Leeds In The Twentieth Century
The family
So as well as imposing cuts the Conservative party is waging an ideological war against single mothers and in favour of the family. In this respect Capitalism has changed little since its birth. The industrial revolution saw the expounding of the nuclear family as the only acceptable model in society. Responsibilities for child care, housing, health and care of the elderly no longer lay with the community or with the lord of the manor. Instead it was expected that the smaller unit of the nuclear family would undertake all care for the workforce.
Economic circumstance forced women to act as nurses, childminders, cooks and cleaners. Similarly men were forced to sell their labour power to provide food and accommodation. The state …show more content…
reaped the rewards of a self catering, cheaply maintained workforce without having any role in the upkeep of that workforce. Single mothers have been singled out for attack because they do rely on the state for help. Indeed many conservatives have been quite explicit in saying this. Peter Lilley the Social Security Secretary complained that these women were 'marrying the state', that is depending on the State for financial assistance, rather than depending on a husband.
Victorian values
This isn't the first time the Conservatives have manipulated and lied about academic work to justifying implementing it's political agenda. Indeed though the Tory party are on a moral crusade to bring back Victorian values, they are particular as to which values they wish to keep, a point which was well made by Gwendolene Stuart2 in a pamphlet on Thatcher "[they have] picked from that period selectively the sentiments and values of the most oppressive class...deriding the real values of that period, the values of ordinary men and women who struggled to work collectively together to advance their quality of life. "
There is nothing new or original about the present campaign. As Dr. John Harris comments "At the beginning of the 20th century there was already a firmly established belief that the family was in decline and decay as a result of the growth of industrial society". The introduction of women into the workforce, the growth of unions and organisations representing youth removed them from the family environment, giving them greater independence.
The move to the cities brought with it poverty, overcrowding and crime. The changing structure of the family was blamed for this rather than the effects of industrialisation. The response of social planners was to re define women's roles within society. Arguments about women being naturally suited to domesticity and about their need for protection in a morally corrupt world were introduced. Concern over declining birth-rate raised "motherhood" to a new level in social recognition. The first Mothers Day was celebrated in 1907 with this in mind. The so called sexual liberation that followed World War I was followed by a moral backlash.
On one hand legislation was introduced which removed many restrictions on women working, on the other ideology was created to prevent women from taking full advantage of the new opportunities available to them. Again and again the family values have been used by capitalism as a bulwark against progression and to deflect from the misery caused by it.
http://struggle.ws/ws94/ws42_family.html
Leeds is one of the largest cities in England and the foremost industrial city of the West Yorkshire conurbation. Its population in 1981 stood at 696 714 and with Bradford forms a metropolitan area supporting more than 1 million people. Although a large proportion of its population are engaged in the tertiary sector Leeds is primarily an industrial city. Its rapid growth during the nineteenth century mirrors any town which was endowed with the raw materials of the Industrial Revolution: coal, iron ore and cheap labour. The particular strength of the West Yorkshire towns was the manufacture of cloth, an industry which began on a small scale high up in the Pennine valleys and then later moved down to the growing mills of Halifax, Bradford and Leeds where engineering and coal mining were fast becoming important.
There was a bitter meeting in 1833 called by such eminent Leeds doctors as Charles Thackrah and Robert Baker to campaign vigorously for a proper sewage system, which in 1850 was eventually channelled into the River Aire near Temple Newsam. In 1870, the Corporation were directed to forbid sewage to pass into the river until it had been properly purified. It was not until about the same time that the courses of the many open becks below Swinegate were paved in and covered to prevent their use as open drains and tipping places. Water supplies to the town were very incompetent and unhealthy until the reservoir was constructed on Woodhouse Moor. However, by 1869 this reservoir had become inadequate and additional water supplies were sought from the Washburn valley near Blubberhouses and the high dales.
