Beyond Star Carr: The Mesolithic in Northern England

The excavation of a Mesolithic site on Swineshaw Moor, Tameside, in the central Pennines, conducted by the Tameside Archaeology Society with Ron Cowell of Liverpool Museum

As a discipline archaeology is focussed upon, perhaps often obsessed by, material culture. The analysis of form, fabric, and function, whether it is a single object or a landscape, is at the heart of such study. This approach is the chief way for archaeologists to understand the past and to attempt the unrecoverable – the motives of people in the past. It is one of the reasons archaeologists love to produce catalogues, databases, and hunt for the type-site: a single monument that will typify a landscape, people, or period which can be used as a model for further research. The Mesolithic lakeside settlement at Star Carr is just such a monument. It is one of the most famous sites in Prehistoric Europe and was first excavated in 1949-51. The latest research, which has highlighted the extent to which the former mere deposits of Lake Flixton have dried out since the mid-20^th century, as well as the discovery of a Mesolithic ‘house’, is published this month in a monograph by the CBA.¹

However, there is more to the Mesolithic than Star Carr, as last night’s Channel 4 Time Team TV special on the Mesolithic tsunami, Star Carr, and Doggerland (the prehistoric North Sea plain) demonstrated.² This point was made repeatedly at the recent CBA North West Spring conference (9 May) at Manchester. The subject was Mesolithic society in northern England and the north-western Irish Sea basin with seven papers of fresh research undertaken in the last five years.

Andy Myers set the scene with an overview of models of landuse and movement based upon a decade of research. Paul Clark looked at the massive, industrial-scale, excavations by Oxford Archaeology of a riverside Mesolithic site at Stainton West on the River Eden in the path of the Carlisle bypass: this produced tens of thousands of flint tools and waterlogged structures. Randy Donahue looked at the progress of identifying the source of black chert from Yorkshire and revealed the prospect of being able to identify specific locations where this material was exploited – and in the process revealed the huge ranges covered by Mesolithic groups. Alison Burns discussed more personal evidence in the form of the fossilised foot prints on the Formby foreshore of Merseyside: deer, auroch, birds, and people were constantly frequenting a waterside environment re-using set routes through a wetland landscape. Paul Preston looked at the technology of stone tools recovered from the thousands of Mesolithic sites preserved beneath the blanket peats of the central Pennines; the best-preserved and densist area of Mesolithic occupation surviving in Europe. In contrast Fraser Brown described the thousands of flints from just a single Mesolithic house excavated at Ronaldsway airport on the Isle of Man. Ron Cowell finished off the day in style with the recently discovered Mesolithic structures as Lunt Meadows, a few miles south-east of Formby: another possible house site.

Three themes emerged from this day; the long-range movement of peoples; the use of rivers as routes ways to open up the landscape; and the widespread use of Mesolithic ‘houses’, that is a permanent dwelling. A major difference between the Star Carr research and the sites discussed at the CBA North West spring conference³ is that most of the latter were investigated as part of developer-funded rescue archaeology – there is no chance to re-investigate most of these sites. There remains an academic/professional divide in archaeology which honey-pot sites such as Star Carr can be seen as perpetuating; the academics dig the unthreatened sites using painstaking techniques and the professionals conduct rescue archaeology within a short timescale with only partial excavation possible. In reality, the excavation techniques used by each group are no different (indeed at Carlisle and Ronaldsway new forms of detailed excavation recording have been used) and both approaches are perfectly valid types of research. Ironically, Star Carr itself has now turned into a rescue archaeology dig because of the continuing degradation of the organic deposits. Yet the developer-funded sites show-cased at the Manchester conference revealed equally complex sites with houses over a wide swaithe of northern England and the north-western Irish Sea basin. These sites are demonstrating how widespread and sophisticated Mesolithic culture was in this area, and the intense recording methods needed to recover their detail, allowing this unfashionable region of Britain’s Mesolithic world to emerge from the shadow of Star Carr.

^{1) Milner N, Taylor B, Conneller C & Schadla-Hall, 2013, Star Carr. Life in Britain after the Ice Age (York: Council for British Archaeology).}

^{2) Gaffney V, Fitch S & Smith S, 2009, Europe’s Lost World. The rediscovery of Doggerland. (York: Council for British Archaeology).}

^{3) www.archaeologyuk.org/cba/groups/northwest}

The Making of Post-War Manchester

The Deansgate Dig, Liverpool Road, Manchester, 1972. This was the site of the first excavation of industrial-era workers’ housing in the city.

Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to be invited to talk at a symposium on the changing urban landscape of mid-20^th century Manchester. This was held in my old office building at Manchester University: Humanities Bridgeford Street – or the architecture building as it was in my day. So it was with more than passing interest that I returned to a building which had been my professional home for a decade.

The aim of the day was to discuss the changing social and physical development of the city during the three decades from 1945. The 12 presentations considered topics as varied as ‘smokeless zones’, health care, and the large-scale built projects of the era such as the Mancunian Way and the University expansion, in relation to civic plans, infrastructural initiatives, local and national government policies, technological innovation, and the wider fiscal climate. This was an era when Manchester was going through one of its periodic re-inventions.

Many of these subjects are topics that since 2000 have become the focus of research for a variety of archaeologists (historical as well as industrial archaeologists)¹ under the broad heading of contemporary archaeological studies. I, however, was the only archaeologist at this particular symposium. The other speakers included cultural, migration, and urban historians, medical historians, geographers, architects, and planners. These formed an interesting multi-disciplinary group who discussed a variety of models, theories, and techniques on the changing Manchester of the period 1945 to 1974.

My own talk took an archaeological perspective on the decline of the traditional industries within Manchester (textiles, engineering and transport) and the impact of new commercial developments on the city townscape: such as the Shambles shopping centre which led to the moving by 1.7m of the city’s only surviving timber-framed building and the Arndale shopping centre which was part of the demolition of the centre of the city between Market Street and Shudehill which saw the loss of a number of historic buildings.

After a brief boom in cotton production in the 1950s Manchester’s most iconic industry rapidly declined in the face of overseas competition, although textile production as a whole managed to survive by diversifying into artificial fibres and clothes production. Engineering during this period completed its shift away from eastern Manchester into the Trafford Park Industrial Estate, its decline hastened by the demise of the steam locomotive and the associated railway engineering works in Gorton. These three decades also saw the complete abandonment of the Rochdale Canal, for over 150 years an east-west artery for raw materials through the city centre, along with its wharves and nearly three miles of private canal arms. Only the Bridgewater Canal survived as a working monument of the industrial revolution, although it was re-invented as a tourist canal in the later 1970s.

Yet this period also saw the beginnings of interest in Manchester’s industrial past. Three events were important in this awakening. The first of these was the city’s very first industrial archaeology dig. This was undertaken in 1960 by Prof Tomlinson of Manchester University on the site of the canal warehouse – the Grocers’ – in the Castlefield canal basin.² Secondly, the first modern community archaeology event, the Deansgate Dig, occurred in 1972. This brought together university students and adult volunteers to excavate for the first time a large section of the Roman vicus, or settlement, in front of the northern gateway of the Roman Fort, off Liverpool Road in Manchester. Whilst looking for the settlement Prof Barri Jones, the excavation leader, insisted on excavating the workers’ housing of the 1800s and 1820s that overlay the Roman remains – the first time this had been done in the city.³ Finally, interest in Manchester’s industrial archaeology coalesced in the mid-1970s around the campaign to save the Liverpool Road Railway Station site, the Manchester terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Opened in 1830 as part of the World’s first intercity passenger railway, its life as a passenger station was short, being superceded by Oxford Road Station in 1849, but it continued as a goods depot until it closed in September 1975, with the key buildings of the 1830s still intact.⁴ It was finally purchased by the GMC in 1978 and was opened in 1984 as the home of the North Western Science and Industry Museum – now the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

These three projects were instrumental in beginning in the revival of the Castlefield area of the city, which after 1945 had become run down as the traditional industries disappeared, and dominated by vacant plots of land and empty buildings. The area became the first Urban Heritage Park in Britain in 1982, and was an early example of the added value of heritage-led regeneration in an industrial city, a legacy the City is still exploiting.

1) For instance CHAT – the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology Theory group established in 2003: www.contemporary-hist-arch.ac.uk

2) Tomlinson V I, 1961, ‘Early warehouses on Manchester waterways’, Transactions of the Lancashire & Cheshire Antiquarian Society 71, 129-51.

3) Jones G D B & Grealey S, 1974, Roman Manchester. Altrincham: Manchester excavation Committee.

