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
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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)
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Fig.4(a) 1820 - H Wild's Map
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Fig. 4(b) 1829 - Staveley and Wood's map, (published 1831)
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Houses in Pennyfoot Street, with characteristic upper storey workshop windows
But before this increase in building activity can be considered in detail, it is necessary to take account of another factor of great importance.
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Notes
1/ Royal Association, Nottingham and its Region, p.303
2/ S.D. Chapman, 'Working Class Housing in Nottingham During the Industrial Revolution', in Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 1963, p.70)
3/ 'Nottingham Lace', in Industrial Nottingham, April 1967, p27
4/ Ibid.
5/ Chapman, op.cit. p.76. His sources include J. Blackner, History of Nottingham, Wm Felkin (see below), and Dearden's Nottingham Directory, 1834
6/ pp.335ff.
7/ Ibid. - this would possibly be Heathcote in Somerset – and Felkin was Heathcote's agent in Nottingham (Dearden).
8/ op.cit. p.76, source: Nottingham Journal
9/ J Blackner, History of Nottingham, 1815, p.50
10/ White's Directory 1832, p.76
11/ op.cit. p.138 revised 1971 in Symposium: The History of Working Class Housing
Photo of Pennyfoot St: Picture Nottingham at
Maps:
H Wild's Map of Nottingham 1820: Nottingham City Library, Local Studies Dept.
Staveley and Wood's Map of Nottingham, surveyed 1828-9, published 1831: a high resolution download is available at