Poor working conditions in many of the mills, bad housing accommodation and the intense pollution of the air all contributed to a very high death rate which rose considerably with the increase in population. New cemeteries sprang up which became the targets for a highly organised group of body-snatchers who became known locally as the "resurrectionists". The cases of body-snatching are well documented and include an account of a box deposited "at the Bull and Mouth Hotel by the Duke of Leeds coach from Manchester in November 1831, the box being addressed to 'The Revd Mr Geneste, Hull. To be left until called for. Glass. Keep this side up." When opened by a curious servant the box was found to contain two corpses.
Body-snatching was so prevalent in some areas of Leeds that the townsfolk organised societies ("Grave Clubs") to cater for the relatives of the deceased persons and to devise measures to beat the body-snatchers.
These measures include guarding newly interred bodies for five weeks and burying corpses twelve feet down with iron staves set into the earth at fixed intervals immediately above the coffin.
Leeds in the Twentieth Century: Urban Renewal
The nineteenth century saw the establishment of Leeds primarily as a commercial city, built haphazardly and at a speed to keep pace with the ever expanding industries. Social and living conditions deteriorated rapidly, being sacrificed to promote the new industrial growth that brought great affluence to a few and indescribable poverty to many. For a long time the pleas
Until the Town Planning Act of 1909 there was no official control over the siting of new houses. The result was that Leeds was left a legacy of many squalid housing areas interwoven with factories and warehouses. The back-to-backs were crowded some 80-90 per acre. The worst of these consisted only to two rooms, a living-cum-kitchen room and one bedroom; later types often had two rooms on each floor. Through ventilation was impossible. Before 1844 some 30 000 back-to-backs were built, 28 000 between 1844 and 1874 and another 12 000 by 1909. Within a radius of 21/2 miles from the centre of the city, there still remains extensive housing areas more than 100 years …show more content…
old.
The magnitude of the problem which faced the civic authorities after 1918 is apparent. The intensity of effort in clearing land has varied locally but much has been accomplished in re-housing population, in providing new sites for industry and in re-developing the central area in an effort to modernise its general character and to alleviate traffic congestion.
In the early inter-war period, there was an urgent need to provide for a general housing shortage, and council estates began to be developed in Meanwood, Middleton and elsewhere, just as in most large towns and cities. The replacement of extensive areas of crowded buildings had to wait, but between 1934 and 1939 a bold slum clearance scheme was set in motion and 30 000 of the poorest type of houses were scheduled for demolition. The clearance of a large area east of the markets, extending along York Road into Burmantofts, was begun and displaced householders rehoused in Middleton and Gipton. The scheme culminated in the building of Quarry Hill flats, a revolutionary high density scheme, on the cleared area. There, in blocks ranging from 4 to 8 storeys high, 938 dwellings, together with a shopping parade, communal laundry and other amenities, were built on 23 acres and 82% of the area was left as open space. Other schemes were started in Marsh Lane and also in Holbeck. However, due to the changed conditions after the war, most of the Holbeck site was re-zoned for industrial purposes.
It was estimated that in 1948 that Leeds still possessed 90 000 houses, out of a total of 154 000, which were substandard and fit only for demolition; the 90 000 included 56 000 back-to-backs. The problem of replacing this slum property was aggravated by the housing shortage and to meet the overwhelming demand, major building developments took place on cleared land near the city centre and in the outer ring. Council estates were sited at Spen Hill, Moor Grange, Armley Heights, Tinshill, Brackenwood and Cross Gates; and large-scale private building began in Cookridge, Adel, Alwoodley Park and Moortown. Extensions were also made to some earlier council estates such as Belle Isle and Seacroft, and many blocks of flats were added to increase the low density of some of those estates on the outskirts.