4) Fitzgerald R S, 1980, Liverpool Road Station, Manchester: An Historical and Architectural Survey. Manchester: Manchester University Press in association with the RCHM and GMC.

Long Live the Monograph – archaeology and e-books

From the 1st May 2013 the Centre for Applied Archaeology at the University of Salford will be offering publications such as this, on Buckton Castle, in e-book form.

The rise of electronic publication is one of the more striking cultural shifts of the last decade. Supported by better quality screens and new personal data-devices such as smart phones, tablets, and e-book readers it is now normal to see commuters on trams, trains, and buses with their noses in the latest fiction e-book. Most universities have electronic data stores of academic research, whilst e-journals pioneered the introduction of this technology within academia.

Archaeology as a discipline has been slow to take up this technology, beyond the e-journal market and the pressures of the publishing houses. Thus, nearly a decade ago one of the period archaeology societies I have been involved with at a committee level for many years was approached by the publisher of their journal with a proposal to provide this electronically. That journal now has more individual articles downloaded each year than the society’s membership – for a fee of course. Back-issues of the society’s own newsletter were made available electronically, for free, a few years later. The Archaeological Data Service (ADS) has for many years been making freely accessible archaeological information and grey-literature reports of developer-funded fieldwork. The pressure to monetise the scholarly value of this primary data, though, is increasing.

What I want to raise in this blog is the lack of availability, electronically, of the other great medium of archaeological information: the monograph. In many disciplines the journal article is the building-block of dissemination, argument, and progress, but in archaeology the specialist monograph, on a single site, as a series of conference papers, or as a collection of thought-provoking essays, is equally important. I was reminded of this at the April 2013 IfA Annual Conference in Birmingham where several of the key fieldwork texts from the 1970s and 1980s were discussed in one particular session in relation to Processual and Post-Processual archaeology approaches: Prior and Clark’s work on key East Midlands sites for instance. These were published in the British Archaeological Reports (BAR) series. My old university library stopped automatically taking this eclectic and excellent series in the late 1990s as the volume of published material grew and the costs rose. However, the current publishers of the series, Archaeopress, have for several years been providing ebook versions of new titles and have just started providing electronic copies of their back catalogue from the 1970s onwards.

Traditionally there has been a small, but strong, market for manuscripts deemed too specialist by the traditional publication houses to be cost effective, hence the establishment of BAR in 1974. The growth of desk-top publication computer programmes in the 1980s and 1990s saw the founding of monograph series amongst many local societies and archaeology units. The Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian Society has a large number of such volumes, whilst Oxford Archaeology, MOLA, Wessex, and the York Archaeological Trust all have long-running monograph series. Few of these important volumes are, at the moment, available electronically. The spread of e-book readers and programmes in the last few years, has, however, made this a serious topic for debate within the archaeology profession and local societies.

Many local societies now produce an e-newsletter – it cuts down on the cost of printing and postage and allows more material to be included. The Buildings Archaeology Special Interest Group of the IfA (of which I happen to be Chair at the moment) now only produces its newsletter electronically. However, we must be careful not to dis-enfranchise those individuals who do not have the desire or ability to access this form of publication. In my role as Chair of CBA North West I have held several discussions over the last year as to whether to make our newsletter only available electronically – to which the answer has been no, not yet. We are, though, about to produce our journal in both paper and e-book format. As for the electronic publication of archaeological monographs, the Centre for Applied Archaeology at Salford University, like many such archaeology bodies, has moved to both paper printing and e-books. From the 1st May both our monograph runs (the University of Salford Archaeology Monographs and the Applied Archaeology Series) will be available as e-books, downloadable from the university’s web-shop for the same price as the paper versions. In producing these it has become apparent that there are formats which are easier to read electronically than on paper – larger font types and a single column appear best on the black-and-white screens of the first generation of e-readers for instance: as with the introduction of printing in the 15th century it will no doubt take a while for the opportunities of the new publication medium to emerge.

The rise of open-source data may mark the point at which archaeology makes the leap from the publication of monographs electronically to the publication of full data sets, so that researchers can interrogate the original data, or a copy of it, themselves, coming up with new conclusions and interpretations. This is already possible on a limited basis through the material held by the ADS. This, though, leads us into the world of meta-data and data-mining rather than publication. There will still be a need to write a synthesis of this data and therefore there will continue to be a role for the monograph-type of publication, whether in paper or increasingly as an e-book.

