Little Ireland was a slum district of Manchester, England in the early 19th century. [1] [2] It was inhabited from about 1827 to 1847 by poor Irish immigrants, [3] and during its existence gained a reputation as the archetypal Irish district in nineteenth century industrial cities. [4] Despite this reputation, the slum was the shortest lived of all the areas of Irish settlement in the city, and also the smallest, covering about four acres. [4] The area existed south of Oxford Road railway station, enclosed by the railway line and the loop in the River Medlock. [5] [6]
Houses along the front of Oxford Road, initially intended as modest middle-class residences, were repurposed in the early nineteenth century as multi-occupation premises for industrial workers as economic activity picked up in the city. [4] Cellars, ordinarily used to store wood, coal and non-perishable foods, were later rented out as cheaper accommodation leading to conditions of perpetual humidity and damp in which infectious diseases could thrive. [4]
By the second half of the 1800s, there was a considerable Irish population resident in Manchester, [7] primarily as a result of the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852) which forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave Ireland. As historian Mervyn Busteed contends, "there were some Irish in every part of the city, but there was a marked tendency for them to concentrate in the poorer parts of the urban fabric, and within these areas to segregate themselves from their fellow workers". [7]
In the 1841 census, Little Ireland had a total population of only 1,510, mostly concentrated in the small streets and courts off the main thoroughfares - James Leigh Street, William Street, Frank Street, Forge Street, and Anvil Streets were over 75% Irish in 1841. [4] In 1845, a group of seven of these small streets were demolished in order to make way for the Manchester and Altrincham railway line and Oxford Road railway station. [4]
The area was demolished to make way for the Manchester South Junction Railway line. In his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 , Friedrich Engels wrote about Little Ireland, calling it a "horrid little slum". [8] [9] Aided by the popularity of Engels' book, the area gained international infamy as the archetypal Irish district in nineteenth century industrial cities. [4] [10]
It is commemorated by a red plaque on 8 Great Marlborough Street, about half-way between New Wakefield Street and Hulme Street. [11] [12]
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator, serving as a leading authority on Marxism.
The River Medlock in Greater Manchester, England rises in east Oldham and flows south and west for 10 miles to join the River Irwell in Manchester city centre.
Hulme is an inner city area and electoral ward of Manchester, England, immediately south of Manchester city centre. It has a significant industrial heritage.
Miles Platting is an inner city part of Manchester, England, 1.4 miles (2.3 km) northeast of Manchester city centre along the Rochdale Canal and A62 road, bounded by Monsall to the north, Collyhurst to the west, Newton Heath to the east, and Bradford, Holt Town and Ancoats to the south.
The Northern Quarter is an area of Manchester city centre, England, between Piccadilly station, Victoria station and Ancoats, centred on Oldham Street, just off Piccadilly Gardens. It was defined and named in the 1990s as part of the regeneration and gentrification of Manchester.
Back-to-backs are a form of terraced houses in the United Kingdom, built from the late 18th century through to the early 20th century in various forms. Many thousands of these dwellings were built during the Industrial Revolution for the rapidly increasing population of expanding factory towns. Back-to-backs share party walls on two or three of their four sides, with the front wall having the only door and windows.
"Common lodging-house" is a Victorian era term for a form of cheap accommodation in which the inhabitants are all lodged together in the same room or rooms, whether for eating or sleeping. The slang terms dosshouse and flophouse designate roughly the equivalent of common lodging-houses. The nearest modern equivalent is a hostel.
Mary Burns was a working-class Irish woman, best known as the lifelong partner of Friedrich Engels. Burns was born and lived most of her life in Manchester, England.
St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park is a public park in Manchester, England, to the immediate northeast of the city centre, on a slope between the River Irk and Rochdale Road. It occupies an area of 7.4 acres (3 ha), and was once an affluent suburb, until the 19th-century Industrial Revolution altered the social standing of the area and introduced poverty and disease. Regeneration of the park in the 2000s has created a gateway into the Irk Valley.
Cathedral Gardens is an open space in Manchester city centre, in North West England. It is bounded by Victoria railway station to the north, Chetham's School of Music to the west, the perimeter of Manchester Cathedral and the Corn Exchange on Fennel Street to the south and Urbis to the east.
Longport is an area of Stoke-on-Trent, England. It is the location for Longbridge Hayes industrial estate.
An industrial city or industrial town is a town or city in which the municipal economy, at least historically, is centered around industry, with important factories or other production facilities in the town. It has been part of most countries' industrialization process. Air pollution and toxic waste have contributed to the lower life expectancy in some industrial cities. Industrial cities are distinguished from port cities or other transportation hubs, which deal in services. In countries with strong central planning, such as China, a city could be created on paper, and then industry found to locate there.
Robert Roberts was an English teacher, writer and social historian, who penned evocative accounts of his working-class youth in The Classic Slum (1971) and A Ragged Schooling (1976).
Grand Central is a rock/metal pub and music venue at 80 Oxford Street, near Oxford Road railway station and opposite The Principal Manchester hotel in Manchester, England. It is a four storey building which is typical of buildings that were originally houses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Wakefield Street on the southside leads to the railway station via a pedestrian stairway.
Model dwellings companies (MDCs) were a group of private companies in Victorian Britain that sought to improve the housing conditions of the working classes by building new homes for them, at the same time receiving a competitive rate of return on any investment. The principle of philanthropic intention with capitalist return was given the label "five per cent philanthropy".
Manchester has historically influenced political and social thinking in Britain and been a hotbed for new, radical thinking, particularly during the Industrial Revolution.
Newtown was a residential area of Cardiff, Wales that was also known as 'Little Ireland' because of its population of Irish families. Its six streets and 200 houses existed from the mid-nineteenth century until they were demolished in 1970. It was known as one of the "5 towns of Cardiff", the others being Butetown, Crockherbtown, Grangetown and Temperance Town.
In Scotland, the Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes and economic expansion between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century, a political union between Scotland and England became politically and economically attractive, promising to open up the much larger markets of England, as well as those of the growing British Empire, resulting in the Treaty of Union of 1707. There was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. New crops were introduced and enclosures began to displace the run rig system and free pasture. The economic benefits of union were very slow to appear, some progress was visible, such as the sales of linen and cattle to England, the cash flows from military service, and the tobacco trade that was dominated by Glasgow after 1740. Merchants who profited from the American trade began investing in leather, textiles, iron, coal, sugar, rope, sailcloth, glass-works, breweries, and soap-works, setting the foundations for the city's emergence as a leading industrial center after 1815.
St Wilfrid's Church in George Street, Hulme, Manchester, England, was a Roman Catholic place of worship. Designed by Augustus Pugin, it was his only known church building in that city.
Engels' pause is a term coined by economic historian Robert C. Allen to describe the period from 1790 to 1840, when British working-class wages stagnated and per-capita gross domestic product expanded rapidly during a technological upheaval. Allen named the period after German philosopher Friedrich Engels, who describes it in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Economists have analyzed its causes and effects since the nineteenth century, with some questioning its existence. Twenty-first-century technological upheaval and wage stagnation have led economists and academics to draw parallels between the two periods.