ther 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