Moss Bank Park – DGM 2013

The remains of the Ainsworth’s house in Moss Bank Park. Not the chimney of the Halliwell Bleachworks on the skyline.

The coldest March in more than 50 years might seem a strange time to be going back into the field, but our flagship community archaeology project, Dig Greater Manchester, has just finished its first excavation of the year. Moss Bank Park, Bolton, sits on the site of the Halliwell Bleachworks, founded by Peter Ainsworth in 1739. The family expanded the site in subsequent generations and this was one of the first places to use chemical bleaching around 1800. The family were able to purchase the nearby medieval Smithills Hall in 1801 and later opened a number of small coal mines on the Smithills estate and built a tramway system to the bleachworks. Taken over by the Bleachers’ Association in 1900, Halliwell survived until the mid-20th century, although the most prominent remains are now a tall chimney and a reservoir.

For the final two weeks of March this was the scene of the first of four community excavations that Dig Greater Manchester will undertake this year. Despite the dig coinciding with the coldest March in 50 years and the heaviest snow, locally, of the winter (up to six inches in two days), more than 60 volunteers and the local history society helped out on the dig and around 70 people attended the Open Day on the final Saturday. There was plenty of exciting finds, including the somewhat surreal image of professional and volunteer archaeologists shovelling snow rather than dirt.

The aim of this year’s first dig was to locate the house built by the owners, the Ainsworths, and some of the housing occupied by the bleach and dye workers, also built by the Ainsworths. Within Trench 1 we uncovered the partial remains of the family wing of Moss Bank House. The remains showed three different building phases within the structure and during the last few days of the dig we uncovered a blocked mullioned window dating to the 18th century. Trench 2 revealed the remains of a 19th century wash house, and Trenches 3 and 4 revealed the partial remains of some 19th century workers housing.

These remains fall within one of the key research aims of the project: charting the creation of new cultural identities in the Industrial Revolution. By looking at the different types of finds from each site we are hoping to see if we can spot social differences between the occupants in the pottery, glass, and other material remains. So far, our DGM digs have looked at sites where the buildings have risen and fall in status during the Industrial Revolution; a feature reflected in the changing types of artefacts and building types recovered. The dwellings at Moss Bank Park suggest that the identification of differences in the finds assemblages at this latest site might not be straight-forward, due to the imbalance in the quantity of material recovered from each set of dwellings. There are some similarities in some of the pottery types, but it is not clear how far differences in depositional practices have affected these remains. However, there are status and display elements within the house of the Ainsworth family similar to some of the other sites we investigated in 2012. Once all 11 DGM site have been investigated a larger database, though, will provide clearer patterns of deposition and further lines of research which at the moment are only just beginning to emerge.

Richard the Third and all that…

An example of scoliosis – courtesy of the NHS and my daughter, Lizzie

Hunting for historical figures using archaeology, whether it the key actors from the Bible or the footsteps of a Roman general, has a very long, but not always honourable, pedigree. I myself have taken part in fieldwork hunting for the campaign forts and temporary camps of the Roman Governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola (b. 40AD d. 93 AD). We certainly found Roman military sites, but whether they were really from the short reign of that governor, who conquered all of Britannia, is difficult to tell. We are not even certain of the dates of his governorship of Britain (77 or 78 AD to 83 or 84 AD), so hoping to locate and date through archaeology his campaigning forts in northern Wales or Scotland was at best optimistic. That’s not to say we did not find some cracking Roman military archaeology, but the discipline is not at its best looking for this kind of precise, personalised, dating evidence. And do not let the modern fashion for applying Bayesian statistics to radio-carbon dates mislead you – this is still no more than a statistical estimate. In other words radio-carbon dates that have been processed using Bayesian statistics remain best guesses (however well informed).(1)

The recent discovery of Richard III beneath a car park in Leicester is just the latest example of this need for physical proof to support the historical documentation. The results of this investigation had more than a hint of the proverbial warning ‘becareful what you wish for – as you might get it’. Richard was found to have a deformity of the his back, scoliosis, wounds to the head indicating that he had died in battle, and a skull which, when subjected to the techniques of facial reconstruction, had more than a passing resemblance to his portrait. So did we learn anything new, apart from confirming some of the early Tudor propaganda? I think we learnt two things. Firstly, yet again archaeology has demonstrated it has the power to bring the past to life by literally putting flesh on the bones. Further, there is the prospect of more insights from the skeleton as the full range of forensic archaeology techniques are applied to the skeleton. Secondly, this was a triumph for applied archaeology techniques from two sides of the profession that do not always have the warmest of relationships: the academic and the professional. One of the reasons this appears to have worked so well in this ‘cold case’ is because the University of Leicester could draw upon the close relationship between the academic department of archaeology and the professional archaeological unit which was also based at the university, in the same building. Here is a justification as to why taking an archaeology degree should be rewarding and worthy of the investment in fees.

