Angel Meadow’s tobacco factory loomed large over the slum’s skyline and added a sickly sweetness to the toxic atmosphere. The factory was built by the Co-operative Wholesale Society in 1898 and made cigarettes and cigars from leaves imported from as far away as Borneo, Sumatra, Brazil and Cuba. The most prized workers were the cigar makers, who could roll tobacco leaves with the dexterity of classical pianists. But the factory employed no local people, with managers revealing in 1902 that their workers came from ‘better class districts’.
Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain’s Most Savage Slum, the first history of Manchester’s Angel Meadow district, is set to be released on 28 February, 2016. Find out how to buy the book here.
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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.
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