Filthy, overcrowded slums: the Victorian back yards at Gladstone Pottery Museum

Filthy, overcrowded slums without sanitation. Homes with no water, flushing toilet or drains. This was daily life for many workers in towns and cities of Victorian Britain.

People did not want to live like this, but they had little control over living conditions. Unlike today there was no local government or authorities responsible for removing waste. The situation was at its worst in the 1840s.

The back yards at Gladstone Pottery Museum are based on information researched for Longton, where the museum is sited, but the situation was the same in any industrial town.

Gladstone's back yards

The back yards were shared spaces, communal yards with communal privies, cesspits, ashpits, water, and gutters. Everything was shared. People would come into the yard from pubs or factories to use the toilets. People living there had no control over what happened in their own back yards.

People tried to create more private areas with stacks of saggars (the fireclay containers used to fire pottery). Yards were not paved, and in the Potteries broken waste pottery was used for surfacing. There would be animals in the backyard, including pigs, dogs (for fighting and ratting), and even cows.

Longton was lucky to have piped water. Tenants paid for this water through their rents. However, if the landlord failed to pay the Water Company it would be cut off.

Most people rented their homes. Rents were typically 2 shillings to 3 shillings. This was10% of the weekly wage of a potter in full employment. The landlord was responsible for the fabric of the building. The tenant was responsible for repairs to windows, and locks.  This meant things tended not to get repaired, but would be put right when the tenants left. There was a high turnover of tenants. The number of residents in the house usually depended on family circumstance and the economy.

The poorest families were those with a large number of small dependent children. The most comfortable would be those with working children. When money was tight people tended to move in together, or out to the country. New houses were only built when demand was high.

Housing in Longton

Housing in towns was generally better-built than in the countryside but conditions were worse in towns due to overcrowding. Most housing in Longton was less than 60 years old in 1840.

Houses in Longton were built of brick, with clay roofing tiles. There was lots of variation of colour in one brick and between bricks. The floor would be brick, the walls were white-washed brick, and the ceiling had open joists. Only the best working-class houses had sash windows. Most had casement windows, either sliding to open (the cheapest) or with one small part opening. Only the front of the house had detailed features.

Houses usually had two rooms upstairs and two rooms down. The rooms were of unequal size, with one room occupying two-thirds of the space. The larger room was for living and cooking, the smaller for washing, storage, and stairs. The total width of the house was about 10 feet.

The fire was very important, providing heat for cooking, drying clothes and heating the houses. It would have burned all year round. It was also dangerous; the biggest cause of death for children was burning.

From the Morning Chronicle, 24 January 1850:

Everywhere there stretch out labyrinths of small, undistinguished, unpaved streets, the houses generally of two stores in height, and built of smoke-grimed brick. Here you will find a new row of cottages the uniformity of the wall slightly broken by stone facings; hard by may be a cluster of old-fashioned houses with lead-latticed windows, and perhaps some attempt to cause ivy to train up the wall. Every few steps bring you in sight of a plain brown brick chapel – a Sion, or Ebenezer or Bethesda …. And I have repeatedly seen localities in the Potteries where every fourth or fifth house was in a tavern. Diverge from the main thoroughfares – into regions of back yards and little gardens and outhouses, and waste patches belonging to pottery establishments – and you will find yourself in a curious chaos of old tumble down sheds, littered with crates, broken crockery ware, and straw – of wall and lean-tos built of old ‘saggars’ … diversified here and there by brick pits, clay pits, smoking engine houses, and great coal heaps, dismal wastes of muddy ground, more of less strewn with the eternal pavement of broken stoneware, the whole landscape enlivened by glimpses of barges deeply laden with pile up clay or flints, lying by wharves, or slowly moving along the narrow canals.

Some facts about people in the Potteries during the 1840s:

• The average child born in the Potteries in the 1840s would have five brothers and sisters, two of whom would die before they reach the age of five and one who would die before 25.
• 25% of all children would lose a parent before 15. 6% would have lost both
• The average age at marriage for women was 24, for men 26
• The average length of a marriage was 15 years.
• Couples separated by death not divorce.
• The expectation of life at birth for males 1838-1844 was 35 years, (40 for England as a whole).
• For females 1838-1844 was 37 years (42 for England as a whole)