The system of land tenure was based on medieval burgage. The lands of the town came under three manors: Kirkgate, Whitkirk and Duchy, and were leased as small plots, burgages, comprising a house, yard and garden (garth). These burgages ran the full length from Briggate to Lands Lane. As the population of the town grew, commercial and residential accommodation was provided in the gardens of these burgages with access facilitated often by tunnels from the main street beneath existing houses. By the mid-nineteenth century these burgages became notorious for overcrowding, cholera epidemics and a high birth rate. Sanitary reformers of the late nineteenth century gave national publicity to these crowded tenement yards, and conditions in the Boot and Shoe Yard (near Kirkgate market) were often cited. In 1795 this Yard contained 22 cottages, but in 1839 there were 34, sheltering 340 people. Pressure also built up behind the houses of the Upper Head Row.
This overcrowding spawned the development of better quality residential areas beginning with the fashionable streets of Park Row, South Parade and East Parade forming the elegant Park Square. However, these early fashionable areas were short lived as the pressure of land values brought about the invasion by other land uses, beginning with the Magistrates Court in 1811, and other areas towards the north were sought after for high-class housing. In many cases what were elegant neighbourhoods in the eighteenth century had, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, been either taken over by industry or degenerated into slums. It is, in fact, the rapid expansion of the nineteenth century which laid the foundations for the pattern of land use observed in Leeds today and it is this period which we turn to next.
for better living conditions by individuals such as Edward Baines, a journalist, and Robert Baker, a physician, went unheard. Cottage property with cellar dwellings was the most popular type of housing thrown up in this period, because it was cheap and because more houses per acre could be crammed together. Sanitation and general hygiene were often non-existent, shared privies being the norm; neither was there any proper drainage or piped water. There were terrible cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1848, and a bad attack of typhus in 1847. In 1834 34.9 per thousand were dying in Leeds, compared with a figure of 11.5 just a century earlier.
Despite the 1842 Leeds Improvement Act, inferior dwellings continued to be built. Cellar dwellings still existed until well into the twentieth century, a century which has tried valiantly to catch up with the removal of a back-log of slum property. Even so, back-to-back houses were still being built in the late 1930s.
Socio-Economic and Ethnic Segregation in Leeds
The development of public and private transport in Leeds since the turn of the century has caused a marked expansion of residential districts.
Professional classes and others who could afford the fares of public transport and/or own cars moved progressively outwards towards the suburbs, particularly those on the northern perimeter. This resulted in the concentration of the working classes in the inner suburbs and inner city areas. The rapid expansion of local authority housing, particularly in the eastern districts of Leeds (Seacroft and Cross Gates), caused a further concentration of semi-skilled and manual workers in these areas. The net effect of these movements has been the emergence of city wards where the effects of social deprivation are clearly
evident.
The worst effects of social deprivation are found in wards immediately to the south of Leeds city centre in the Hunslet/Holbeck districts; to the east of the centre in a broad sector running from Burmantofts, Harehills, Cross Gates and Seacroft; and westwards through Armley, Burley and Wortley. These areas are characterised by high crime rates (burglaries, drug addiction, car crime), high levels of unemployment, low standards of education, poor health and poor self-motivation. These are also areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities. Understanding why these areas experience so many problems clearly lies in their development as areas of working class housing and predominantly industrial areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the slow rate at which urban redevelopment schemes have progressed in replacing the virtually derelict housing stock.
http://www.brixworth.demon.co.uk/leeds/
4. Effects of Industrialisation
Most girls learned their culinary skills from their mothers, starting to help in the kitchen from a very early age. However the development of the factory system dislocated the process by which domestic skills were transmitted from one generation to another. After two or three generations the decline in the quality of working-class home-life had produced deterioration in the health of many families. 5. Leeds School of Cookery
As a response to this situation the wives of leading Leeds industrialists, particularly Mrs Catherine Buckton and Mrs Emily Kitson began a series of lectures on physiology and hygiene for working women in 1871.
