but usually separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of towns. The third system, that of the back alleys, prevails largely in the great workingmen’s district east of St. George’s Road and Ancoats Street, and is the one most often found in the other workingmen’s quarters of Manchester and its suburbs.
In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats, stand the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six and seven-storied buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above the low cottages of the workers.
The population of the district consists, therefore, chiefly of mill hands, and in the worst streets, of hand-weavers.
The streets nearest the heart of the town are the oldest, and consequently the worst; they are, however, paved, and supplied with drains. Among them I include those nearest to and parallel with Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street.
Farther to the northeast lie many newly-built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots between them larger and more numerous.
But this can be said of a minority of the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the first ten years.
For the construction of the cottages individually is no less to be condemned than the plan of the streets. All such cottages look neat and substantial at first; their massive brick walls deceive the eye, and, on passing through a newly-built workingmen’s street, without remembering the back alleys and the construction of the houses themselves, one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the