In Nottingham
an increase in the availability of cotton and yarn, made possible by industrialisation, led to a boom in domestic framework knitting and lace production - and contributed to a building boom in the early nineteenth century.
Traditionally it has been considered that a characteristic trend of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was that of a transition from individual self employment as a means of of support to a pool of labour employed for wages. This was the time when inroads were being made into the old type of economy based on self supporting village and family units. New farming methods and enclosures turned villagers into wage earning labourers or dispossessed them completely. The mechanisation of cotton spinning brought the domestic outwork system of cotton spinning to an end, and with no means of providing their own food and with no income from cotton spinning, families moved to the large centres of cotton manufacture becoming employed as wage earning labour in factories.
Developments in Nottingham were a little more involved. Since the invention of the stocking frame locally around the turn of the seventeenth century the stocking frame industry had gravitated towards London. Early in the eighteenth century, however, a movement began away from London and back to the East Midlands as knitters became disenchanted with the irksome and restrictive regulations of the Chartered Company of Frame-Knitters. Distance from London, supplies of wool from Leicestershire and, later, of cotton after the setting up of factories by Arkwright and Hargreaves made the region very suitable for the industry. (1)
The presence of such an industry modified the effect of the industrial revolution upon the labouring classes of the area. Far from there being a depression of the domestic outwork system, there occurred two 'golden ages' in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the second and third of the nineteenth century.
Factory spinning made available large quantities of worsted yarns and cotton at cheap prices and this led to a rapid growth in the making-up side of the industry. Between 1782 and 1812 the number of stocking frames in Britain increased by 50%. (2) The first boom occurred in the production of hosiery, and this was produced by skilled operators working the hand-operated stocking frame – in their own homes.
As early as 1764 the stocking frame had been adapted to produce lace of an elementary design (3), and it is clear that, with the abundance of cotton and the existence of skilled frame-smiths and operators, there should have been some incentive to develop a frame which could produce the expensive lace net.
The breakthrough occurred in 1808 when John Heathcote perfected his bobbinet machine, which could produce a strong, stable, hexagonal net. (4). In the 'twenties and 'thirties, as the domestic hosiery industry went into a protracted decline, a major boom occurred in the domestic lace-making industry.
Lace-making was a much more skilled task than the operation of the original stocking frame: the machines were complicated and required constant attention to every thread and moving part. (Perhaps this explains why all the labour force employed on the stocking frames was not absorbed into the lace industry, and is the reason why a large number of stocking-frame knitters existed in the most miserable circumstances alongside the prosperous bobbin-net makers.) Wages were high: earnings for operators during the twenties could vary between 30s and £4 (5). The skilled smiths who built the machines earned £3 - £10 per week.
An indication of the number of people earning these fabulous wages – at a time when stocking knitters were making 12s a week – can be gained from the sheets of signatures attached to an agreement to restriction of hours in the bobbin-net trade, organised by William Felkin in 1829, and from his comments on the agreement in his book, History of the Machine Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacturers (1867). He says in his book that a seven-eighths majority was missed by 55 machines. (6). Owners of 3,307 machines signed out of a total of 3,842 machines existing to Felkin's knowledge. Not all of these were in Nottingham of course, but examination of the signature sheets, which include the owners' addresses, shows that a very large majority were Nottingham based. Further, a large number of the machines not included in the votes in favour belonged to one large out-of-town operator (7). As for frame builders, Chapman quotes a figure of 1500 in Nottingham. (8).
The years at the end of the eighteenth century, then, and the twenties of the nineteenth were periods when there existed artisan elites of highly paid workers: workers who worked within a domestic outwork system. It is therefore to be expected that these people should want, and should be able to afford, housing of a reasonably good standard in which to live and carry on their trades.
This factor needs to be considered in conjunction with another factor: that of population growth. In common with the rest of the country the population of Nottingham began on a rapid upward curve. Blackner says that in 1779 there were 3,556 families in Nottingham (9). An examination of later censuses shows an average of five persons per family. If there were five persons per family in 1779 (and it is unlikely that the figure would have been higher) Nottingham's population would have been around 17,500 persons. The census returns for 1801 give Nottingham's population as 28,861 – an increase of more than a third on the 1779 estimate. By 1821 it was 40,000 and by 1831, 50,727 (10). The population of Nottingham trebled between 1779 and 1831 – and had nearly doubled in the years 1801-31.
Such a large growth in numbers and the prosperity of the boom years would be expected to have contributed to a large increase in housing accommodation – and such an increase did occur. According to Chapman, by 1784 concentrations of working class housing had appeared to the North of the Old Market Square between Long Row and Back Side (now Parliament Street - see below, (Fig.1), and the ' … peripheral Narrow Marsh and Broad Marsh [areas] were only beginning to emerge as distinct working class districts …' (Fig.2, Fig.3) Even so, Dearden's enumeration of houses suggests that the area contained at least 17% of the houses in the town. (11)
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| Fig.1 H Wild's Map of the Town of Nottingham, 1820 |
The real boom in house building occurred in the 'twenties of the next century however. H Wild's map of the town in 1820 shows that a considerable amount of building had taken place since Deering's enumeration (Fig.2). The Leenside area and Red Lion Street area (Narrow Marsh) has been filled with a concentration of terraces and courts packing the area between Red Lion Street and the Nottingham Canal. However, open spaces remain in the area bounded by the triangle between Rick's Gardens in the North and St Mary's church and Pennyfoot Stile to the South. Comparison of this map with Staveley and Wood's map of 1828-9 shows the extent to which building went on during the decade, filling in most of the remaining open spaces (Fig.4).
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| Fig.2 Narrow Marsh 1820: H Wild's Map of the Town of Nottingham |
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| Fig.3 Narrow Marsh 1829:Staveley and Wood's Map of Nottingham (surveyed 1829, published 1831) |
 Fig.4(a) 1820 - H Wild's Map |
 Fig. 4(b) 1829 - Staveley and Wood's map, (published 1831) |
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