The little street that helped to save lives

IT is one of the most picturesque hidden gems in Manchester, a rare example of pristine terraced housing in a city centre these days better known for apartments.

But when it was built, Anita Street stood out for a different reason.

These two neat rows of Victorian terraces in Ancoats were not originally built to be pretty or pristine, but to save lives. The city leaders decided to build it to try to combat Manchester’s notorious 19th Century housing crisis, which they feared was spiralling fatally out of control.

Anita Street’s story – one that reflects both the best and worst of the city’s industrial heritage – started a century or so before its construction at the very back end of the 19th Century.

In the 1790s, as plans for the Rochdale canal were drawn up, eagle-eyed industrialists decided Ancoats would be the ideal place to locate their mills.

As they did so, a new neighbourhood grew around them – a dark, tight network of badly-constructed back-to-back terraces, hordes of weavers and mill-workers crammed in to filthy rooms and cellars with their families, all there to service the needs of surrounding factories.

Ancoats became the world’s first industrial suburb, or, as Friedrich Engels said of the neighbourhood in 1845: “It must be admitted that no more injurious or demoralising method of housing the workers has yet been discovered than precisely this.

“The working man is constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for others, and because there are no others within the vicinity of his mill.”

The east and north-east sides of Manchester were the only ones on which middle-class people had not built, he noted, because for most of the year the westerly winds drove thick factory smoke across them, ‘that the working people alone may breathe.’ With the squalid housing came disease and death.

But at the same time as Engels was researching that chronicle of Victorian poverty, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Manchester City Council was being established. And with it came a wave of civic pride – one that increasingly fretted about how to help the poor.

Even the architect’s plans for Manchester town hall point to how serious a problem slum housing had become. Alfred Waterhouse’s original sketches for the building, unearthed last year, designate an entire section of it for the ‘unhealthy dwellings’ department.

And so, in the second half of the 19th Century, the council started literally laying down the law. It banned the construction of backto-backs, insisted on the inclusion of toilets and issued notices on houses deemed to be unfit.

Research still estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 people were dying unnecessarily within the 25-street network of back-tobacks off Oldham Road, however. So in the late 19th Century, the slum clearances began in earnest.

In their place, the council decided to try something new: some of the first examples of social housing in the country.

First came Victoria Square, an 800-person block of tenements that boasted communal laundries and ventilated food stores for everyone – but only a toilet for every two apartments.

Rents were high, though, so initially it remained partly empty. But the council was determined to plough ahead and so – three years later – Sanitary Street was born.

These two rows of tenement homes were a step up again, each with their own toilet and sink. Sanitary Street would only be renamed Anita Street in the 1960s, when residents no longer fancied the connotations.

That Anita Street is still going strong to this day is testament itself to just how much changed in the 50 years before its construction.

Just a few decades earlier Engels had noted the ‘niggardliness’ of those who built the old Ancoats back-to-backs, finding outer walls ‘one brick thick at most,’ ‘as thin as it’s possible to make them.’ They would last barely 40 years before falling down, he pointed out.

But 120 years later, Anita Street stands just as proudly as it did on day one.

And while the council later progressed its social housing vision to Blackley and later Wythenshawe’s ‘garden city’ of the 1920s, the two rows of pristine terraces in Ancoats remain the favourite street of many Mancunians – and the lasting legacy of a civic revolution.

Today, as Manchester grapples with a new set of housing problems, there is even a sense we may have come full circle.

Dwayne Mead, 27, has rented on Anita Street for five years and says that as well as the troupes of tourists passing by and the TV crews filming adverts, he regularly gets letters through the door from people wanting to live there.

That’s not just because the street is attractive and convenient for town, he believes, but in part because the housing being built currently is once again just not high quality enough.

“This is the place I’ve stayed the longest in Manchester – previously I’d lived in new-build flats in town,” he says.

“In my experience and that of a few of my friends, the walls in newbuild apartments can be a bit rubbish, and the carpets, the flooring. All a bit flimsy.

“They put them up in the space of a month nowadays.

“But here I’ve had no problems. They’re solid buildings.”