During the 19th century AD industrial production continued to increase. It was most noticeable in the growth of the northern textile towns. The 1851 Census recorded that Manchester’s population had grown from 182,000 to 303,000, while Bradford’s went from 26,000 (1821) to 104,000.

These towns were physically and socially unlike any in previous history; they were built around factories rather than market places, cathedrals, or other traditional town centres. Long alleys of tiny ‘back-to-back’ terrace houses crowded round factories whose huge chimneys belched out smoke day and night. The owners of the mills and factories lived on the outskirts of towns, away from the smoke and grime. The rapid and haphazard growth of these towns meant that there were no services like street paving, lighting and water-supplies; overcrowding and unsanitary conditions led to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid.

The new towns horrified middle-class Victorians; by the late 1840s they had begun to set up royal commissions, statistical societies and charitable organisations to tackle the ‘Condition of England’ problem, as it was called. Stripped of their coating of soot, many of the old industrial towns have a nostalgic fascination today; some of the factories and warehouses provide fine examples of industrial architecture; but for many who lived and died in them, the factory towns were hell.