Manchester's pivotal role in the industrial revolution has been written about extensively -- what can we possibly learn from the baths and wash-houses of the time that we don't know already? In this article, I propose that this one small aspect of life in Manchester in the 1840s gives a crucial insight into people's lives and experiences, and the beginning of Manchester's perception of itself as a modern city. People needed to wash and bathe and clean their clothes, and it was much harder to do so before public baths were established. Even after the establishment of the Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company, it was a luxury that few could afford. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I have been researching Manchester's public baths since before the Hulme History Project, and became fascinated with Leaf Street Baths and Wash-houses. This gigantic municipal baths was round the corner from my house, and now there is almost no trace of either its existence or impact on the community -- the site was a park, and is currently being redeveloped into flats.

In its heyday it looked like this:

(Picture courtesy Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives)

The last time I got a good look at the site before it was all boarded up, it looked like this:

The beautiful second class males swimming pool cracked and full of dirty water:

I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole imagining Hulme at the time, what it looked and smelt like and how people lived. But why should anyone else care?

Well. There are a number of reasons that make public baths and wash-houses interesting as yardsticks of social progress. I'll talk about my main four here: habitus, civil engineering, finance, and municipal government.

Habitus. What's considered "normal" living conditions? Habitus explores how different kinds of people lived in Manchester, why they lived that way, and what they thought about it. Bath-houses transformed what people considered acceptable, expedited through Victorian Christian morals about "cleanliness being close to godliness".

Civil engineering. Public baths are only a part of the massive civil engineering project that is an industrial city. But they are good way to understand how civil engineering as a discipline emerged, and how it was promoted by town planners, engineers, business men, and politicians. Civil engineering in Manchester at the time was about railways, roads and trade; the baths were one of the first things built explicitly for the poor.

Finance. In order for public baths to be built and run, funds need to be raised -- almost entirely through public subscription. Modern crowd-funding like Kickstarter utterly pales in comparison to 19th century public philanthropy. The methods this was accomplished with give a crucial insight into how some aspects of the country were run in the early Victorian period.

Municipal government. Manchester's early baths and wash-houses were built by private enterprise, and the municipal government lagged behind its regional neighbours by not getting involved until 1876. Looking at how the municipal government changed lets us understand why the Corporation may have been so reluctant to take on public bathing, and what they were focusing their energies on instead: roads, railways, sewage, and waterworks.

Habitus

Habitus is a concept commonly used in sociology when understanding what's considered "normal," especially the kind of normal we take for granted.

Habitus explores how we understand the world: that we wear specific kinds of clothes; accept some things as food items and not others; talk in a specific way in certain situations; build and decorate our homes in a certain way. I don't mean that some people prefer green wallpaper over purple; I mean that we accept that houses look a certain way, that they have conveniences in them and are laid out in a way that we are used to. Habitus explores the things that "go without saying," the things that only when they are absent strike us as missing.

Manchester in the middle of the 19th century was a study in contrasts: there was excruciating poverty next to splendid factories and mills. Much of the middle class of merchants and wealthy people had moved out of the city centre toward leafy Moss Side and other surrounding suburbs to escape the filth and the mess. I am concerned here with the living conditions of the poor because they were the ones the baths and wash-houses were intended for and the ones who used them. Many middle class houses would have access to water and thus cleaning and washing facilities that poor households lacked.

Here's what houses for the poor in Manchester looked like at the time. This is a common illustration of the outside of a cellar dwelling from 1838. Interestingly, there were few streets in the slums of the poor that would have been paved at this time.

Here's the interior. Note the apparent high ceiling and abundance of furniture in this picture.

(images courtesy Manchester Libraries, Information, and Archives)

To be honest, people were not living exactly like this: it was much, much worse. There were often up to a dozen people crammed into a room like the one above, sleeping on rags, straw, each other, anything they could find. Often, there would be no furniture at all and the floor would be damp. There would be children and adults with hardly any clothes because they had been pawned for food all on top of each other in a cellar room with no windows. In some parts of Manchester, especially Little Ireland or Gibraltar, the floor would be flooded with river water almost all the time.

Housing is one of those things that "go without saying"; we need shelter, sustenance, and warmth. But how we think about housing and living conditions has changed somewhat over the last 170 years. To us today, housing is a right, and we expect a certain level of comfort. This was only the case in 1840s Manchester if you were of a social class that did not live hand-to-mouth. Most of the new population of industrial Manchester lived in dire poverty, especially the hand loom weavers who were rapidly put out of business by the advancements of the power looms.

