An ordinary cottage in Leeds occupies not more than five yards square of land, and usually consists of a cellar, a living room, and one sleeping-room.  These contracted dwellings, filled day and night with human beings, are another point dangerous alike to the morals and the health of the inhabitants.”  And how greatly these cottages are crowded, the Report on the Health of the Working-Classes, quoted above, bears testimony:  “In Leeds we found brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, sharing the parents’ sleeping-room, whence arise consequences at the contemplation of which human feeling shudders.”

So, too, Bradford, which, but seven miles from Leeds at the junction of several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black, foul-smelling stream.  On week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud of coal smoke, but on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when viewed from the surrounding heights.  Yet within reigns the same filth and discomfort as in Leeds.  The older portions of the town are built upon steep hillsides, and are narrow and irregular.  In the lanes, alleys, and courts lie filth and debris in heaps; the houses are ruinous, dirty, and miserable, and in the immediate vicinity of the river and the valley bottom I found many a one, whose ground-floor, half-buried in the hillside, was totally abandoned.  In general, the portions of the valley bottom in which working-men’s cottages have crowded between the tall factories, are among the worst built and dirtiest districts of the whole town.  In the newer portions of this, as of every other factory town, the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they share here, too, all the evils incident to the customary method of providing working-men’s dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak more particularly in discussing Manchester.  The same is true of the remaining towns of the West Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax and Huddersfield.  The last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by reason of its charming situation and modern architecture, has yet its bad quarter; for a committee appointed by a meeting of citizens to survey the town, reported August 5th, 1844:  “It is notorious that in Huddersfield whole streets and many lanes and courts are neither paved nor supplied with sewers nor other drains; that in them refuse, debris, and filth of every sort lies accumulating, festers and rots, and that, nearly everywhere, stagnant water accumulates in pools, in consequence of which the adjoining dwellings must inevitably be bad and filthy, so that in such places diseases arise and threaten the health of the whole town.”