Angel Meadow was Manchester’s main lodging house district at a time when thousands of people were arriving in the city in search of work. Wanderers stepped off trains at Victoria Station and made the short walk to an unsafe harbour in the slum. They laid down their heads for a fearful first night in beds shared with strangers – removing their clothes because it was the only way to keep them free from lice. Social observers described these dens as ‘disgusting abodes’ haunted by vice, crime and disease. Explore the interior of an Angel Meadow lodging house using this clickable image.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
Published by angelmeadowbook
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 