Mr Riddall Wood's evidence to Chadwick's Sanitary Report 1842

In what towns did you find instances of the greatest crowding of the habitations?

In Manchester, Liverpool, Ashton-under-Lyne, and Pendleton. In a cellar in Pendleton, I recollect there were three beds in the two apartments of which the habitation consisted, but having no door between them, in one of which a man and his wife slept; in another, a man, his wife and child; and in a third two unmarried females.

In Hull I have met with cases somewhat similar. A mother about 50 years of age, and her son I should think 25 at all events above 21, sleeping in the same bed, and a lodger in the same room. I have two or three instances in Hull in which a mother was sleeping with her grown up son, and in most cases there were other persons sleeping in the same room, in another bed. In a cellar in Liverpool, I found a mother and her grown-up daughters sleeping on a bed of chaff on the ground in one corner of the cellar, and in the other corner three sailors had their bed. I have met with upwards of 40 persons sleeping in the same room, married and single, including, of course, children and several young adult persons of either sex. In Manchester I could enumerate a variety of instances in which I found such promiscuous mixture of the sexes in sleeping-rooms.

From Chadwick's Sanitary Report

The cottages in the neighbourhood were of the most wretched kind, mere hovels, built of rough stones and covered with ragged thatch.

The wife's face was dirty, and her tangled hair hung over her eyes. Her cap was ill washed and slovenly put on. Her whole dress was very untidy, and looked dirty and slatternly; everything about her seemed wretched and neglected and she seemed very discontented. She immediately began to complain of her house. The wet came in at the door of the only room, and when it rained, through every part of the roof also: large drops fell on her as she lay in her bed: in short she had found it impossible to keep things in order, so she had gradually ceased to make any exertions. Her condition had been borne down by the conditions of the house.

Friederich Engels: Industrial Manchester, 1844

Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found - especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld.

In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. This is the first court on the Irk above Ducie Bridge - in case any one should care to look into it. Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction.

Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen's Court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. Dr. Kay gives a terrible description of the state of this court at that time. Since then, it seems to have been partially torn away and rebuilt; at least looking down from Ducie Bridge, the passer-by sees several ruined walls and heaps of debris with some newer houses. The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank.

Virulent and fatal as was the recent attack of cholera here, my wonder is that cholera, or some disease almost equally as fatal, is ever absent. From one house, for instance, situated in a large irregular court or yard - a small house containing two rooms - four corpses were recently carried. I looked about and did not marvel. The floor was two or three inches deep in filth. This seemed to be the normal state even of the passable parts of the place. In the centre of the open place was a cluster of pigsties, privies and cesspools, bursting with pent-up abominations; and a half a dozen places from this delectable nucleus was a pit about five feet square filled to the very brim with semi-liquid manure gathered from the stables and houses around.The east and north-east districts of Leeds are perhaps the worst. A short walk from the Briggate, in the direction in which Deansgate branches off from the main entry, will conduct the visitor into a perfect wilderness of foulness. I have plodded by the half hour through the streets in which the undisturbed mud lay in wreaths from wall to wall; and across open spaces, overlooked by houses all round, in which the pigs, wandering from the central oasis, seemed to be roaming through what was only a large sty. Indeed, pigs seem to be natural inhabitants of such places. I think that they are more common in some parts of Leeds than dogs and cats are in others.