By this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can be obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse off than in the former method.  The middle row, on the other hand, is at least as badly ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the back street is always in the same filthy, disgusting condition as they.  The contractors prefer this method because it saves them space, and furnishes the means of fleecing better paid workers through the higher rents of the cottages in the first and third rows.  These three different forms of cottage building are found all over Manchester and throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire, often mixed up together, but usually separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of towns.  The third system, that of the back alleys, prevails largely in the great working-men’s district east of St. George’s Road and Ancoats Street, and is the one most often found in the other working-men’s quarters of Manchester and its suburbs.

In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats, stand the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six and seven-storied buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above the low cottages of the workers.  The population of the district consists, therefore, chiefly of mill hands, and in the worst streets, of hand-weavers.  The streets nearest the heart of the town are the oldest, and consequently the worst; they are, however, paved, and supplied with drains.  Among them I include those nearest to and parallel with Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street.  Farther to the north-east lie many newly-built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots between them larger and more numerous.  But this can be said of a minority of the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the first ten years.  For the construction of the cottages individually is no less to be condemned than the plan of the streets.  All such cottages look neat and substantial at first; their massive brick walls deceive the eye, and, on passing through a newly-built working-men’s street, without remembering the back alleys and the construction of the houses themselves, one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the Liberal manufacturers that the working population is nowhere so well housed as in England.  But on closer examination, it becomes evident that the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is possible to make them.  The outer walls, those of the cellar, which bear the weight of the ground floor and roof, are one whole brick thick at most, the bricks lying with their long sides touching; but I have seen many a cottage of the same height,