In 1874 the Yorkshire Ladies' Council of Education using funds raised by subscription opened the Leeds School of Cookery in Cookridge Street. Mrs Titus Salt and Mrs Kitchen planned a detailed syllabus to ensure that the wives of working men would be able to serve the most nutritious foodstuffs in their homes. They also urged that all girls in the elementary schools should be taught how to cook. In 1875 Baroness Burdett-Coutts opened the Yorkshire Training School of Cookery, Leeds Branch, in permanent accommodation in Upper Albion Stre http://www.historytoherstory.org.uk/index.php?nextcount=2&targetid=16&themeid=2&PHPSESSID=368bb2568f59436904f416330cf733b7 Environmental Balance Today
Survival depends on individual creativity, which is a discovery process. As each individual seeks his own best interests in an interdependent world, he can never be sure of the outcome of his actions. His every action affects the economy and the environment around him, so he and everyone else must adjust to change. A free economy has altered our planet for survival through human action, not through human design. In a similar fashion, the human race came into existence through unpredictable mutations in individual beings, each of whom then had to adjust to survive. All of nature works that way.
The extraordinary and unprecedented improvement in our quality of life during the past 200 years can be attributed to individual freedom, technology, industry, and economic growth. Let us not sacrifice the system that has given us longer life and better health to unwarranted fear of the very processes of that system. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0993d.asp The size of towns in the 1770s is difficult to pin down. The following are approximate sizes:
Birmingham 30000
Manchester/Salford 27000
Leeds 17000
Nottingham 17000
Hull 20000
Sheffield 20000
Northampton 5000
Bolton 5000
Bradford 4000
Oldham was a village of about 500.
http://www.blackcountrysociety.co.uk/articles/socialconditions.htm
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Imagine you had been born in a poor area in the centre of Leeds in 1 842. It is possible that you would have died before you reached the age of nineteen. Even then you would have been lucky. Many of your brothers and sisters would have died before they were five years old. If you look at the table below you will see that few people lived to be as old as your grandparents today.
Type of People Leeds
(Town Area) Rutlandshire
(Country Area)
Professional persons, gentry and their families 44 52
Farmers, tradesmen and their families 27 41
Mechanics, labourers and their families 19 38
http://www.hummersknott.org.uk/stud_res/Info_Hum/Info_His/Dis/Dis_Info_.htm
So as well as imposing cuts the Conservative party is waging an ideological war against single mothers and in favour of the family. In this respect Capitalism has changed little since its birth. The industrial revolution saw the expounding of the nuclear family as the only acceptable model in society. Responsibilities for child care, housing, health and care of the elderly no longer lay with the community or with the lord of the manor. Instead it was expected that the smaller unit of the nuclear family would undertake all care for the workforce.
Economic circumstance forced women to act as nurses, childminders, cooks and cleaners. Similarly men were forced to sell their labour power to provide food and accommodation. The state …show more content…
reaped the rewards of a self catering, cheaply maintained workforce without having any role in the upkeep of that workforce. Single mothers have been singled out for attack because they do rely on the state for help. Indeed many conservatives have been quite explicit in saying this. Peter Lilley the Social Security Secretary complained that these women were 'marrying the state', that is depending on the State for financial assistance, rather than depending on a husband.
Victorian values
This isn't the first time the Conservatives have manipulated and lied about academic work to justifying implementing it's political agenda. Indeed though the Tory party are on a moral crusade to bring back Victorian values, they are particular as to which values they wish to keep, a point which was well made by Gwendolene Stuart2 in a pamphlet on Thatcher "[they have] picked from that period selectively the sentiments and values of the most oppressive class...deriding the real values of that period, the values of ordinary men and women who struggled to work collectively together to advance their quality of life. "
There is nothing new or original about the present campaign. As Dr. John Harris comments "At the beginning of the 20th century there was already a firmly established belief that the family was in decline and decay as a result of the growth of industrial society". The introduction of women into the workforce, the growth of unions and organisations representing youth removed them from the family environment, giving them greater independence.
The move to the cities brought with it poverty, overcrowding and crime. The changing structure of the family was blamed for this rather than the effects of industrialisation. The response of social planners was to re define women's roles within society. Arguments about women being naturally suited to domesticity and about their need for protection in a morally corrupt world were introduced. Concern over declining birth-rate raised "motherhood" to a new level in social recognition. The first Mothers Day was celebrated in 1907 with this in mind. The so called sexual liberation that followed World War I was followed by a moral backlash.
