NINO STAFFA industria! working class have together added to and modified the ruling class system which resulted from the industria! revolution. Consequently, in modem-day British society, a great variety of public and private institutions contro! and dictate how we live, where we live, in what type of accommodation we live, and the amount of energy and resources that we must expend in arder to survive. In the Victorian cities the polarisation between the capitalist/bourgeois class and the proletariat found physical expression in the stark contrast between the luxurious accomodation occupied by the capitalist/bourgeois minority and the unsanitary, miserable and inhuman life-style of the urban proletariat. This contrast was so great that it led Marx and Engels to mistakenly conclude that Britain would be amongst the first nations in which the « inevitable » revolution would take place. Engels' description of Manchester in his « The Condition of the Working Class in England » provides a convincing account of how the miserable life-style of the proletariat would almost certainly have led them towards the revolution. « The workers have been caged in dwellings which are so wretched that no one else will live in them ... Industry alone has been responsible for all this and yet this same industry could not flourish except by degrading and exploiting the workers ... But have either the landowners or the authorities done anything to improve matters when new buildings were erected? Far from adopting any such policy those responsible for recent developments have built houses in every conceivable nook and cranny ... No hovel is so wretched but it will find a worker to rent it because he is too poor to pay for better accomodation » (2). The bourgeoisie was also aware of the obvious danger to themselves that the « masses » represented. As far back as 1750 London already housed 10% of the total population of England and whilst the quality of the housing stock had certainly improved by the year 1900 a housing problem of comparable and possbly even more frightening proportions still existed. Sections of the bourgeoisie accordingly had already mobilised themselves in severa! ways. Reformers such as Owen, Salt and others built «model» towns in which the wotking classes could work, live decently and improve their morals (2) F. ENGELS, Manchester in 1844, reprinted in « Cities in Modern Britain » edited by C. Lambert and D. Weir (Fontana 1975). 8
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==