Housing the Workers: Re-visiting Employer Villages in Mid-19th-century Europe

Abstract

As the first phase of high industrialization was coming to an ebb in the 1830s, its impact upon human life became more apparent, as the living and especially housing conditions of the working classes wors-ened dramatically. The reports compiled by local or national govern-ments (Villermé, 1840/1971; Chadwick, 1842) as well as descriptions by contemporary observers (e.g. Engels, 1845; Zuber, 1852) bear ample witness to how overcrowded dwellings, lack of access to clean water and a general lack of basic hygiene took their toll on the health and life expectancy of the urban working classes. In Britain, the leading industrialized country, it fell mainly upon the newly empowered municipal governments to deal with these consequences, but in an age of laissez-faire liberalism and limited budgets, the efforts of the municipal boards to ease the emerging ‘housing question’ were often half-hearted and overall insufficient to provide a real solution to the problem. More often than not during this period, municipal govern-ments would embark upon large infrastructural projects such as gas works or water supply and sewer systems, but leave it to individual landlords and house owners to increase and improve residential space as well as rent these out to tenants (Gauldie, 1974; Burnett, 1978). This situation entailed the predictable result that housing became fundamentally an economic problem, the working classes unable to command sufficient resources to provide themselves with decent accommodation. Improvements in housing conditions were thus slow to reach the urban working classes in 19th-century Europe. Checkland neatly expressed what the ‘essential’ feature of the working-class housing market was.