The dreary wastes of Angel Meadow. Down Angel Street, with its pestiferous lodging houses, with its bawds and bullies, its thieves and beggars, one had need to visit such a place when the sun is high in the heavens. When night falls I had rather enter an enemy’s camp during the time of war than venture near such dens of infamy and wretchedness, but the poor live here and die here.
The Spy, 1893
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Step into the Victorian underworld of Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world's first cotton mill, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs. Thieves and prostitutes keep company with rats in overcrowded lodging houses and deep cellars on the banks of a black river, the Irk. Gangs of 'scuttlers' stalk the streets in pointed, brass-tripped clogs. Those who evade their clutches are hunted down by cholera and tuberculosis. Lawless drinking dens and a cold slab in the dead house provide the only relief from this filthy and frightening world. Journalist Dean Kirby takes readers on a hair-raising journey through the alleyways, gin palaces and underground vaults of the nineteenth century Manchester slum considered so diabolical it was re-christened 'hell upon earth' by Friedrich Engels in 1845. Enter Angel Meadow if you dare... Angel Meadow will be published by Pen and Sword on 28 February, 2016. See my website for details. View all posts by angelmeadowbook
Angel Meadow 
I was intrigued by the quotation about Victorian Angel Meadow on your website that seems to have first appeared in an anonymous article in The Spy magazine in 1893. I am currently writing a chapter in a book about Cheshire true crimes of the 19th century which touches on the ‘hell upon earth’ that was Angel Meadow, and in particular Angel Street. I cannot, however, locate any information about the actual magazine (though there is on the net mentions of Spy magazine, which was a late 20th century American publication). Can you tell me anything more about the origin of this quote and about the magazine concerned. I point out that my modest effort in no way impinges on your obviously far more detailed story of the ‘Medda’. With many thanks, Derek Yarwood.
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