In 1835 the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited Manchester and described what he saw in a single breathless passage. Smoke blotted out the sun. Palaces of industry stood beside hovels. Filthy streams ran past streets with no pavements. And yet, he wrote, from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world; here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish. Manchester had become what one historian later called a shock city, a place where the future seemed to be arriving all at once, for better and worse.

Growing too fast

Manchester grew from about 70,000 people in 1801 to more than 300,000 by 1851. Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool grew almost as quickly. The census of 1851 showed that for the first time more people in Britain lived in towns than in the countryside, making it the first large country in history with an urban majority.

Building could not keep up. Speculative builders threw up rows of back-to-back houses, sharing rear walls so that rooms had windows on one side only. Families crowded into cellars. Dozens of households might share a single privy. Rivers carried industrial waste and sewage together. Disease spread fast in these conditions, and the health reformers who fought it are a story in their own right; here the point is that the industrial city was a new kind of human environment that no one yet knew how to govern.

In 1845 a young German, Friedrich Engels, whose family owned a share of a Manchester cotton firm, published The Condition of the Working Class in England, a vivid survey of these streets. He noticed something subtle: the main roads into the city center were lined with shops, so that middle-class commuters could travel daily from their suburbs to their offices without ever seeing the slums behind. The new city was divided not only by wealth but by sight.

Railway time

Before railways, every town kept its own local time by the sun. Bristol's clocks ran about ten minutes behind London's. That did not matter when a journey took days, but it caused chaos for train timetables. In 1840 the Great Western Railway began using London time across its whole network, and in 1847 the Railway Clearing House recommended that all companies adopt Greenwich Mean Time. Many towns soon followed, some with clocks showing two minute hands, one local and one railway. Parliament made Greenwich time the legal standard for Great Britain in 1880. Industry had changed the very hour of the day.

New ways to connect

Industrial Britain also built new forms of public life:

• The penny post (1840): Rowland Hill's reform let anyone send a letter anywhere in the country for one penny, prepaid with a stamp, the Penny Black. The number of letters sent soared.
• Mechanics' institutes: beginning in the 1820s, these offered lectures, libraries and classes in science and drawing to working men.
• Cheap newspapers: as taxes on newspapers were cut and finally abolished in the 1850s and 1860s, a mass reading public grew.
• Organized leisure: in 1841 a Baptist preacher named Thomas Cook chartered a train to take about five hundred people from Leicester to a temperance meeting in Loughborough, the start of the modern package tour. Later in the century, factory teams and church clubs became professional football clubs.

The Great Exhibition

In 1851 Britain invited the world to London for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. It was housed in the Crystal Palace, a vast building of iron and glass designed by the gardener Joseph Paxton and assembled from prefabricated parts in months. About six million visits were recorded between May and October. Cheap railway excursions let factory workers from the north see it, alongside Queen Victoria, who went dozens of times. Exhibits ranged from steam hammers and locomotives to the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Profits helped found the museums of South Kensington. The exhibition celebrated industry, empire and free trade, but it also showed something new: ordinary people as visitors and consumers of a shared national culture.

Worked example: walking through Manchester in 1844

Imagine you are a visitor following Engels on a walk from the city's grand Exchange out to the district of Ancoats. What should you notice?

• The layout: how shopfronts on the main roads hide the courts and alleys behind them.
• The housing: back-to-backs and cellar dwellings built for profit with no building regulations.
• The workplaces: mills beside canals, with homes packed close so workers could reach them on foot.
• The signs of new life: a mechanics' institute, a chapel, a cheap newspaper, a railway station.

Both views are true at once. The industrial city was a place of misery and a place where new freedoms, ideas and organizations were being born.