Liverpool: A Port for Industry

However, the industrial nature of Liverpool, and particularly its growing population over the course of the century (with a 100 percent increase in population in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and then a 300 percent increase again from 1831 to 1871), created an ecology ripe for the urban penalty.4Report from the Select Committee on the Health of Towns, iii; Stewart, Courts and Alleys, 4. Early nineteenth-century records described Liverpool’s harbor as often “obscured from view” from nearby Toxteth Park, due to smoke from ships sailing into port.5Mosley, The Chimney of the World, 22. Within the city itself, sanitary systems were ill-equipped to manage the rapid population growth. Historian Tristram Hunt describes how the “open latrines and overflowing cesspools of Liverpool’s slums” in the 1830s were indicative of “a public health system in collapse” in a city with an infrastructure equipped to support only one tenth of its population.6Hunt, Building Jerusalem, 32. An 1840 Health of Towns Report described working-class housing in both Liverpool and Manchester as “miserable and neglected” and utterly “prejudicial to health.”7Report from the Select Committee on the Health of Towns, vi, xvi.

Victorian Liverpool’s surging population growth resulted from its important role as a port of industry. To maintain the flow of British manufactured exports out to sea required cheap manual labor. Census records from 1871 indicate that approximately 12 percent of the adult male workforce in Liverpool were employed either on the docks or in dockside warehouses, often taking their employment on a day-to-day basis, based on the seasonal need for labor. Preferring the cost and convenience of a short journey to work, especially when work was offered on a “first come, first served” basis, most laborers sought housing near the potential for work. Dockside communities formed, consisting of mainly low-skilled workers and their families. These dockside communities also benefitted employers, creating a semi-­permanent pool of potential labor, which allowed employers to quickly adapt to market trends.8Pooley, “Residential Differentiation in Victorian Cities,” 136.

Laborers seeking work at Liverpool’s docks included poor laborers from the surrounding counties of Lancashire and Cheshire, as well as Scottish and Welsh immigrants.9Hunt, Building Jerusalem, 19. However, the largest group of immigrant laborers were the Irish (who accounted for 22 percent of the city’s population in the 1851 census), who fled poverty and famine at home.10Hunt, Building Jerusalem, 20. Much as in Manchester, discriminatory labor practices were divided on ethnic lines: the Welsh tended work as warehousemen because the owners tended not to trust the Irish, while the Irish took less skilled work as porters. To even have the possibility of work, the Irish were forced into abominable living conditions in Liverpool’s courts and cellars.11Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism, 7–10. And yet, as they were in Manchester, the Irish were also often blamed for bringing poor health conditions upon themselves.12Pooley and Irish, “Housing and Health in Liverpool, 1870–1940,” 202.

Court housing was a major feature of urban planning in Liverpool as it expanded from a small port town into a sprawling city. While wealthier Liverpudlians in the professional classes fled the dirty dockyards for newly developed areas of the city such as Rodney Street, Abercromby Square, and Everton Brow, poorer residents, especially the dockside laborers, often lived in cheaply built, low-rent, back-to-back housing which was squeezed behind street-front property and accessible only via an alley off a main road.13Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism, 15 These alleys typically led into a common central courtyard across which the houses faced one another. On average, courts included between four and ten houses and each house was three to four stories high, plus a cellar. Within these slums, the poorest families might occupy only a single room, resulting in considerable overcrowding of the court and its cellars (630–1,000 people per acre).14Stewart, Courts and Alleys, 1–5, 26. These back-to-back court houses were often constructed from a simple architectural plan: an entry from a common court or alley into a living room of ten to fifteen square feet, with stairs into a similarly sized room. Some had an attic bedroom or a cellar that was often sublet. Communal space between houses provided a space for socialization and a shared water tap, but irregularly cleaned privies frequently contaminated this shared space. Twenty-five percent of Liverpool residents resided in this type of housing in 1840.15Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain 1780–1914, 31–34. More significantly, this type of housing created the ideal conditions for the spread of infectious diseases: overcrowding, uncleanliness, lack of ventilation, and a population of physically exhausted and overworked laborers.16Stewart, Courts and Alleys, 12–13.