Manchester's population had exploded over the previous twenty years. Jerry-built slum housing and property speculation were rife, and created a physical situation for the residents that is almost unimaginable to us now. To think not only of the physical conditions, but also the habits, expectations, and culture that go with it is habitus in a nutshell. We know for example, what the people living and working in the slums around the cotton mills ate and drank, what they wore, what they did in the extremely limited free time they had.

Depending on their social status, they would be eating gruel (though probably without milk, just mixed with water) or potatoes, or bread if there was bread to be had. If they were unemployed it was likely that they would not eat at all and depend entirely on their neighbours or the outdoor relief the parish was providing which usually contained of soup and a little bread. Poor people in Manchester in the 1840s would be drinking water from the few public taps, or from the polluted rivers and brooks. If they had the money for it, they would drink ale. In their free time, if they were in work, they might go to church, or spend time with friends and family, usually in beer houses. Social reformers were very much concerned with the intemperance of the people.

Bathing and washing are completely normal to us in the global North now, and we take our daily showers and washing machines for granted. The fact that these are relatively new inventions and conveniences is not something many people think about, and it's hard to imagine living without them. The effect when you do is somewhat alienating, and fascinating: looking through a stained glass window and everything being familiar but distorted, slightly off, and in strange colours.

Knowing about Manchester's public baths gives an insight into the terrible cost of the wealth this city created: the fact that they needed to be built in the first place and the manifold motives of those who built them create a picture of life in early Victorian Manchester. Cholera had spread through the city in 1832, with outbreaks of typhus and smallpox to follow. Most of the habitations of the working classes could be considered uninhabitable, let alone insanitary, and disease was rife. Life expectancy in Manchester for a working class person in 1842 was 16 years. It was not only that disease and malnutrition claimed many lives, accidents in the mills and factories happened all the time and children as young as four would work on the factory floor. At the time, this was just how things were and many poor people seemingly expected nothing else. But even at the time, reports were being written about the conditions of the labouring population and how they could be relieved of some of their suffering.

Public baths and wash-houses were only a small part in this nation-wide project and there are many arguments about how to interpret the motives of the philanthropists who set up the early baths and wash-houses in Manchester. Some argue that it was out of self-interest: to ensure that the cogs of the machines keep running, they need to be operated by clean, sober, and obedient workers. Some argue that it was out of Christian Humanitarianism, a need to help the suffering fellow man. Still others argue that death and disease were bad for business and stood in the way of man's economic efforts in a laissez faire economy. I suspect that it was a mixture of all three but for now that is beside the point.

Much of what was said at the time of the opening of Manchester's first public baths and wash-house focussed on the health and the moral argument: being clean on the outside also meant that you were cleaner on the inside. Cleanliness is next to godliness, indeed.

So what needed to happen for baths to be built?

Engineering

Civil engineering as we understand it today was in its infancy at this time. While the Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in London in 1818, until the start of the Industrial Revolution the massive projects we associate the profession with today were not possible or necessary.

In Manchester, as all over the North and the rest of the country, civil engineers were concerned with railways, bridge and canal building as well as the construction, paving, and widening of roads. From the 1840s onwards, the profession grew rapidly. So did the expertise of the engineers, which is why by the 1890s Manchester had its very own ship canal and was the third largest sea port in the country.

Nevertheless, public baths and water supply were not really on the agenda until after the 1848 Public Health Act, which was intended to ensure that towns and populous districts improved living conditions when it came to sanitation, drainage and water supply.

The water for baths and other sanitation projects needed to come from somewhere, and it took a while for Manchester to be connected to the grid, if you like. Early baths, such as the one on Miller Street (opened 1846) and the one on Sycamore Street (opened 1850) used the water they got from local springs to fill up cisterns. This was not very reliable and the water pressure was temperamental, to say the least. Factories were built everywhere and steam power made mechanisation more and more advanced. Very similar to today, many engineering projects relied on engineers with imagination and gumption to try things out.

And, of course, information sharing. No-one knew how to build a bath house for a large number of people. Sure, some wealthier families had bathing facilities in their houses, and the Manchester Infirmary had a few slipper baths but not on the scale that is needed to clean an industrial population. Liverpool opened the first public baths in the country (in 1832), but it were the London experimental establishments that drew up the plans on how to build a public baths and wash-house from scratch.

