high, the contractors do a little something to keep the cottages inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years. They never do anything more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all. Occasionally when an epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary police is a little stirred, raids are made into the workingmen’s districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in the case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long: the condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much better off by letting them, and the sanitary police won’t come again so soon. These east and northeast sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the year the west and southwest wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe.
Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, workingmen’s quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to mind. The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up and the worst. Here flows the Medlock with countless windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the valley of the Irk. Along both sides of the stream, which is coal black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and workingmen’s dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition. The bank is chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water’s edge, just as we saw along the Irk; while the