This discovery was also a highly personal moment for me. My eldest daughter has scoliosis, in the same lower back position as Richard III, although not quite so bad. It was quite shocking to see the level of deformity within the dead King’s back and to know that my own off-spring has had to cope with the pain and discomfort of something very similar. That brings home the immediacy of the past through the medium of archaeology. I’m relieved to say that my daughter has benefitted fully from modern 21st century medicine: with the level of metalwork now in her back she should make a spectacular discovery for archaeologists in the dim and distant future.

1) ‘Gathering Time: the Second Radiocarbon revolution’, Current Archaeology Issue 259, 2011.

Snow Stopped Digging

Industrial archaeology in the snow at Worsley New Hall January 2013

Industrial archaeology in the snow at Worsley New Hall Jan 13[/caption]There are many questions I, and the majority of professional archaeologists, are regularly asked by those members of the public brought up on TV archaeology, such as what is your most exciting find (not sure – could be a Roman coinhoard or a seventeenth century blast furnace); or have you ever found any gold or silver (yes, a tiny gold shoe tag). Less often asked is can we dig in all sorts of weather? Leaving aside the assumption that all archaeologists do is excavate (it’s at the core of what we do but there are many other techniques we use such as building survey or field walking) there is one type of weather that I personally fear and loathe on the forecast: rain.

Frost and snow are straightforward, for if the ground is as hard as iron then even a mattock is not going to be safe to use, and if the snow is blanketing the ground then you can’t see safely to walk, let alone work. In which case it’s time to retire to the site hut to fill in the context/photographic/finds sheets and have a cup of tea and a biscuit. Rain, though, creates uncertainty, depending upon how much and for how long it’s been precipitating. Health and safety in archaeology has never been more important, since most fieldwork is now done through the planning process on construction sites. The profession, rightly so, complies with the health and safety regulations common in the Built Environment sector. Therefore, the decision as to whether to dig or not to dig is surely straight forward: if it seems as though it might be unsafe for archaeologists to dig due to the adverse weather conditions then they don’t. So this morning, with three inches of snow covering the brick and rubble foundations of a nineteenth century country house, accessible only down a slope, it was clear we were not going to be doing any fieldwork due to the risk of slipping, tripping, or falling.

The grey area comes in assessing how much damage could be done to the archaeological deposits between the point at which it’s too unsafe for the archaeologist to work and the point at which the archaeology will be damaged by working in the rain. There are no convenient sets of guidelines to help here, rather it’s down to the type of archaeology being excavated, the ground conditions, and the skills of the workforce on site.

There were several times during the course of 2012 when we took our community volunteer diggers off sites, during the Dig Greater Manchester excavations, because the effects of the rain, usually from the day before but often during the day, were making the diggers too wet. The archaeology deposits (stone and brick walls and floors) were robust enough to withstand further work in the weather conditions. In contrast, even the lightest shower at our gravel and sand quarry site at Besthorpe, in the lower Trent Valley, meant that we had to hurry to the cabin or the site would end up looking like a sandpit. Designated walkways and protective tents can help to mitigate against this kind of problem, but what helps most is staff experienced in all kinds of weather conditions and in all sorts of archaeological deposits.

I’m rather hoping, therefore, with at least five community excavations to undertake and at least two large-scale developer-funded projects to deliver, that 2013 will prove to be average for rainfall, or even a little on the dry side in Manchester – and no jokes about the weather thank you.

