If you take a few moments to study old 19th Century maps of a place you start to build up a picture of what it must have been like to have lived there.
There is only so much however that a one dimensional representation can convey.
What cannot be imagined is the combination of sights, sounds and smells that will have been part of a typical everyday life for the residents and work force.
A very graphic and disturbing account of my home city of Kingston Upon Hull as it was in 1847 really emphasises the squalor, deprivation and disease ridden environment of a good proportion, if not the majority of its inner city population.
The document was a report of the Sanitary Committee of the Medical Society of Hull specifically on the sanitary state of the town.
The streets, alleyways, courts and cul de sacs did have interesting and somewhat idyllic and characterful names.
These are, apart from a few examples, long lost to todays Hull A to Z map.
Bore's Entry, Dibbs Court, Caleys Entry, Paradise Place, Old Dark Side, Atlas Alley, Westwards Yard, Eastcheap, Botanic Terrace, Mechanics Lane, Tripps Square, Boteler Street, Popple Street, Marvel Street, Milligans Buildings, Dickens Entry and Black Swan Yard are just a few names.
On the old maps the areas around the River Hull corridor and the network of land drains and ditches is a solid mass of black to denote the density of development. There is little differentiation between houses and industry as they co-existed wall to wall, yard to yard.
The dwellings were rented as the notion of owner occupation was only within the means of the very wealthy and emerging middle class and so the slum landlords went for the smallest floor areas, back to back buildings, tiny windows and no fireplaces which meant very poor natural light and ventilation.
Overcrowding was the norm with reports of 3 married couples in one room, concentrations of 15, 16 and 21 persons both adult, child and infants across 3 rooms. The highest density seen in Hull was 46 persons in less than a handful of rooms.
Even worse was that the essential amenities, however crude, had to be shared and it was not unusual for 1 privy lavatory albeit just a bucket of soil or open trench, to serve ten users.
Very few of the housing areas had, what the Committee Report referred to as "covered channels of communication with the main drain" meaning that all foul waste, bodily and other, just ran under natural flow into the nearest drains or stagnated.
There were badly constructed outfalls which impeded the removal of the sewage to the usual watercourses such as the Damson Drain. The occupants of St Quintins Place, William Street and Hedgerow Drain were said to be "strangers to the purity of atmosphere".
The description of stinking ditches and smoking dung hills was as damning as it was evocative of the poor living conditions.
The term "Muck Garth" was used for the location at the end of each terrace or block of tenements and houses where human excrement and detritus was deposited. They were no more than open ditches and the combination of decomposing effluent, animal carcasses and vegetation made for a cocktail of stifling and toxic emissions.
There was little open space for a breeze to dissipate this stench and in the summer months in particular the air quality was oppressive. The liquid refuse could only be depleted by evaporation under the sun.
Add to the human lifestyle factor the presence of domestic animals in the houses and courtyards and you got the cumulative effect of pig waste and from kept rabbits. The word Middenstead, long since disappeared from the vocabulary, referred to a dunghill. These could be piled up against the walls of the houses and with pungent and harmful liquids and residues seeping into cellars, wells and standing in fetid pools on the unmade or badly paved paths and roads.
The population were captive in these areas of Hull because it was where they found their means of employment.
There was no regulation or control of where and how industry could establish itself or in its processes and waste products. Factories on the very doorstep of the squalid housing produced noxious and hazardous gases and odours. A common stench was from Sulphate of Ammonia which was used in many lines of manufacture. Dense smoke persisted in the districts and was absorbed into the lungs and wash-line hung clothes of the residents.
The industry of Hull included fish drying, bone boiling for soap and glue products, slaughter houses, glass and rope works, whale blubber processing, foundry's and ship building.
The work force eked out a pitiful living in these operations and suffered for it in frequent debilitating illness and mortality rates for adults and children were disproportionately high in all of the Inner City Wards of Hull even those where improvements in housing and drainage had been implemented.
The impact of fever, stomach complaints, English Cholera, dysentery and respiratory illness was disastrous on families and the wider population.
The 1847 Report will have shocked and terrified its authors in equal amounts but was the catalyst for public expenditure by the Corporation to bring in clean water, swiftly and hygienically remove waste, upgrade living conditions and slowly improve the existence and health of the people of Hull.
Many of the aforementioned streets were not actually demolished and cleared until the second half of the 20th Century.
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