“Slums” of the Black Country: Quarry Lane, Bilston

If there’s been some research into Carribee Island in the past, and a little into the Mambles in Dudley, there’s almost nothing to be googled on another of the Birmingham Daily Post’s ‘low-lights’ of the Black Country, the next in a series of exposées on the shocking sanitary conditions of the Black Country. Quarry Lane in Bilston doesn’t feature by name on the first edition OS map, and you can’t ascertain the “slum”-like conditions as you can in Dudley or Carribee Island. Nevertheless, as you pull into Lidl on Bilston High Street, you’re treading in the blackened footsteps of generations of colliers, working men and women into one of the least healthy and most unloved parts of any Black Country town.

Of all the black country towns Bilston is the blackest – the most dismal, dilapidated and desolate
Birmingham Daily Post, 7th June 1866

To the Post‘s Special Reporter, Bilston epitomised the dirty, uncultured, unlovable Black Country. A sense of grime and smoke pervades the report, although he is swiftly drawn to the “narrow, noisome courts opening out into alleys, covered ways and little fetid squares.” Despite Bilston being one of the few sewered towns in the area, this picture of dirt, poverty and poor housing would be as familiar a story to observers of the urban environment in 1866 as it is to historians.

Bilston’s sewers were installed as a special measure after two devastating episodes of Asiatic Cholera. This gruesome disease was the most terrifying of all the terrifying epidemics of the nineteenth century. Its causes, means of transmission and suitable cures were unknown, and it affected rich and poor alike when it struck. In an era when many felt themselves to be “modern” now, its progress across continents could be tracked, but not halted, just as frighteningly as plague had once been. The outbreaks of cholera in Bilston in 1832 and 1849 killed over 700 people each time around, making it one of the worst affected towns in the country. The subsequent culverting of the filthy Bilston Brook and the installation of sewers no doubt helped, but didn’t entirely prevent cholera reoccuring.

Cholera is a water-borne bacterial disease, as the wonderful story of John Snow in Soho shows. When drinking water is drawn from affected sites, like communal pumps, brooks and rivers, it incubates within a couple of days, so water passed from the body and returning to such sources (we’re talking human waste here, which was far from separated from drinking water in the mid-nineteenth century) passes the infection on. Houses sharing water sources, those in close proximity to each other or to infected watercourses etc., are all fair game and in towns, that doesn’t mean just the houses of the poor.

Nevertheless, certain areas established reputations as hard-hit fever nests, and in Bilston the chief of these was Quarry Lane. Lying below the level of the High Street, filthy water was regularly washed down towards the brook, made worse by the close confinement of individuals in tightly-packed houses. It certainly had its share of disease in the 1832 epidemic, as this list of victims demonstrates (although the whole town was afflicted as well).

The whole place is a filthy dilapidation, pestilential as the Valley of Death, disgusting as the rotting corpse of a diseased drunkard.
Birmingham Daily Post, 7th June 1866

Quarry Lane, or Street as it became known, remained a tangled maze of cottages until after the Great War, when it came down to be replaced by “homes fit for heroes”. The Post reporter was shocked by the wan appearance of the tenants, who crammed in “seven or eight in a room, with a doorless privy full to the brim at the side of the house”. As in Dudley, our reporter falls on the opposite side of what we often think of as the prevailing Victorian point of view. Rather than to blame the poor for their own condition (an argument thrashed out for years to come), he mentions that the tenants could probably help by cleaning up, but why should they when they are expected to herd into unfit rooms just because they are poor? Why should they when none of them own their property and even the amenities are shared? In a foreshadowing of arguments over council estates, for instance, he suggests that “what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.”

I’m coming to like our correspondent. He (and I’m not stretching probabilities too far to suggest it was a he) is truly outraged not just at the state of things, but at those who’ve caused it – not the tenants, but the landlords and the municipal powers. He raises arguments many years ahead of the time in which they’d become widely accepted, and proposes solutions which became commonplace years later.

He also has quite the turn of phrase, so I’ll leave you with his description of Bilston:

Viewing the place from some one or the other of the cinder heaps that form its outskirts, the eye seeks in vain for the grateful relief of one single patch of herbage, one solitary green tree or hedge row… The irreverent opine that it must have been made on the last night of creation, out of incongruous odds and ends.
Birmingham Daily Post, 7th June 1866