Q: What first drew you to study Engels’s observations of Manchester, and how did discovering your family’s connection to Angel Meadow influence your perspective on his work?
A: I was drawn to study Engels and Angel Meadow by researching my family history, which began as a teenager with my dad back in the 1980s, at a time when genealogy wasn’t as popular or as easy as it is now.
We spent a lot of time visiting Manchester Central Library, sitting side by side on these wooden chairs they used to have, searching for our Irish-Mancunian ancestors on these big old microfilm readers that you rarely see these days.
“Scrolling through the census pages one-by-one felt to me like walking through the streets of the Victorian city. We would go down one street, turn left and down the next one until we eventually, after a lot of hard work, found my three-times-great-grandfather William Kirby, who had come to Manchester from County Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland.”
I can still remember holding a photocopy of that census page in my hand and looking at the word Ireland over and over on the bus home. It was the first time I realised I had a history that stretched beyond Manchester.
Over the decades, we’ve carried on our ancestry search, including making visits to Dublin and Mayo.
In around 2010, I had an idea to start looking at old maps and the poor rate books to see if I could find out more about where William was living in Manchester.
I discovered that, after he arrived, he was living underground with his family in a cellar off Hanover Street in Shudehill, in what would have been terrible conditions. He then moved to Charter Street, which I found was in the heart of a notorious slum district called Angel Meadow.
It turned out that William’s house was demolished in slum clearances after the Second World War and that the remains of it were still locked away under what was until recently a car park.
When the old Victorian houses were knocked down in Manchester, the rubble was mostly back-filled into the cellar holes and concrete poured over the top, leaving the remains of the houses sealed down there like Egyptian tombs waiting to be rediscovered.
I used to park my car in this car park because it was cheap and close to the Arndale Centre. I even got into the habit of trying to park over where I knew the house was – to claim the land back for a short while.
But one night I was going with my wife to a Noel Gallagher gig at Manchester Arena and we found the car park locked up. There was a sign saying Archaeologists at Work. To be honest I lost a bit of interest in the gig and just wanted to spend the night peering through the fence in the darkness to try to see what the archaeologists had been doing.
The next morning, I dashed back and spoke to the archaeologists. They were digging up the houses there to find out more about the living conditions in Victorian Manchester – the world’s first industrial city.
When they had finished the dig, they invited me and my dad to come back and we were able to climb down a metal ladder into the cellar holes and, almost like time travellers, touch the walls and stand on the flagstones.
It was an incredible moment, which really spurred me into finding out everything I could about the history of the area, including investigating what Friedrich Engels had written about it.
I went on to write a bestselling book about Angel Meadow and in 2023 I completed a PhD thesis re-evaluating what Engels had said about Angel Meadow in The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Today, I lead walking tours around the area for people including Mancunians whose ancestors also lived in Angel Meadow.
Q: How accurate do you think Engels’s portrayal of Angel Meadow was, based on your research into both your family history and the broader historical record?
A: Engels offers a really powerful account of Angel Meadow and Manchester as a whole that to a large extent matches what other writers were saying about it at the time.
He was one of a handful of outsiders who were brave enough to step foot in the courtyards and alleyways where he said people were living in “Hell upon Earth”.
His descriptions of that small area of the city are so important not just because they are first-hand but because The Condition went on to have a huge impact on the development of the modern world.
“One thing Engels got right was his discovery that builders were laying bricks end to end to create walls that were just half-a-brick thick. This was evidenced by archaeologists, although they felt this was part of the vernacular style in Manchester rather than an attempt to scrimp on materials in workers’ homes as Engels suggested.”
It is also clear that Engels was highly selective in the streets and courts he chose to visit to emphasise the lowest quality housing and that he missed or misinterpreted the reality of living conditions in an area that was dominated by what had once been larger Georgian housing designed for artisan weavers, sometimes with porticoed doorways.
It’s not that the conditions were better but the causes of them were much more nuanced than he described.
Engels was also wrong about the Irish, who he appears to have felt were the cause of their own poor living conditions. My research has shown that they were more likely to be found at the top of Angel Meadow in the larger housing rather than the worst courts Engels found near the River Irk.
Q: Have you found any interesting discrepancies between Engels’s written accounts and other historical sources from the period?
A: Being a journalist, I admire the work of a Victorian investigative reporter named Angus Bethune Reach who visited Angel Meadow just a couple of years after Engels.
He was a better writer than Engels and he did something that Engels appears not to have done – he went inside the houses and spoke to the people living in them.
In Reach’s writing, we get to follow him down the cellar steps into the “subterranean holes, utterly without light” where Irish-Mancunians were living as he discovers “beds huddled in every corner”.
