Impact of Industrialisation

The Industrial Revolution can be viewed as an age of great enterprise, massive economic growth and of fantastic scientific breakthroughs. It is an age of glorious empire, trade, conquest and one in which British democracy and values developed into one of the most dominant value systems in the world. It's also a period that included much suffering for the labouring classes of this country. For them, the new found wealth was not forthcoming overnight. Industrialisation brought enlarged towns and economic growth - but at a price.

These sources provide a number of sources that illustrate some of the negative consequences of Industrialisation.

Source 1

At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half-a-dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it- as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.
Description of Jacob’s Island creek on the Thames, from Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens 1837)

Source 2

These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchen form, throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men’s quarters may readily be imagined.
Condition of the Working Class in England (Fredrich Engels 1845)

Source 3

The houses of the work people are very inferior. They are one and all constructed back to back, or rather built double, with a partition running down the ridge of the roof. This is the case even in rows and streets at present building. "The plan," said my informant, "is adopted because of its cheapness, and because it saves ground rent."

Bradford is well suited for drainage. There is ample fall, and the "Bradford Beck," a rapid stream which flows through the town, would, if arched over, make a capital main sewer. The brook at present runs the colour of ink. The relieving officer with whom I inspected the town, showed me a spot where the foul water washed the grimy walls of half a dozen steaming mills. "There," he said, "when I was a boy. I used to catch trout in as bright a stream as any in Yorkshire."

Angus Reach, The Morning Chronicle (1849)