On one hand legislation was introduced which removed many restrictions on women working, on the other ideology was created to prevent women from taking full advantage of the new opportunities available to them. Again and again the family values have been used by capitalism as a bulwark against progression and to deflect from the misery caused by it.
http://struggle.ws/ws94/ws42_family.html
Leeds is one of the largest cities in England and the foremost industrial city of the West Yorkshire conurbation. Its population in 1981 stood at 696 714 and with Bradford forms a metropolitan area supporting more than 1 million people. Although a large proportion of its population are engaged in the tertiary sector Leeds is primarily an industrial city. Its rapid growth during the nineteenth century mirrors any town which was endowed with the raw materials of the Industrial Revolution: coal, iron ore and cheap labour. The particular strength of the West Yorkshire towns was the manufacture of cloth, an industry which began on a small scale high up in the Pennine valleys and then later moved down to the growing mills of Halifax, Bradford and Leeds where engineering and coal mining were fast becoming important.
There was a bitter meeting in 1833 called by such eminent Leeds doctors as Charles Thackrah and Robert Baker to campaign vigorously for a proper sewage system, which in 1850 was eventually channelled into the River Aire near Temple Newsam. In 1870, the Corporation were directed to forbid sewage to pass into the river until it had been properly purified. It was not until about the same time that the courses of the many open becks below Swinegate were paved in and covered to prevent their use as open drains and tipping places. Water supplies to the town were very incompetent and unhealthy until the reservoir was constructed on Woodhouse Moor. However, by 1869 this reservoir had become inadequate and additional water supplies were sought from the Washburn valley near Blubberhouses and the high dales.
Poor working conditions in many of the mills, bad housing accommodation and the intense pollution of the air all contributed to a very high death rate which rose considerably with the increase in population. New cemeteries sprang up which became the targets for a highly organised group of body-snatchers who became known locally as the "resurrectionists". The cases of body-snatching are well documented and include an account of a box deposited "at the Bull and Mouth Hotel by the Duke of Leeds coach from Manchester in November 1831, the box being addressed to 'The Revd Mr Geneste, Hull. To be left until called for. Glass. Keep this side up." When opened by a curious servant the box was found to contain two corpses.
Body-snatching was so prevalent in some areas of Leeds that the townsfolk organised societies ("Grave Clubs") to cater for the relatives of the deceased persons and to devise measures to beat the body-snatchers.
These measures include guarding newly interred bodies for five weeks and burying corpses twelve feet down with iron staves set into the earth at fixed intervals immediately above the coffin.
Leeds in the Twentieth Century: Urban Renewal
The nineteenth century saw the establishment of Leeds primarily as a commercial city, built haphazardly and at a speed to keep pace with the ever expanding industries. Social and living conditions deteriorated rapidly, being sacrificed to promote the new industrial growth that brought great affluence to a few and indescribable poverty to many. For a long time the pleas
Until the Town Planning Act of 1909 there was no official control over the siting of new houses. The result was that Leeds was left a legacy of many squalid housing areas interwoven with factories and warehouses. The back-to-backs were crowded some 80-90 per acre. The worst of these consisted only to two rooms, a living-cum-kitchen room and one bedroom; later types often had two rooms on each floor. Through ventilation was impossible. Before 1844 some 30 000 back-to-backs were built, 28 000 between 1844 and 1874 and another 12 000 by 1909. Within a radius of 21/2 miles from the centre of the city, there still remains extensive housing areas more than 100 years …show more content…
old.
The magnitude of the problem which faced the civic authorities after 1918 is apparent. The intensity of effort in clearing land has varied locally but much has been accomplished in re-housing population, in providing new sites for industry and in re-developing the central area in an effort to modernise its general character and to alleviate traffic congestion.
