Dean Kirby

Angel Meadow – The Slum of Slums

Angel Meadow the name alone can conjure up images of a beautiful place, and by all accounts it once was, that was until the Industrial Revolution arrived in Manchester. By the end of the nineteenth century we soon learn that Angel Meadow had lost its beauty and had become the slum that ended all slums. This was a dark, dank, horrible place to be, from the tightly packed slums to the rough ale houses this was not a place to live or the living.

Angel Meadow came back to the fore in Manchester recently as the Co-operative Group was building its brand new headquarters on what was Angel Meadow. For nearly fifty years the people had slowly forgotten about Angel Meadow, its history and the horrors that it used to behold. In fact, while they were clearing the site ready for construction a murder victim’s body was found from over forty years before. Like many slums that surrounded Manchester in the early twentieth century was pulled down, cleared and forgotten to the anals of history.

Dean Kirby, a former Manchester Evening News Journalist, was attracted to Angel Meadow not just by the story but because it has a place in his own family history. When he discovered that one of his Victorian forebears, William Kirby, left his life as a farm labourer from County Mayo, who had survived the Great Famine, to fight to survive in Manchester.

Kirby has researched Angel Meadow through the numerous archives that are held by various institutions across Manchester. He was able to discover William Kirby had loved on Charter Street, one of the main thoroughfares. His ancestors home was discovered back in 2012 and he was able to actually visit the site, see that his house was 10ft square house and that the walls were only half a brick thick, so you would be able to hear the neighbours. To where the privy (toilets) served over 100 residents just does not bare thinking about.

Dean Kirby goes on to tell the story of Angel Meadow through the archives and those that lived there, he does not paint a romantic picture of the place, but a very honest picture. All I can say is I am glad I did not live there at that time, especially as there a cholera epidemic there amongst the large Irish population. This being a population that had survived famine to die in a slum in Manchester.

Some people talk about the beauty of Victoria Station and the lost Exchange Station, what they forget is that the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway built a viaduct, straight through the slum in 1844. As he notes that those that lived in the lowest Streets of the Meadow were now in a permanent shadow with the addition of the soot of smoke deposits from the trains marking their homes. Kirby also makes the pertinent observation that the safest place to view Angel Meadow was from the trains on the viaduct.

Dean Kirby has written and researched one of the best books on Manchester’s social history in years, what makes this so good is that it is readable, uses some excellent illustrations of the people in written form. This a book that those who want to know more about those that worked and somehow survived the Industrial Revolution in Manchester. This is not a romantic vision of history but a stark and an honest account, that sees the place for what it was, the Slum of Slums.… (mer)