We have reports on how to build baths and wash-houses to be read by engineers who had no idea how to do this. There are plans for a variety of budgets. The one below is for a model establishment to the cost of £4000 and taken from 1852's Report on Baths and Wash-Houses for the Labouring Classes in London. There are more plans for other price categories and sizes. These model baths and wash-houses included plunge pools, the smaller cousin of the swimming pools we are used to today. For that much water to be pumped and stored safely into a pool required a lot of civil engineering works.

I am interested in this because obviously one needs clean water to bathe and wash clothes, but also because the reports give us an insight into how people thought about the problem of bathing and washing. There is, of course, also the question of water supply to Manchester. This was achieved by connecting up the town to the Longdendale Reservoir in 1860, after ten years of engineering works and improvements. The stretch looked like this in 1881:

Manchester still gets its water from this connection today.

Finance

The next question is, of course, who paid for all of this massive engineering? These days, most swimming pools are built and maintained by the local authority. 170 years ago that was not the case. So how did the early baths come about? The easy answer is that committees were established to open them. People who got together, raised funds, found a suitable venue, converted it, and opened the baths. 19th century crowd funding.

It was a bit more complicated than that though; most baths used a subscription model, somewhere between a share and a donation, as far as I can figure out. All of the early baths and wash-houses I have found in Manchester (including the Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company) were run on this model. A committee would be set up and go about convincing people to donate money to the cause. It was definitively not only baths that this model was applied to: the first public parks in Manchester and Salford were financed the same way. You end up with a subscriber list similar to this one:

The amounts given range from £25 to 5s. I'm not sure exactly what you got in return for the subscription. Normally, subscriptions are used by newspapers and magazines and you would obviously get the newspaper or magazine for your money but here? Because the funds are being raised for a public bath it would not make sense to restrict entrance to the subscribers either. Perhaps "subscription" is just another word for shares and in this case the "investors" would obviously receive a share of the profit in line with their investments. Perhaps. This model persisted until 1876 when Manchester Corporation took over due to massive losses, including the price of coal exploding -- a story for another time.

Speaking of Manchester Corporation...

Municipal Government

What does the history of public baths in Manchester tell us about the development and administration of the municipal corporation? Short answer: quite a lot, actually.

The first five public baths in Manchester were in private hands and the first 30 years of public bathing, washing, and swimming were administered either by private committees or by a company. Why was this? It had a lot to do with the administration of a growing industrial city which was going through significant administrative changes in those 30 years. It had to do with how the municipality was financed, and what it was spending money on. It had even more to do with what the Corporation was for, and what its duties and responsibilities were.

We do not even question today that the City Council is responsible for a large part of our conveniences, from road management, to bin collections, to the provision of schools, playgrounds, parks. All of these responsibilities had to be bestowed to the Corporation or had to be take on by them. And all those decisions are political and were fought over tooth and nail in the local committees, council chambers and meeting rooms.

From 1838 (when Manchester was first incorporated) to 1851 (when it received city status) to 1876 (when the Corporation took over the provision of baths and wash-houses), these duties and responsibilities were negotiated and renegotiated until we get to a situation of municipal governance and finance we are more familiar with.

Initially, Manchester Corporation focussed on improving sanitation by removing nuisances (such a beautiful word to obscure overflown privies and ash heaps), draining and paving streets, and improving the water supply to the city. Much of this was achieved through local legislation which sometimes lacked teeth and often did not compel landlords to build more privies or improve their houses. There was also vicious obstruction from the Manchester "Shopocrats" to contend with who resented administrative meddling with the market's abilities to fix everything, including social problems, through private enterprise.

Taking on responsibilities like roads and encroaching little by little into mill owners' territory when it came to working conditions and hours, Manchester Corporation eventually was in a position to put the Baths and Wash-Houses Act 1876 into practice and build its own municipal baths.

Of course, there was national and local legislation and its implementation to take into account as well and that is a whole different story.

Conclusion

So, as can be seen, investigating early baths and wash-houses opens a window into the past that is multifaceted and complex and definitively worth doing!

Baths and Wash-houses do not stand in isolation and studying them lets us explore other aspects of 19th century industrial life, such as living conditions, engineering advances, financing strategies, and municipal governance. There are, of course, other aspects that these fascinating institutions let us examine but these are the ones I am interested in at the moment.

A week's gone by and I'm wondering why I've spent it transcribing an enormous legal document from 1855. What does a huge certificate from 1855 have to do with the history of Hulme?