In the early inter-war period, there was an urgent need to provide for a general housing shortage, and council estates began to be developed in Meanwood, Middleton and elsewhere, just as in most large towns and cities. The replacement of extensive areas of crowded buildings had to wait, but between 1934 and 1939 a bold slum clearance scheme was set in motion and 30 000 of the poorest type of houses were scheduled for demolition. The clearance of a large area east of the markets, extending along York Road into Burmantofts, was begun and displaced householders rehoused in Middleton and Gipton. The scheme culminated in the building of Quarry Hill flats, a revolutionary high density scheme, on the cleared area. There, in blocks ranging from 4 to 8 storeys high, 938 dwellings, together with a shopping parade, communal laundry and other amenities, were built on 23 acres and 82% of the area was left as open space. Other schemes were started in Marsh Lane and also in Holbeck. However, due to the changed conditions after the war, most of the Holbeck site was re-zoned for industrial purposes.
It was estimated that in 1948 that Leeds still possessed 90 000 houses, out of a total of 154 000, which were substandard and fit only for demolition; the 90 000 included 56 000 back-to-backs. The problem of replacing this slum property was aggravated by the housing shortage and to meet the overwhelming demand, major building developments took place on cleared land near the city centre and in the outer ring. Council estates were sited at Spen Hill, Moor Grange, Armley Heights, Tinshill, Brackenwood and Cross Gates; and large-scale private building began in Cookridge, Adel, Alwoodley Park and Moortown. Extensions were also made to some earlier council estates such as Belle Isle and Seacroft, and many blocks of flats were added to increase the low density of some of those estates on the outskirts.
The system of land tenure was based on medieval burgage. The lands of the town came under three manors: Kirkgate, Whitkirk and Duchy, and were leased as small plots, burgages, comprising a house, yard and garden (garth). These burgages ran the full length from Briggate to Lands Lane. As the population of the town grew, commercial and residential accommodation was provided in the gardens of these burgages with access facilitated often by tunnels from the main street beneath existing houses. By the mid-nineteenth century these burgages became notorious for overcrowding, cholera epidemics and a high birth rate. Sanitary reformers of the late nineteenth century gave national publicity to these crowded tenement yards, and conditions in the Boot and Shoe Yard (near Kirkgate market) were often cited. In 1795 this Yard contained 22 cottages, but in 1839 there were 34, sheltering 340 people. Pressure also built up behind the houses of the Upper Head Row.
This overcrowding spawned the development of better quality residential areas beginning with the fashionable streets of Park Row, South Parade and East Parade forming the elegant Park Square. However, these early fashionable areas were short lived as the pressure of land values brought about the invasion by other land uses, beginning with the Magistrates Court in 1811, and other areas towards the north were sought after for high-class housing. In many cases what were elegant neighbourhoods in the eighteenth century had, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, been either taken over by industry or degenerated into slums. It is, in fact, the rapid expansion of the nineteenth century which laid the foundations for the pattern of land use observed in Leeds today and it is this period which we turn to next.
for better living conditions by individuals such as Edward Baines, a journalist, and Robert Baker, a physician, went unheard. Cottage property with cellar dwellings was the most popular type of housing thrown up in this period, because it was cheap and because more houses per acre could be crammed together. Sanitation and general hygiene were often non-existent, shared privies being the norm; neither was there any proper drainage or piped water. There were terrible cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1848, and a bad attack of typhus in 1847. In 1834 34.9 per thousand were dying in Leeds, compared with a figure of 11.5 just a century earlier.
Despite the 1842 Leeds Improvement Act, inferior dwellings continued to be built. Cellar dwellings still existed until well into the twentieth century, a century which has tried valiantly to catch up with the removal of a back-log of slum property. Even so, back-to-back houses were still being built in the late 1930s.
Socio-Economic and Ethnic Segregation in Leeds
The development of public and private transport in Leeds since the turn of the century has caused a marked expansion of residential districts.
