I came across this six-minute video on YouTube and wanted to share it with you people.

Just a few minutes walk from Manchester city centre, Angel Meadow in the 19th Century was anything but heavenly. Under the dark skies of the industrial north, this was one of the city’s worst slums. A London-based journalist, Angus Reach, on visiting it, described it thus:

‘The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality in Manchester is called, singularly enough, ‘Angel Meadow.’ It is full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants, tramps and, in the very worst sties of filth and darkness, by those unhappy wretches the ‘low Irish.’

The cellars that he described were situated beneath lodging houses, crammed and overcrowded with the most unfortunate people in the direst of circumstances.

Reach visited one such cellar:

‘The place was dark, except for the glare of a…