Overview
- Cambridge researcher Emily Chung concludes Engels overstated the extent of residential segregation in mid-19th century Manchester.
- More than 60% of buildings that housed the wealthiest occupational groups also contained unskilled laborers, indicating frequent co-residence.
- In Ancoats, long depicted as a working-class slum, roughly one in ten residents belonged to wealthier employed classes.
- Chung argues daily rhythms and institutions—work schedules, shopping, churchgoing, pubs and policing—produced much of the social separation.
- The analysis links individuals from the digitised 1851 census to specific addresses using ordnance maps and directories, after months of manual building-by-building mapping.