‘Slums’ of Victorian Manchester housed wealthy doctors and engineers, new study reveals

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Work, shopping, church and the pub kept different classes apart far more than ‘residential segregation’ in 1850s Manchester, undermining key assumptions about the Industrial Revolution. Historians have long assumed that Manchester’s middle classes sheltered from the poor in town houses and suburban villas. But by mapping digitized census data, new research shows that many middle-class Mancunians including doctors and engineers lived in the same buildings and streets as working-class residents including weavers and spinners.

 

Over 60% of buildings housing the wealthiest classes also housed unskilled labourers. Over 10% of the population in Manchester’s ‘slums’ belonged to wealthier employed classes. Stark differences in work routines, recreational lives, shopping, public services, policing and pervasive discrimination isolated classes far more than residential segregation.  

[Research paper proofs and images available here]

 

Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism, visited Manchester in 1842 and began recording examples of rampant inequality in the rapidly industrialising city.* He described a commercial core encircled by ‘unmixed working-peoples’ quarters, then the ‘middle bourgeoisie’ and further beyond, the upper classes. Many historians have relied on Engels’ account but the conflation of class division and spatial segregation has come under increasing scrutiny.

Now Cambridge University historian Emily Chung has used data from the digitized 1851 census to precisely map where people from different social classes were actually living in the city. Her findings, published today in The Historical Journal, are startling and undermine the idea that different classes clustered in separate parts of the city.

“Manchester’s wealthier classes did not confine themselves to town houses in the city centre and suburban villas, as we’ve been led to believe,” Emily Chung says. “I found doctors, engineers, architects, surveyors, teachers, managers and shop owners living in the same buildings as poor weavers and spinners.” 

“Segregation in cities remains a major concern in many parts of the world, including Britain, so understanding what people experienced in Manchester, one of the world’s first industrialised cities, is really important,” Chung says. “It teaches us that where we live matters but other factors can be even more influential. How people work, shop and relax divides social groups and can even make them invisible.”

Chung, a PhD researcher at St John's College, Cambridge, used ordnance survey maps, commercial directories and the 1851 census to link individuals to their specific residential address. She spent eight months painstakingly pinpointing buildings using known landmarks, including pubs, to guide her. At her most efficient, Chung could map 700 buildings per day. AI isn’t yet capable of doing this work accurately. Chung then used this huge dataset to analyse spatial patterns.

She used official occupational descriptors and wage data to categorize individuals into one of six classes:

1. Professional Occupations such as doctors, engineers and clergymen

2. Managerial and Technical Occupations, and Dealers, including shop owners

3. Skilled Occupations including clerks and those employed in the transport and building industries

4. Partly-Skilled, including police and labourers in semi-specialist industries

5. Unskilled general labourers

6. Unskilled labourers in the textile, mining and agricultural sectors

 

Chung found that the commercial district to Manchester’s southwest was significantly more socially diverse than the residential zones of the city to the north and east. But even in Ancoats, the main working-class slum which so appalled Engels, around 10% of the population belonged to the wealthier employed classes. Across the city, the working-class represented 79.3% per cent of the population on average.  

Looking at Manchester’s surrounding townships, Chung found that Cheetham had a higher proportion of upper-middle-class residents while Salford, traditionally viewed as a ‘working-class’ suburb, closely mirrored Manchester’s mixed population, as did Hulme and Chorlton-Cum-Medlock.

 

Sharing buildings

 

Chung’s findings became even more interesting when she zoomed in on individual buildings. She found that over 60% of the buildings which housed the wealthiest occupational classes also housed unskilled labourers.

“This was a big surprise,” Chung says. “I started with the city centre and I thought the pattern might end there but as I moved onto the next part of Manchester, I kept finding this mixing. The most exciting moment was discovering that one in ten people living in Ancoats, the notorious working-class slum, were middle-class.”

“Middle-class Mancunians might have seen their homes as stepping stones to something better,” Chung says. “But architects and shop owners also valued the convenience of living close to where they worked. Commuter trains weren’t popular yet.”

Chung argues that while different classes lived cheek-by-jowl, the construction, design, and maintenance of housing in 1850s Manchester limited interaction between them. In the first half of the 19th century, Manchester couldn’t build houses fast enough to keep up with its booming population.

“Manchester grew almost organically with very little regulation and developers were determined to make maximum profit from as little land as possible,” Chung says.

To do this, they converted existing buildings into subdivided tenements. More respectable ground- and first-floor units could be rented to one or two middle-class households, while multiple poor families were crammed into filthy underground cellars.

“Manchester’s housing experiment stacked multiple households one on top of another. Different classes were living so close together but walls, ceilings and different routines minimised interaction between them,” Chung says.

 

Segregating routines

 

Occupational status played a major role in segregating people through their daily routines, Chung argues. Before the introduction of labour reforms, many of Manchester’s semi- and unskilled workers put in twelve-hour days, six days a week, trapping them inside while wealthier people were free to move around the city, working, shopping and socialising.

The middle and upper classes had flexible access to shops and markets but factory workers often had to wait for their wages on Saturday evenings before they could buy food.

Chung says: “While Victorian London and Liverpool bustled with daytime activity, Manchester’s public spaces were almost deserted. Its streets were rarely occupied by weavers and doctors at the same time.”

 

Leisure and culture

 

The cultural and recreational habits of Manchester’s different classes reinforced their segregation, Chung argues, highlighting the opposing institutions of church and pub.

In this period, Manchester’s middle classes were increasingly drawn to church while the city’s 600 pubs had a far greater pull on the working classes. Churches no longer distributed poor relief as they had under the Old Poor Laws and public services made many poor people feel ashamed.

Even when the poor did attend, many churches and chapels deliberately kept different classes apart. Morning services rented out pews on an annual basis, and catered towards the middle and upper classes, while afternoon or evening services were more likely to be frequented by the working class who could not afford regular rents.

Pubs offered more welcoming and affordable respite for working-class Mancunians but, Chung points out, as soon as they went outside the city’s police were ready to re-enforce class segregation.

“Even small groups of working-class men were made to disperse by officers on rotation,” Chung says.

“They were determined to keep the city’s middle-and upper-class dominated public realm clear, clean and calm, so they forced the working poor out of sight into more neglected parts of the city.”

“What the Victorians ‘thought’ was happening in Manchester still matters, but comparing these perceptions against concrete geographic patterns means we can reconstruct life in the city more accurately. Then we can understand how those perceptions arose.”

One thing that remains a mystery is how multiple families from different classes shared outdoor toilets or privvies. “Annoyingly, this isn’t something that people wrote about at the time,” Chung says. “I suspect that the middle classes still used chamber pots so they weren’t so reliant on shared privvies.”

Emily Chung is a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), which has been busting myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history for over 60 years. Her PhD is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

 

Reference

Emily Chung, ‘Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester’, The Historical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X25101246

 

Media contacts

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: tom.williams@admin.cam.ac.uk / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 44

Emily Chung, University of Cambridge: evc28@cam.ac.uk

 

Notes to editors

* Friedrich Engels’ journal entries became The Condition of the Working-Class in England (published in German in 1844) and Manchester had a major influence on his political views, fueling his opposition to the bourgeoisie. He was not alone in portraying Manchester as a city where different classes lived apart and rarely interacted. In 1841, Canon Richard Parkinson decried that there was ‘no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed’.

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