The Victorians certainly understood that poor housing was one of many factors that contributed to poor health and had a dramatic impact on family welfare, and the court housing near the docks of Liverpool offered among the worst housing conditions in the entire country.17Pooley and Irish, “Housing and Health in Liverpool,” 196. Table 1.1 shows that Liverpool was certainly the most compacted and overcrowded of the three case-study cities by the end of the nineteenth century (with London for comparative reference). If factory pollution was the biggest factor in shaping the urban penalty in Manchester, in Liverpool the urban penalty stemmed from this overcrowding.

Thus, the Liverpool branch of the Health of Towns Association was formed by municipal elites to guide the development of Liverpool’s public health in 1845. The Health of Towns Association pushed forward the passage of the Liverpool Sanitary Act of 1846, which laid out local minimum standards for the construction of dwellings and led to the appointment of Dr. William Duncan as the town’s (and England’s) first Medical Officer of Health in 1847. The Liverpool Health of Towns Association was also instrumental in pressuring Parliament to pass the landmark 1848 Public Health Act.21Ashton and Ubido, “The Healthy City and the Ecological Idea,” 175–76.

As a mentee of Edwin Chadwick, Duncan had responsibilities, which he initially conducted on a part-time basis, to promote sanitary measures and environmental hygiene. He performed this important role for fifteen years, until his death in 1863.22Kearns, Laxton, and Campbell, “Duncan and the Cholera Test,” 88–89. His first and foremost duty was to improve housing conditions in Liverpool. In dockside communities less than half the streets (25.5 out of 57.5 miles) were “wholly or partially sewered,” and 1,982 courts housed 55,534 people when William Duncan took his position as Liverpool’s first Medical Officer of Health.23A Century of Progress 1847–1947, 5. Duncan oversaw the passage of several local Acts that made some improvements to the municipal environment. Most notably, the 1864 Liverpool Sanitary Amendment Act resulted in some 12,000 houses being condemned by the end of the century.24Pooley, “Residential Differentiation in Victorian Cities,” 139.

The actions of Duncan’s successor, Dr. William Trench, who professed the importance of sanitary reforms but was more politically cautious, were often stymied by political pressures from Liverpool’s Conservative town councilors’ hesitancy towards funding widespread nuisance removal and large-scale municipal development projects.25Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism, 83–84. It was not until the passage of the 1889 Liverpool Act that building court housing really became uneconomical. The 1889 Act required courts to be open to the street from both the front and back of houses. The court itself had to be at least 30 feet wide and no longer than 100 feet in length and no more than twenty-three houses could surround a single court. The problem, of course, was that this Act applied only to newly constructed residences, leaving the problems of lack of ventilation and sunlight in the existing court houses untouched.26Stewart, Courts and Alleys, 98. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, the court housing that remained was “invariably old, insanitary, and insufficient in quantity.”27Pooley, “Residential Differentiation in Victorian Cities,” 136. To escape these substandard housing arrangements for life in the suburbs, as skilled laborers could, would have cost the Liverpool dockworker more in both rent and travel costs than many could afford to lose. Meanwhile, omnibus and tram routes allowed suburban families direct access to main-street shops of the city center, while concealing the unhealthy crowded courts and alleys that plagued inner-city life in late Victorian Liverpool behind a “respectable façade.”28Pooley, “Residential Differentiation in Victorian Cities,” 138. It is unsurprising, then, that in the central and dockside wards of the city of Liverpool (Vauxhall, St. Anne’s, Lime Street, Great George, and Pitt Street), where working-class families were often forced by economic circumstances to live in court houses, death rates were higher and outbreaks of infectious diseases were more frequent.

So, just as in Manchester, industrialization in Liverpool shaped the ecology of the city in ways that often resulted in serious threats to public health. As housing reform began to reveal how environmental conditions made Liverpool’s dockside community a frequent epicenter of death and disease, by the late nineteenth century further reforms and public health interventions became necessary in these miserable housing conditions.29Housing reform continued to be a matter of public health in both cities throughout the period under our consideration, and even on into the interwar years as described by Wildman, “Urban Transformation in Liverpool and Manchester,” 127–31. Children would similarly be among the greatest beneficiaries of improved housing environments and living conditions, as they were often at the greatest risk of serious consequences of infectious diseases.