INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: Essay#1

New towns: their buildings and sanitary system during the early and late 18th century.

 There was a significant change regarding the buildings in England throughout the eighteenth century and this is mainly a result of the distribution of people because of the modifications in society that the industrial revolution caused. The Industrial Revolution witnessed a huge growth in the size of British cities. In 1695, the population of Britain was estimated to be 5.5 million. By 1801, the year of the first census, it was 9.3 million and by 1841, 15.9 million. This represents a 60% growth rate in just 40 years. A lot of people also immigrated from the country and from Ireland to the city so they carried out changes in the structure of towns.

  The living conditions on those new towns were not suitable since most streets were narrow and unpaved. Poor people used to live in small hovels that had only one or two rooms and they were normally made of weatherboard with a pitched roof. The building material used was the cheapest a builder could find. Cheap slate from Wales was commonly used. What is more, most cellars were inhabited by people and also their pigs, cattle or horses. The hovels and the cellars were extremely overcrowded since in the most desperate cases there were ten people lived in one single room, which often lacked furniture or beds. Many diseases such as typhus, typhoid and dysentery began to spread due to the inhospitable living conditions that people had. All the corpses of the people that died of these diseases were thrown into a big hole on the ground that was not covered until it was full of dead bodies. On the other side, rich people´s houses were frequently empty since the rich were trying to find more salubrious places to live.

  The sanitary system contributed to make poor people´s lives so miserable and hostile. None of the homes was built with a bathroom, toilet or running water. People washed in a tin bath in the home with the water being collected from a local pump. Sanitation and hygiene barely existed and throughout the eighteenth century there was a great fear of cholera, typhus or typhoid epidemic. Toilets basically consisted of cesspits. When these were filled they had to be emptied and what was collected was loaded onto a cart before being dumped in a local river. Fresh water supplies were also very difficult to get in the poor areas. With no running water supplies, people could expect to leave a bucket out and collect rainwater. Some areas were lucky enough to have access to a well with a pump but there was always the chance that the well water could have been contaminated with sewage from a leaking cesspit.

  In conclusion, living conditions in England during the eighteenth century were terrible and it had many consequences on society and on people’s health. People were aware of how insalubrious the places where they lived were. However they did not have the possibility of changing their reality since that involved spending a big amount of money that they did not have because their salaries were really low.