Living ConditionsThe Industrial Revolition led to the rapid growth of British cities and large towns. In the first 30 years of the nineteenth century, cities such as Birmingham and Sheffield doubled in population. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow more than doubled in population during this time. Towns and cities grew without any planning or government supervision. Alot of the housing was built by the factory owners to rent out to their workers. These factory owners wanted to keep costs down, so the housing was often poorly constructed, with as many houses as possible built on one site.
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Houses were built with the cheapest possible materials and were often built back to back without any gardens. Basic amenities such as a water supply, were ignored. Streets were narrow, with poor drainage, and were filled with rubbish and raw sewage. There were no sewerage pipes to remove waste and no council rubbish collection as we know today. Diseases such as cholera and typhus were common and spread quickly through densely populated urban areas.