His descriptions are ever more visceral than Engels’s because you start to witness something of the human tragedy that was happening to families behind closed doors.
At the lowest level of one network of cellars he finds an old man asleep in a coffin-shaped hole that extends out of the wall into the bare earth.
“I turned away,” Reach writes, “and was glad when I found myself breathing such comparatively fresh air as can be found in Angel Meadow, Manchester.”
Q: As both a journalist and a descendant of Angel Meadow residents, how do you balance your professional objectivity with your personal connection to this history?
A: As an academic historian and journalist, you are taught to carefully assess the evidence and to analyse it in a dispassionate and objective way, which clearly makes sense if you are writing a news story or researching an article for an academic journal.
In that light, my personal connection to Angel Meadow can be seen as bringing just another set of, albeit quite personal, sources and experiences to the table to be studied and analysed.
But my interest in history is really to find out what it was like for ordinary people who went through it – something that a US social historian named Stephan Thernstrom described back in 1964 as “history from the bottom up”.
What was it like, for example, for our Mancunians forebears living in one of those courtyards visited by Engels?
To try to properly understand that you have to leave your objectivity at the front door and tell their story with a huge amount of personal empathy. That’s something that Reach did and is something I always try to do in my books and on my walking tours.
“Walking tours are obviously different environments from the world of academia but I think that helping people to understand and get to grips with the street-level history of Manchester is in many ways much more important. And being in the place where your ancestors lived really helps you connect with them in a way you cannot learn about in books.”
Q: Could you tell us about a specific discovery about your ancestors that changed your understanding of life in Victorian Manchester?
A: I have two objects at home that are precious in their own way, and which tell a story about my ancestors’ lives in Angel Meadow, in a way that books by Engels and other contemporary writers never could.
One of these is our family Bible which was found in a relative’s attic and given to my dad some years ago. It’s a huge book with a decaying brown leather cover with the date 1866 handwritten inside in a shaky hand.
But whereas the Bibles of wealthier families perhaps have lists of names and birthdays inside, our Bible only has the word “dead” written over and over – a single word that tells you so much about the conditions in which they were living.
“The other object I have is a brick from William’s fireplace that was given to me by the archaeologists during the dig. When they pulled it out of the wall and turned it over, it was still covered in a thick layer of soot from the fire that would have kept William and his children warm on a cold winter’s day.”
The fireplace was very important to Irish families and when people left Ireland, they would give a piece of the still-burning peat to a neighbour to “keep the home fire burning” until they returned. So, in some ways, by keeping that brick I am keeping up the family tradition.
A few years ago, we had the kitchen done and the builders found the brick in the garage and threw it in the skip, but I climbed in and managed to rescue it. I’ve carried it across town on the bus to do a talk about it at the university.
Q: How do you think Engels would view Manchester today? Are there parallels between the social issues he observed and challenges we face in modern cities?
A: In 2024 when the story broke that a £2.5m penthouse flat in Manchester was to be named The Engels, I was asked what I thought about it by the BBC.
I said at the time that Engels was a man of huge contradictions – the frock-coated communist who enjoyed lobster salad and fox hunting as well as wandering through the slums of Victorian Manchester. So, he may have enjoyed the lifestyle of modern high-rise living while writing about the deprivation still prevalent in modern cities.
But he would not have been surprised to discover that cities around the world, not just Manchester, are still trying to find ways of coping with the challenges of urbanisation that he identified 180 years ago.
Q: How has your research into Engels’s work and Angel Meadow’s history influenced your understanding of Manchester’s development as a city?
A: History is important because it helps to define who you are and what you will do in the future – and that applies to cities as much as it does individual people.
It’s only when you start reading about the history of Manchester that you realise the huge role it has played in the development of the modern world.
It was the world’s first modern city and is often described as the place where the modern world began. It was also the first to have to deal with the acute social problems that Engels wrote about.
Growing up in the 1980s, we weren’t taught about any of that in school and I only hope children are being taught about it today.
It’s also important to know what families in Angel Meadow and other parts of the city went through. Many of them came from other places to live and work in Manchester, and faced a fight for survival while building the city we call home.
“As Mancunians, we need to keep talking about and be proud of our story – and take ownership too of it so that it isn’t left just to outsiders like Engels to tell it. We need to pass that story on to future generations too.”
Thank you to Dean for taking the time to answer our questions.
Dr Dean Kirby will be giving his talk – Engles in Manchester: Past Meets Present – at Friends’ Meeting House, Manchester, on Wednesday 21 May.