This is Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company's Royal Charter:

It's a beautiful piece of calligraphy: handwritten and illustrated, with a Royal Seal attached. It needs a special box for storage and this one is one of about 980 Royal Charters which have ever been issued; there are only about 750 of these still in existence, according to Wikipedia. This one became void in about 1875 when the Company was incorporated by the Manchester Corporation -- but I am getting ahead of myself.

Back to where this all started: my interest in Leaf Street Baths in Hulme.

This lovely building was the third public bath and wash house house built by Thomas Worthington for the Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company in 1860. It had a male and a female section: both with a number of slipper baths, a laundry, and a pool, much like Victoria Baths. It was demolished in in the 1976 slum clearances.

I will write more about this little gem in a future blog post, so stay tuned!

I wanted to find out more about Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company, so I checked if there was anything in the archive and yes, there was -- a Royal Charter, whatever that was. I went and had a look. By that point, I'd read on the internet about the 1846 Baths and Wash Houses Act that allowed local councils to use public money to build bath and wash houses. I knew that the Company operated for about 20 years, and that they built nine baths and wash houses in Manchester and Salford. Oh, and that it was run by philanthropists because Manchester Corporation (now Manchester City Council) did not do very much to improve the public sanitation situation at that point in time.

So what did I find? I found a beautiful and at that time almost completely incomprehensible document. The Charter is so big that you can't lean over it very easily, and trying to read it standing up or perching awkwardly on a chair was only fun for so long. I gleaned some things from the first few paragraphs which interested me enough to decide to transcribe the thing for easier access.

I also learnt that The Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company was set up by Benjamin Nicholls, Mayor of Manchester at the time as well as a cotton spinner and mill owner, William Neild, a calico printer and owner of Mayfield Print Works, and Joseph Heron, the Town Clerk, as well as a large number of other people who had shares in the Company.

The exact date of the Charter can be seen here: 21st June 1855.

Between them, they managed to sell 7,000 shares at £5 each to set up this Company which is an impressive feat given that £5 would amount to between £517.30 and £12,500 depending on how you calculate it. The latter result may sound excessive, but we are measuring historic investment into a project which according to Measuring Worth can either be measured in Historic Opportunity Cost or Economic Cost. Check out their glossary of terms for exact explanations of everything related to understanding historic values of money. Even if we take the £517.30 amount, it was still very impressive to find 7,000 people to buy shares.

I did not really realise what kind of document I was looking at when I first saw it. I knew that I would not be able to spend all day with it in the search room, so I took quite a lot of pictures. While I was in the search room I tried to transcribe a passage, still thinking I would capture some flavour and quickly found how difficult this was going to be. I left out about five lines at the top because I could not make them out bent over the scroll and then had to go back every other word to check what it was. At home, my screen looked like this a lot:

I spent a lot of time of the first few days trying to guess words or trying to match up the letters with other times that letter occurred on the page. After about two days I realised that the lower case letter "c" is written in here very similarly to the lower care letter "r" and that made so much more sense when "arrorsing" (as an obvious example) became "according". Another obvious trap is the similarity of the lower case letters "s" and "d" which gave me all sorts of trouble until I figured it out and "rade" finally became "case".

The other thing I only realised way too late into the process: this is a legal document. I cannot stress this enough because I had no idea when I started reading just how much legalese there was in this. "Hereditament" (a property which can be inherited), "body politic", and "mossnages" (a type of terraced house, I think) are all words and phrases I had never really heard before and while some of these are beautiful words, some of these gave me such a headache that I ended up learning way more about land law and covenants than I ever expected. Also, there is no punctuation in the whole thing. It is very tightly spaced as you can see here:

I kept losing my place and because the sentences are so strange, I would not notice until a few days later when I looked over it again. I missed a whole paragraph one time and somehow the sentence still kind of made sense.

I have learnt about the social situation in Manchester which allowed the Company to come into existence, who set it up and under which parameters it was operating. This Company is a great example of the "five per cent philanthropy:" philanthropic intention with a capitalist return, something that was apparently very common during this time and frequently used for the erection of public buildings, like hospitals, orphanages, workhouses, or schools. There are quite a few still around in Manchester today.

Here are some choice quotes. I have added punctuation and some words to make it easier to read.

That during the last few years work has been done and more attempts for the purpose of improving the condition of the working classes by orienteering their attention to those personal and domestic habits which have so large an influence on their societal position [has been done and] that whilst the movement had been unquestionably founded on the best intentions, it has too frequently had a pamperizing tendency and been calculated to exercise a baneful influence upon an industrious and naturally self reliant people.

