The Industrial Revolution: work, cities and protest
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
From home to factory
Before industrialisation most manufacturing happened in homes and small workshops at the worker's own pace. Machines powered first by water and then by steam were too large and costly for that, so work moved into FACTORIES, where hundreds worked to a clock and a supervisor. The change was as much about time discipline as about machinery.
The towns that grew
Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and Glasgow grew faster than anything could be built to serve them. Housing went up back-to-back with no sanitation, water came from contaminated sources, and cholera epidemics followed. Life expectancy in the worst districts fell below that of the countryside. These were not accidents of poverty alone but of building without drains, water or regulation.
How it changed
Improvement came from organised pressure and law rather than goodwill: factory acts limiting hours and child labour, public health acts forcing sanitation, and trade unions — illegal for a period and then legalised — bargaining collectively. Each was contested at the time, and reading the arguments made against them is part of understanding how the change happened.
Manchester's population: about 25,000 in 1772, 322,000 by 1851 — thirteenfold in eighty years. No sewers were built to match. Life expectancy for a labourer in Manchester in 1842 was recorded as 17 years, against 38 in rural Rutland. Cholera arrived in 1832. Those figures explain the reform movements far better than any description of a factory does — and they are why public health legislation came when it did.