Excavating Engels

There is a terrific history series on BBC Radio 4 called the ‘Long View’. The premise is to take a contemporary issue in society and politics and to look at it from the point of view of a parallel case in the past. The publication this month of further summary data from the 2011 Census throws up just such a case study, with some interesting facts for the student of urban industrial archaeology in the Manchester region. According to the latest Census the City of Manchester has one of the highest percentages of people born abroad (25.2%), as well as those born abroad and resident for less than 10 years (15.8%), outside London. The city, along with the borough of Trafford, has some of the biggest Irish-born or origin populations in England and Wales; Bury and Salford have some of the greatest concentrations of Jewish populations; whilst the Polish population across the whole city region has grown dramatically over the last 10 years. This is against a rise in population for England and Wales of 3.7 million during the decade 2001 to 2011, the largest decennial growth recorded by the census since such records began in 1801. Manchester reflects this, with one of the largest percentage increases in population during this period, with a population over half a million, at 503,000 (up 19% from 423,000 in 2001), for the first time since 1971.¹

These figures have a strong echo of the rapid social changes and high levels of immigration and social mobility seen during the early to middle decades of the 19^th century, arguably the peak period of industrialisation in England and Wales. At the forefront of these changes was Manchester, the shock city of the age. Between 1801 and 1851 its population rocketed from around 75,000 to over 303,000, with hundreds of mills and ironworks providing factory work for a new industrial urban population. By 1841 the Manchester-Salford conurbation was the second largest urban area in the UK, behind London, and one of the largest city regions in Europe.

This rapid growth had some appalling consequences: overcrowding, disease, and early death being the most notorious. Industrial housing could often be found next door to industry. Excavations in 2002 on Hardman Street, off Deansgate in the centre of Manchester, revealed terraced housing and cellar dwellings adjacent to a felt hat makers (who used mercury and sulphuric acid in the their manufacturing processes), a steam-powered silk mill, and a soda works with its own boiler-house and well.² No wonder some mid-19^th century commentators such as General Napier described the city as the ‘entrance to hell’. Campaigners for better living conditions included the authors Mrs Gaskell, who used Manchester as the backdrop for her first novel, ‘Mary Barton’ (published in 1848), and Charles Dickens (1812-70), a frequent visitor to the city. Other social commentators, such as Frederick Engels, were more forensic in their descriptions, which are all the more shocking for their detail.

It is now possible to start testing, archaeologically, the comments of Engels and others on the state of Manchester’s housing. Since 2001 more than 17 areas of late 18^th to early 20^th century workers’ housing have been excavated across Manchester and central Salford, supported by the local archaeological planning officers who recognised at the end of the 1990s the international importance of Manchester as a newly industrialising city during this period. Within these sites three areas have strong associations with Engels: Ancoats and Angel Meadow in Manchester, and Islington in Salford. These were some of the most overcrowded areas of both cities, with more than 90 people per acre recorded living in these zones as late as the 1880s. They were also the areas with the highest level of Irish immigrant population. These are the areas which have seen the most extensive excavations with more than 200 properties investigated in just these three areas.

Whilst it’s still too soon to give a coherent archaeological account of the archaeology of poverty and squalor within the city region, it is now possible to assess which of the themes highlighted by Engels might be tested archaeological. Identifying immigrant communities through their material remains has so far proved virtually impossible, if we ignore the surviving Catholic churches in Ancoats and the Islington area of Salford, and perhaps is due in part to the way in which rubbish was systematically removed from the city to stop it chocking on its own filth. Likewise, direct evidence for disease has also been absence within these houses, although that might be recovered from privy deposits or from the bones of inhabitants should an opportunity arise to investigate a 19^th century cemetery. But supporting evidence for these two subjects might also be inferred from two other Engels’ themes: lack of sanitation and poor ventilation. Finally, evidence for overcrowding can be recovered from the small, closely-packed, house forms excavated, and in the poorly-built nature of many of these properties. These points have been highlighted in the recent excavations on Chapel Street, Salford (see illustration), of the White Cross hamlet, the precursor to the industrial area of Islington. This was an area of densely-packed cellar dwellings, back-to-back housing, courts, alleyways, and terraced housing built during the period 1810-30. It was even briefly described by Engels himself: ‘The working men’s dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane, where a mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state, vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding’.³ Yet we must be careful in letting the written sources lead the archaeology: the material remains of everyday living during this revolutionary period are evocative enough without recourse to the shocked writings of contemporary social commentators.

^{1) A word of caution here as the boundaries of census districts, and local authority units, tend to change regularly so direct comparison with the 19th century is always problematical.}

^{2) Michael Nevell. 2008, Manchester: the Hidden History. History Press, Stroud.}

^{3) Friederich Engels, The Condition of the working Class in England. Penguin classics 2009 edition, 100.}