And we do hereby further direct that the said Deed of Settlement shall be prepared to the satisfaction of the President for the time being of the Board of Trade, and that a Copy of such Deed of Settlement shall within the period of twelve calendar months from the date of this our Royal Charter be lodged with the said Board of Trade, and that a Certificate that such Deed had been so prepared as that such Copy had been so lodged as aforesaid endorsed on this our Royal Charter under the hand of one of the Secretaries of the said Board of Trade or other person authorized in that behalf by the President of the Board of Trade shall be conclusive evidence that the said Deed of Settlement has been duly prepared and that a copy thereof has been lodged in accordance with our directions in that behalf above contained.

There is even a handwritten note overleaf to declare that this Deed of Settlement indeed had been lodged with he Board of Trade.

The whole text can be found here.

The Company was incorporated into the Manchester Corporation in 1875 or thereabouts. We don't know a lot about this acquisition; I am going to hazard a guess and say that the Company was probably having trouble breaking even given that their clientèle were predominantly on low or no incomes with very little money to spare. The continuing building of infrastructure, connecting more and more houses to the water grid as well as the fluctuations in the coal prices probably also had an effect, as did changes in legislation around the provision of public health (like the 1875 Public Health Act). To this day, swimming pools are hugely expensive to run and we don't even have a slipper bath before plunging in.

I wonder what happened to this idea of the public (well, the wealthy public) owning public services: for something that seemed so common at the time, there is now barely a trace of it when it comes to ownership of our public services. Perhaps they would now require too much capital, perhaps the state provides these services more efficiently, but it is strange that this kind of public philanthropy seems all but gone.

Quite a lot to learn from a single document!

There has been an explosion in the use of maps to visualise data, prompted by the rise of the "data scientist", available open data, and a wealth of new tech tools. Authors like Tufte a Few have created ground rules and beautiful examples of what's possible with data visualisation, from the minimalist to the maximalist. With access to big data sets and a basic grounding in statistics, it's possible to make all kinds of quantitative data visualisations using tools from R (a DSL for data manipulation) to Tableux (freemium data visualisation software).

What though of qualitative data visualisation? How can we visualise cultural changes, geographical changes, or the movement of communities? There is no shortage of inspiration for mapping say, population density, crime or employment rate, or anything that makes a neat quantifiable percentage; even if the underlying statistic is in itself flawed, it still makes a pretty map. Visualising good qualitative research in interesting, interactive ways still feels under-explored.

Why does my map look poorly?

Overwhelmingly, qualitative data is represented using what I call a "pincushion" map. Arbitrary pointers referring to qualitative phenomena are plotted on a map, with no order or story told. At its most extreme this kind of data looks like the aftermath of a paintball game: an unnavigable mess of markers vying for attention that don't tell you what they do till you click on them, a classic example of the "mystery meat" anti-pattern which supposedly went out of fashion a decade ago.

Here's some examples. The first from the British Library's Sound Archive, which makes it look like the UK has measles.

Clicking one of the zits gives us some context...

What does this have to do with the map? Seemingly nothing. I can't even see where this came from as it's overlaid the map. I'll give them a break for the poor metadata as this is seemingly user contributed data: but a map here seems a particularly poor choice for showing these sounds. Have data, must project?

This is a particular poor example of mapped data. However, I think the pattern is flawed even when done well. Here's one from Trafford Intelligence Lab.

At least here we have some clue what we're going to see before we click on it. The cog on the left navigation allows us to toggle and untoggle layers. Again though: I struggle to imagine any uses for this map. If I want to know what arts spaces there are, I'm going to do a search for that in Google Maps. If I want to find out where there's a lack of say, services for over 50s, the map's far too busy to make a meaningful reading, and even then it doesn't tell me if there are actually people over 50 living there. It would help a little if the markers would "dodge" each other and not overlap: however it would then lose it's accuracy.

As a design pattern I think it falls flat: I'd much rather read this information in a simple directory with a filter for region. It simultaneously has too much and too little data: not enough to make a reading of anything, but so much that the output is cluttered. Perhaps this would be better as a series of visualisations using the same technology: as is though the smorgasbord approach is overwhelming.

With both of these maps I'm really struggling to imagine what I'd actually use them for. In neither case do I think this is the best representation of the data.

Examples of mapping qualitative data that work

It's been a struggle to find good examples. The few I like tend to do one or two things beautifully, with a strong focus.

