Angel Meadow with Dean Kirby at MMU Business School

Angel Meadow with Dean Kirby at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 9 June 2018, FREE - Visit now

Step into the underworld of Angel Meadow, Victorian Manchester’s most savage slum, in this free talk by author Dean Kirby.

Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world’s first cotton factory, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs. Thieves and prostitutes keep company with rats in overcrowded lodging houses and deep cellars on the banks of a black river, the Irk. Gangs of‚ scuttlers stalk the streets in pointed, brass-tipped clogs. Those who evade their clutches are hunted down by cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Lawless drinking dens and a cold slab in the dead house provide the only relief from this filthy and frightening world. Come along and hear author and hear MMU PhD researcher Dean Kirby talk about how and why this nineteenth-century Manchester slum was considered so diabolical it was re-christened ‘hell upon earth’ by Friedrich Engels.

Part of Manchester Histories Festival 2018, a long-weekender of events across Greater Manchester from 7-11 June 2018.