How Did London Have An Increased Population

In the summer of 1854, London was coming out as one of the most modern cities in the world. With nearly 2.4 million people living in the area at the time, the city’s infrastructure itself was having a hard time providing for the basic needs of its residents. The biggest problem existing within the city at that time was its waste removal system, or for better terms, its lack of one. Human waste was piling up everywhere, from people houses to the rivers and drinking water. This situation was the perfect breeding conditions for a number of diseases, and towards the end of that summer, one of the most deadly of them all took over. It took the work of both a physician and a local minister in order to discover the mysterious cause of the

In 19th Century England, living conditions were horrible for the poor. If you didn’t have enough money to stay out of poverty you were heading into a harsh and unforgiving life as a person in the slums. People took poison to escape the horrors that a poor person could easily slip into. Both adults and little children drank gin and beer because of all of the sewage and garbage dumped into the rivers. For the many, many poor people there was often no clean water and people went to the bathroom in ‘bathroom’ privies that everyone in the slums used outside. At least half of the poor children died before their fifth birthday. In contrast, the wealthy could have mansions with servants, grand food, and clean drinking water. On top of all of this,

Economic depression hit England in the the late 1500s caused many people to lose their homes. Along with the fact that only eldest sons were able to inherit

The tenements where immigrants lived were unacceptably tiny and unsanitary. The East Side was packed at the rate of 290,000 per square mile at one point, while the greatest crowding of Old London was at the rate of 175,816 (12). Due to this overpopulation, diseases spread rapidly and killed thousands of unprotected tenants. Tenements also lacked fresh air because they did not have windows, which contributed to the fast advancement of cholera until around 1869 (14). One of the homes that Riis visited had “half a dozen persons washing, cooking, and sorting rags, lay

From 1750 - 1851 Manchester, England wet under many changes. Streets were filled with excrement and disease. As much as 10 people lived in a single room. The walls of buildings were covered in smoke. The city size grew exponentially. The main changes included city growth, poor living conditions, and overall city ugliness that led to a variety of reactions.

This created overcrowding, disease, and the need to build more shelters to accommodate everyone. This in part, was the reason cities such as Manchester grew so large. However, the living conditions of urban cities in Europe were utterly abysmal. Disease ran amok in the streets, infecting people quite easily. For example, the city of Paris had narrow streets and buildings practically stacked on top of one of each other, leading to the same problems that most European cities at the time had. According to Edwin Chadwick, public health reformer who authored Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of Great Britain, “Diseases caused or aggravated by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings, prevail among the laboring classes.” In this statement, Chadwick encompassed just about every problem with these large urban areas. He also provided the effects of the problems associated with the horrid living conditions, for instance the effect of education would be much more “temporary”, and the population would not be as influenced by morality. Edwin Chadwick was a socialist, which should definitely tip the reader

Due to this loss, houses became very overcrowded to the point where families had to live in a single room. This would be where they would cook, eat, sleep and socialise. Rooms to rent became very popular.

England has a long history of periodic architecture and aside from recent war damage and the destruction during the Dissolution of the Monasteries Acts in the 16th century by Henry VIII, much of its historic legacy remains intact.

Manchester was overcrowded and cramped. Manchester grew rapidly from the 1750’s to the 1850’s population and infrastructure wise. Manchester during the 1750’s was relatively small compared to the size of the city during the 1850’s. The city had nearly quadrupled in size (Doc. 1). Assuming Manchester circa 1750 could support 18,000 people comfortably but circa 1850 the city has to support 300,000 people without nearly enough space.

Many families were threatened by advancing cholera and smallpox which would spread very fast because they lived in the small badly ventilated tenements that housed many families. There are modern day tenements, but now they are called apartments. The definition of a tenement is “occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises; or by more than two families on floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, ect.” The modern tenements are much cleaner with better lighting and

With the Industrial Revolution thousands of people had migrated to the inner city creating overcrowding in

Most of the jobs the poor held in London involved searching through the city’s river and its wastes for valuables. The price to pay night-soil men, the men that cleaned out a property’s cesspool, was twice that of other laborers. This meant that most people allowed the pits of wastes from their house to accumulate more than usual as to avoid the costs. According to Johnson (2006), “…the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England.” (p.17) There were so many people of lower classes crowded together in one city that if disease struck it would spread very

During the time, there was a housing shortage, due to the big birth rates, and

At the same time, Britain became more industrialized, towns started to grow and became over populated especially factory towns. Houses in these factory towns were close together, and because of this the living conditions in these houses were overcrowded, damp and dirty. People ate, slept and cooked in the same places. There were no sewers so there was human waste everywhere, because of the

The Tower of London is one of the most famous and visited historic monuments in the world. For some people it conjures up images of Norman architecture and towering battlements, but most associate it with arms and armour, ravens, the Crown Jewels, Yeoman Warders, imprisonment, death and ghostly apparitions. But this does not do it justice: the history of the Tower and its buildings is a vast, fascinating and complex subject, intertwined with the history of the country of England, its government, its kings and queens, and its people and institutions. The castle's first four centuries, during the Middle Ages, saw the development of the layout of buildings that we know today and its