This version of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map by Geoff Christou, which shows an interpretation of the historical migration of his own family, is somewhat qualitative. The Dymaxion map is my favourite projection: showing the globe as an unfolded icosahedron centred around the North pole shows the world as a connected landmass in a way nothing else manages.

The lines show the migration of his family, as far back as he can chase it. It's a simple visualisation that's extremely effective at demonstrating how we are all people of the world: I could see myself using something like this as a tool to argue for free migration, for example.

Another example I really like is Mike Bostock's visualisation for this travelogue piece. This is an extremely minimalist example, but lets the copy tell the story, augmented by a sparkline-style map which shows where you are both in the piece, and where the story is geographically: a really clever combination of two bits of information. Click through and have a scroll.

Finally, I have a real soft spot for the "map as propaganda".

While this is essentially a cartoon plotted onto a map, it shows a lot about national stereotypes at the time (and perhaps today). The graphics are directly laid on top: showing national tensions and perceived tendencies using illustration in a way that wouldn't be nearly as engaging as say, a series of lines showing where conflicts arise.

Are maps themselves qualitative data?

Of course, almost all data is both qualitative and quantitative: as Ann Oakley outlines, attempting to split the two or make claims for the superiority of one or the other is futile and stifles progress. Even the most quantitative data requires interpretation to make sense and not just be a jumble of numbers; even the most qualitative data requires justification as to its importance in some way. Well conducted research uses the data most appropriate: whether a table of values or an open-ended interview. We need the right tools for the right job.

Maps themselves are perhaps one of the most used qualitative data visualisations in everyday use. Yes, they're made up of millions of data points measured quantitatively: but they give no intrinsic reading about these points mean without a key or local knowledge, a perfect vindication of Oakley's paper. Data is meaningless without context and vice-versa. To any reader, they're clearly an abstraction, a way of finding our way around. There is no intended start or end point. They allow a lot of approximation, but accurate measurement requires an extra tool. We know they go out of date, and make mental notes of the parts of them that are obsolete. A map helps you find your way around: pinpoint accuracy is not a priority.

Quantitative data though -- statistics on anything from immigration to tax to population growth -- perhaps an air of objectivity that maps do not. They're reported verbatim by politicians and press, and rarely questioned or seen as an interpretation in the way that a map is. We rarely question where numbers have come from one they've been plotted.

It's somewhat fitting then that the easiest and most immediately obvious visualisations to make when given a new tool are to map quantitative data on top of it. Quantitative data tends to be dry, flavourless: we know, for example, that 20% unemployment is bad and 5% is better: but represented on a table this looks like so much accounting data. Projected onto a map, things change: we can see the boundaries of unemployment, we can look at where we live and place ourselves in this world. The map gives us the qualitative flavour to interpret our Excel spreadsheet.

The downside is that the accuracy can be low: any deprivation index for example can have quite a low geographical resolution, so while an area might have several different pockets of varying deprivation, these will be averaged out in a way that can lose crucial context. However, the perfectly mapped boundaries of a digital map can make it look more accurate and authoritative than it is: similar to how representing a 0 as 0.00000 implies accuracy which might not be there, a map area with perfect boundaries implies a misleading level of geographical accuracy.

Another problem is with showing changes over time. While there is a large move towards open data through sites like data.gov, these only tend to apply to relatively recent data. The way things are measured and what's important changes a lot, so while comparing the last 5-10 years is manageable, comparing the last 100 is significantly harder and it will take a long time for our datasets to catch up. This means any time-series visualisation will have a fairly recent cutoff point, and the medium will overwhelmingly start affecting the message.

So how can we use maps effectively as designers and researchers?

I think like most modern technologies, now we have them we need to take a step back. It's easy to project X onto Y: now we need to apply a level of research, design and UX that is normal for any other more mature technology.

Some ideas.

Be opinionated

The main problem with pincushions is that they give no route through the data. Clearly the visualisation has been made for a reason: so make the reason clear. Why have you built the map and what can I take from it? Being opinionated can feel like losing objectivity: but everything is subjective and political, even the Gall-Peters projection is a political statement. Be upfront about the meaning of the visualisation and what you hope to gain from it from the outset. It's more honest and will create maps which answer one or two specific questions, rather than answering no questions at all.

Give the user a path

If the visualisation doesn't have an obvious route through it, give it one. Create a timeline, a tour, or reduce the data points to where everything is visible. As Bret Victor argues, a website should give just as much information as a printed map before interacting with it. Clicking should add more context that wouldn't fit on paper, not be a crux for poor design at the outset.

