Angel Meadow

Victorian Britain's Most Savage Slum

By: Dean Kirby

Narrated by: Nigel Gair

Step into the Victorian underworld of Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world's first cotton mill, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs.

Thieves and prostitutes keep company with rats in overcrowded lodging houses and deep cellars on the banks of a black river, the Irk. Gangs of "scuttlers" stalk the streets in pointed, brass-tripped clogs. Those who evade their clutches are hunted down by cholera and tuberculosis. Lawless drinking dens and a cold slab in the dead house provide the only relief from this filthy and frightening world.

Former Manchester Evening News journalist Dean Kirby takes listeners on a hair-raising journey through the alleyways, gin palaces, and underground vaults of the 19th-century Manchester slum considered so diabolical it was rechristened "hell upon earth" by Friedrich Engels in 1845. Enter Angel Meadow if you dare....

©2020 Dean Kirby (P)2020 Pen and Sword

Narrator can’t pronounce ‘Blackley’ ...

... otherwise a good read.
As a member of the Mancunian diaspora, I knew about Angel Meadow, but not the extent of the horror. Clearly well researched and based on historical sources.