Slums and suburbs: water and sanitation in the first industrial city

Today, one in three people globally do not have access to clean drinking water and over half the world’s population lives without safely managed sanitation. Lack of access to these basic services causes millions of deaths from preventable diseases each year. Clean water and sanitation for all is high on the global agenda for sustainable development, yet a variety of environmental challenges put achieving this goal at risk. 

There are striking parallels between the factors affecting access to clean water and sanitation across the world today and the problems that confronted 19th-century industrial Manchester, the original shock city—a term coined by historian Asa Briggs to describe the rapid and radical change undergone by such cities. 

Increasing pollution, rapid urbanisation and rising demand for water are key issues. Today, 80 percent of the world’s wastewater goes untreated before flowing back into ecosystems. Global water use has increased at more than twice the rate of population growth over the last century, and the pace of urbanisation is outstripping many cities' capacity to develop water and sanitation infrastructure. 

Can the environmental challenges and solutions of the first industrial city offer an insight into the water and sanitation dilemmas confronting our modern world? How far (or not) have we come since Manchester’s unprecedented 19th-century industrial transformation?

At the heart of Manchester’s environmental problems was its woefully inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure. In 1847, of the 47,000 houses in the town, only 11,000 had a piped water supply. A further 12,000 homes relied on a shared tap or standpipe in the street, while thousands more drew their water from shallow wells or streams, which were often polluted.  

Privy middens, consisting of a wooden seat built over a pit, were in widespread use in Manchester’s densely packed streets of workers’ housing. Shared between up to 30 families and rarely emptied, human waste seeped into watercourses and overflowed into the streets. The plumbed toilets that did exist connected to drains which discharged directly into the town’s rivers.

The gradual conversion of Manchester’s privy middens into pail closets, which used a removable, galvanised metal bucket to collect waste, did improve matters. The pails were emptied more frequently and the so-called night soil was taken away to be processed into manure. However, pail closets were incomparable with the benefits brought by flushing toilets, and scientists and reformers continued to campaign for a ‘water carriage’ system of sewage removal for Manchester.

Manchester’s early sewer network was haphazard and inadequate, having been designed primarily to deal with the rainy town’s surface water. The expansion of the network and innovations in sewer design in the mid-19th century, including the development of egg-shaped, clay sewer pipes to encourage better flow, did nothing to fix the fact that these sewers were releasing untreated waste directly into Manchester’s rivers. 

Science Museum Group Collection Image source for Tall black wall-like structure with a cylindrical opening across the bottom edge

With industrial Manchester’s expansion, the city’s demand for clean water continued to increase. In response, in 1851, Manchester Corporation completed the first stage of a huge project to supply Manchester with water from Longdendale in the Peak District.

Chief Engineer John Frederick Bateman pushed the boundaries of Victorian hydraulic engineering. A chain of six reservoirs gathered the plentiful rainwater falling on the Pennines. The water flowed by gravity into Manchester along a series of aqueducts. 

The arrival of water from Longdendale in 1851 allowed Manchester Corporation to extend the network of pipes delivering water around the city. While this brought benefits, not least to Manchester’s manufacturers, who were desperate for a plentiful supply of clean water, it also widened inequalities.

The local government invested in pipes to Manchester’s growing, middle-class suburbs, supplying residents with fresh water inside their homes. Meanwhile, most working people in Manchester’s densely populated centre continued to rely on a shared standpipe, which meant queuing for water and carrying it through the streets to their homes. Manchester Corporation also continued to deny these homes access to plumbed toilets, while extending this service to the suburbs. 
 

By the late 1860s, the demand for water in Manchester had outstripped the supply from Longdendale. Manchester Corporation turned again to engineer John Frederick Bateman for the solution. Bateman set his sights on the Lake District, which has some of the heaviest rainfall in the country. He designed a pioneering scheme to create a reservoir at Thirlmere and bring water to Manchester via a 96-mile, gravity-fed aqueduct. 

Manchester Archives+ (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Image source for Light yellow map with a long central section coloured red

The engineering project began in 1885 and water from Thirlmere finally reached Manchester in 1894, effectively ending the problem of supplying the city with adequate water. 

Alongside the ambitious water supply project, in the 1890s, Manchester Corporation finally constructed a series of intercepting sewers that carried waste away for treatment to a new sewage works at Davyhulme. These, along with the plentiful water supply from Thirlmere, allowed for the mass conversion of privies to flushing toilets. In 1890, Manchester Corporation ruled that all new residential constructions must have indoor plumbing and in 1892, it ordered landlords to refit existing homes with this convenience. 

The election of councillors who represented the interests of Manchester’s working people—like Ancoats-born Charles Rowley, who campaigned for “healthy lives, healthy homes, and healthy surroundings”—helped to usher in a more progressive and egalitarian approach to environmental and public health issues, spurring ongoing reform into the 20th century.