Little Ireland

Caroline Scott reveals the prejudice and poverty faced by Irish migrant communities in 19th-century Britain.

Friedrich Engels observed in 1845: “These Irishmen who migrate for four pence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle,insinuate themselves everywhere… the worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces.”

As economic migrants were drawn to centres of dock, canal and railway building, textile and chemical manufacturing; mining and iron working, warehouses and markets, so many northern towns had an Irish population of significant size by the time the 1841 census was taken. With most, though by no means all, in unskilled and casual employment, they found themselves living in districts of overcrowded and unhealthy houses.

Industrial cities had grown rapidly in the first decades of the 19th century, but the quantity of housing stock had not kept pace with population expansion and the infrastructure just couldn’t cope. By the 1830s, Britain’s manufacturing centres were overcrowded and insanitary, viewed as urban jungles, threateningly simmering with social and moral disorder.

For Engels and a generation of social scientists, politicians, churchmen and philanthropists, the worst of industrialising, urbanising England would be exemplified by the area of Manchester known as Little Ireland. Some 200 houses, accommodating a population of around 4,000, were packed between the Rochdale Canal and a loop in the River Medlock. Crammed in between gasworks, dye works, mills and foundries, this low-lying spot frequently flooded and the streets ran with the noxious waste of the surrounding industry. By the 1820s, this area was inhabited by labourers, hawkers, hand-loom weavers and the very poorest of Manchester’s poor. Many of them were Irish.

Lowering the tone