Living conditions

• Housing: Back to Back housing

  • Packed as many houses as possible onto small land
  • Many houses built in terraced rows, joint to rows behind
  • Often built around an enclosed yard
  • Poorer families rented this accommodation
  • Often had one room downstairs and another upstairs
• • Landlords and builders took advantage of the lack of building regulations
• Back to back houses were difficult to ventilate, so they were often damp which caused chest infections. Diseases such as tuberculosis thrived in these conditions.
• Housing: Lodging houses

  • Normally rented out by single people
  • Large houses that had been divided into smaller rooms
  • Many lodging houses were dirty and overcrowded- people were packed into a room and were sharing beds or sleeping on the floor
  • Difficult to keep bodies or clothes clean- fleas and body lice common- Caused typhus to spread
• Housing cellar dwellings:

  • Small and damp spaces underneath other people's houses
  • No sunlight
  • Sometimes flooded with rain or even sewage from street above
• The diet of the urban working class was unhealthy 
• Food: Diet

  • In the first half of the 19th century, it was difficult to get enough fruit and vegetables into the towns to feed the growing population
  • Second half of the 19th century, railways started to have an impact on the food supply
  • Workers’ housing had limited facilities for cooking and storing food safely
  • Low wages of unskilled workers-Struggled to buy enough food for whole family
  • Workers relied on basics like bread, potatoes and weak tea. Sometimes had bacon if they could afford it- unbalanced diet- caused malnutrition
• Food: Quality of food

  • No laws regulating the quality of food
  • Some butchers and street sellers sold meat from diseased animals
  • Food adulteration was a widespread practice E.G Milk was sold with chalk and water to make it go further
  • Led to diarrhoea and food poisoning
• Waste:

  • The disposal of human waste from so many people was a major problem.
  • Sewers were not usually built to service the new working-class houses.
  • Privies were used
  •  Some people had their own privy because they had their own yard
  •  Back-to-back houses had to share a privy, sometimes between ten houses or more.
• Privies:A toilet located in a small shed outside a house or other building.
• Waste: Privies

  • Privies were not connected to sewers but to cesspits(underground pits used for collecting human waste)
  •  cesspits were usually built of brick and about six feet deep
  •  Landlords paid night-soil men to empty the cesspits and take the waste away to sell to farmers as manure.
  • This was arranged directly between landlords and night-soil men.
  • Therefore, if landlords did not pay, cesspits overflowed into the streets and yards in stinking pools.
• Waste: Cesspits

  • Cesspits often leaked- had a deadly impact on the water supply- Caused outbreaks of diseases such as cholera
• Waste: Sewers

  • Some sewers did exist, but they had originally been built to take away rainwater rather than human waste
  • Sewers emptied straight into the rivers where drinking water came from. When flushing toilets became popular, they were connected to sewers, making this situation even worse
• Water:

  • All water was unsafe throughout the 19th century- Water companies took water from the rivers, which were contaminated by human waste
  • Rainwater might be unsafe as it had fallen through smoke of factories
  • People had not made the link between germs living in dirty water and diseases such as typhoid and cholera
• Water:

  • Piped water into homes was not usually available in working-class areas
  • water companies supplied water to be shared between a court or a street, accessed by a water pump for the working-class
  • Many houses and families shared a single pump
  • many landlords were unwilling to pay more than the minimum fee to the water companies, so the water was only available for a few hours per day.
• Water:

  If there was no water pump at all, working-class families collected water from their town’s river or pond. Some people collected rainwater in a water butt or barrel.