Concentrate more on content

As a coder I know this one well: often the tech challenge is so large that once it's in place, it feels finished. This is not the case. The technology should be invisible: we should be just as keen to tell a story with our visualisation as we would with a press release or pamphlet. What is the story you're trying to tell?

Next time...

I'm working on a project that's tried to learn from all these and create an engaging history map fro Hulme, where I live. It's still in development, but in the next article I'm going to aim to explain what we did and if it worked or not. Let me know if you see any good examples of maps that transcend my critiques!

The Cassowary Project is a grassroots research project investigating themes of place, identity, and history, based mostly in Manchester, UK.

The project is run by Sylvia Kölling and Kim Foale. We started this project blog to document our own research, and release some of our thought processes and findings. We are currently working on two projects, one based in Hulme, Manchester and one that's an attempt to create a history of social organising from the 1960s to today.

The name comes from a flightless bird home to the forests of New Guinea (and surrounding islands) as well as Northern Australia. What's interesting to us about this beautiful bird is that for a long time, its mating behaviour has been misunderstood by ornithologists. In true human-centric fashion, it was assumed that the females would be "conquered" by the males and that mating would be steered by the males as well. That, and a non-recognition of the relationships males have with each other. In fact, some of the early ornithologists completely misgendered the birds.

What does this have to do with place, identity and history? Well, Cassowaries highlight some of the problems we have when talking about both identity, politics, and the past. We can only go on what we know, what we can observe around us, and things we can find about the past. Reading about the past requires understanding the past: terms, concepts, ideas, and identities change in meaning and influence as the world changes, and this reading of history is often ignored in contemporary analyses. The humble Cassowary doesn't care what we call it or think of it: and yet humans have created a web of lore and identity around them that says more about us than them.

We hope that you will come on some of the journey with us to explore the world around us and understand some of how we got here.

This post is a placeholder for now, we will explain more as we go along!

Pictures from Wikipedia.

It is strange to think that the poplar trees in Hulme Park were planted as part of an effort to make the area around the Hulme Crescents greener and more hospitable. In some older aerial photographs you can see them clearly: maybe a little smaller than they are now, but still as sturdy. Everything around them has changed so much and yet here they are. The above photo looked [like this in 1997]((https://flic.kr/p/fCk7Ta), just after the Crescents were ripped down to build where I live now.

I moved to Manchester the second and final time in 2006, and ended up in Hulme two years later. As a foreigner I took to exploring the area where I lived and, as an unreformed map geek, soon discovered that I landed in an area that went through tremendous changes in the last century, some of which are still apparent today. A rather winding road took me to talking to people about their lives in bygone Hulme; I started exploring the archive at Central Library (their map collection is a thing of beauty), and generally nosing around an area and a topic that people already feel very passionate about. Late to the party, but hey.

I recently found the beautiful City of Manchester Plan 1945 in which the city planners lay out what they want their city to be like after the end of WWII and the Manchester Blitz. There is a digital copy of the whole thing here. Do go and have a look.

Hulme was one of the areas where redevelopment was planned. At the time, Hulme was part of Moss Side, as were Moss Side East & West, Medlock, St George's, Hullard Park, part of Wilbraham, and some of Whalley Range. The population in 1945 of this area was 102,588 people which the planners wanted to reduce to 37,896, a significant reduction both of people and living spaces. They considered pre-war Hulme/Moss Side as a "slum" area of rotting and congested unfit Victorian housing and wanted to build something modern, green and spacious.

Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock [...] are among the oldest localities in the city and were built almost wholly before 1870. Developed to a characteristic mid-nineteenth-century pattern in narrow congested streets of small houses with internally and externally, with only the smallest of backyards in place of gardens, these areas constitute a typical and unhealthy example of Victorian working-class housing. (City of Manchester Plan, 1945)

It looked like this:

This is Violet Street which is now somewhere underneath the Mancunian Way, alongside Chester Road. The picture is from 1914 but it would look like this until the late 1960s when this are was finally cleared. The 1945 Plan never did come into fruition and it would have looked very different then.

Looking at this now, it does appear that this was more of a statement of intent rather that a concrete plan: a vision for the future and a wish for things to be better from now on.

In 1967, the city planners made some more realistic plans for the redevelopment of the city centre, including a never-realised Central Station which would serve both the North and the South, combining Victoria and Piccadilly stations.