Professional classes and others who could afford the fares of public transport and/or own cars moved progressively outwards towards the suburbs, particularly those on the northern perimeter. This resulted in the concentration of the working classes in the inner suburbs and inner city areas. The rapid expansion of local authority housing, particularly in the eastern districts of Leeds (Seacroft and Cross Gates), caused a further concentration of semi-skilled and manual workers in these areas. The net effect of these movements has been the emergence of city wards where the effects of social deprivation are clearly
evident.
The worst effects of social deprivation are found in wards immediately to the south of Leeds city centre in the Hunslet/Holbeck districts; to the east of the centre in a broad sector running from Burmantofts, Harehills, Cross Gates and Seacroft; and westwards through Armley, Burley and Wortley. These areas are characterised by high crime rates (burglaries, drug addiction, car crime), high levels of unemployment, low standards of education, poor health and poor self-motivation. These are also areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities. Understanding why these areas experience so many problems clearly lies in their development as areas of working class housing and predominantly industrial areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the slow rate at which urban redevelopment schemes have progressed in replacing the virtually derelict housing stock.
http://www.brixworth.demon.co.uk/leeds/
4. Effects of Industrialisation
Most girls learned their culinary skills from their mothers, starting to help in the kitchen from a very early age. However the development of the factory system dislocated the process by which domestic skills were transmitted from one generation to another. After two or three generations the decline in the quality of working-class home-life had produced deterioration in the health of many families. 5. Leeds School of Cookery
As a response to this situation the wives of leading Leeds industrialists, particularly Mrs Catherine Buckton and Mrs Emily Kitson began a series of lectures on physiology and hygiene for working women in 1871.
In 1874 the Yorkshire Ladies' Council of Education using funds raised by subscription opened the Leeds School of Cookery in Cookridge Street. Mrs Titus Salt and Mrs Kitchen planned a detailed syllabus to ensure that the wives of working men would be able to serve the most nutritious foodstuffs in their homes. They also urged that all girls in the elementary schools should be taught how to cook. In 1875 Baroness Burdett-Coutts opened the Yorkshire Training School of Cookery, Leeds Branch, in permanent accommodation in Upper Albion Stre http://www.historytoherstory.org.uk/index.php?nextcount=2&targetid=16&themeid=2&PHPSESSID=368bb2568f59436904f416330cf733b7 Environmental Balance Today
Survival depends on individual creativity, which is a discovery process. As each individual seeks his own best interests in an interdependent world, he can never be sure of the outcome of his actions. His every action affects the economy and the environment around him, so he and everyone else must adjust to change. A free economy has altered our planet for survival through human action, not through human design. In a similar fashion, the human race came into existence through unpredictable mutations in individual beings, each of whom then had to adjust to survive. All of nature works that way.
The extraordinary and unprecedented improvement in our quality of life during the past 200 years can be attributed to individual freedom, technology, industry, and economic growth. Let us not sacrifice the system that has given us longer life and better health to unwarranted fear of the very processes of that system. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0993d.asp The size of towns in the 1770s is difficult to pin down. The following are approximate sizes:
Birmingham 30000
Manchester/Salford 27000
Leeds 17000
Nottingham 17000
Hull 20000
Sheffield 20000
Northampton 5000
Bolton 5000
Bradford 4000
Oldham was a village of about 500.
http://www.blackcountrysociety.co.uk/articles/socialconditions.htm
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Imagine you had been born in a poor area in the centre of Leeds in 1 842. It is possible that you would have died before you reached the age of nineteen. Even then you would have been lucky. Many of your brothers and sisters would have died before they were five years old. If you look at the table below you will see that few people lived to be as old as your grandparents today.
Type of People Leeds
(Town Area) Rutlandshire
(Country Area)
Professional persons, gentry and their families 44 52
Farmers, tradesmen and their families 27 41
Mechanics, labourers and their families 19 38
http://www.hummersknott.org.uk/stud_res/Info_Hum/Info_His/Dis/Dis_Info_.htm