Of course, then, in 1972, Manchester got its own version of the concrete jungle: the Hulme Crescents. As an example of modernist or even brutalist architecture, they are textbook. They even won design awards (inexplicably to us now?) and rehoused a lot of people in modern, functional council accommodation from the Victorian housing we saw above. They were designed to provide accommodation for over 13,000 people in 3,284 deck-access flats.

In 1979 they looked like this:

The intention was, as far as I understand it, to provide modern social housing to as many people as possible using bold new methods: but in the execution there were significant flaws in both the building construction and design. On a Manchester Modernist Society walk through Hulme recently, I was told by people on the walk that the actual building of some of the Crescents was so shoddy that the concrete slabs did not line up and that you could stick your hand through the gaps of some exterior walls. The heating was centrally controlled (it was 'modern' underfloor heating) so that it was either freezing or too hot. Disabled access was not something that was on the radar then, and lifts were apparently very poorly maintained. As a result, anyone with a buggy eventually wound up lugging this up the stairs of what amounted to tower block. The idea that pedestrians were elevated above the roads (see picture of the walkways) also backfired because these walkways were unsafe for children (one child died after falling off a balcony) and created bottlenecks.

Two years after opening, the Crescents were declared unfit for families and ten years after that, in 1984, they were abandoned by the Council with no further rent collected for the next nine or ten years. Yes that's right, the council didn't collect rent for ten years. Unsurprisingly while crime rose, so did a vibrant subculture which artist Michael Mayhew compared to Christiania in Copenhagen or East Berlin squats in the 1980s in a recent lecture.

Whether you think the Cresecents were some kind of anarchist utopia, or a plague-ridden deathtrap is what I find most fascinating about the Crescents. There are so many different opinions about them, both by people who lived there and people who did not. This vibrant subculture of punk, squatting, drugs and music attracted young people from all over the North West and offered refuge to some who simply could not turn to anywhere else. Dogs of Heaven happened. There was a nightclub called "The Kitchen" which comprised of three flats whose walls had been knocked through and which, at times, was more popular than then Haçienda. There was an Art House Cinema. There was a transport workers' club. The Council continued to provide electricity even after they stopped collecting rent.

As someone who grew up in a tower block in East Germany, I find learning about how people lived in the Crescents really interesting. I know what it's like to be in such close proximity with people who you may not even like very much, let alone have to get along with because you share a poorly insulated or soundproofed wall. But people made do and you can read some of their stories here on exhulme's guestbook. The descriptions of the Crescents just before they were demolished remind me of the deserted suburbs in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" where the "kibble" is slowly but surely taking over everything and making the buildings wholly uninhabitable. "Kibble" is Philip K Dick's neologism to describe the mess and baggage (physical and emotional, but that's for another time) that accumulates in buildings, especially when no one lives there any more. It multiplies until there is no space left untouched by it. The kibble and nuclear winter, but hey, it's about associations, right?

From what I can gather from talking to people, there was an extremely strong sense of place and identity in the Crescents which may have had to do with the fact that the estate was effectively cut off from the rest of the city by the Mancunian Way, Princess Parkway, and Stretford Road being partially pedestrianised. There were no vehicular thoroughfares through Hulme and the Crescents themselves seemed islands onto themselves. So it is not surprising that the people who chose to live there, especially after 1984, did so with a sense of ownership and belonging. Naturally, once the Council decreed that the Crescents had to come down and they had received even international notoriety, these people wanted their voices heard about redevelopment.

Most people who lived in the Crescents agree that they needed to come down; the trouble started when it came to what would happen to the area next. There is still a lot of debate about the consultation process, the Council's role in the redevelopment of the area, how the residents' views were (not?) taken into consideration and what could have been. I would go so far as to say that there is still a lot of bad blood around. There is a lot of information around about this period, for example urbed's planning documents, this blog post, and Manchester City Council's own report and many more.

I would say though that everyone with an interest in the past, or urban development, is richly served with Hulme history. Be it densely populated and busy Victorian roads when Hulme needed its own town hall and had one of the busiest shopping streets in the city (with trolley cars!) in the shape of Stretford Road; or be it during the estate-like isolation of the Crescents which brought about their own creativity; or be it today where Hulme is relatively transitory and full of families, students, and yuppies. Hulme has been home to many of us. I, for one, still really like it here. I miss the Bingo Jesus sign, though...

Initial photograph and edit by Kim Foale. Article contains lots of images nicked from the internet: we've tried to put attribution on everything but let us know if we missed something!