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Instant access to inspirational lesson plans, schemes of work, assessment, interactive activities, resource packs, PowerPoints, teaching ideas at Twinkl!

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The architectural profession is largely a Victorian creation. In the 18th century it was common for architects to act as developers and surveyors too, but by the 1820s such roles were being devolved, leaving architects free to experiment with a profusion of styles.

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The architectural profession is largely a Victorian creation. In the 18th century it was common for architects to act as developers and surveyors too, but by the 1820s such roles were being devolved, leaving architects free to experiment with a profusion of styles.

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Intro

In the new industrial cities, the poor were housed in unhygenic and overcrowded slums. Miles of terraced cottages were built cheaply, with few facilities. Water came from a stand pipe in the neighbourhood, which flowed only a few hours in a week. There might be a toilet in a yard serving a group of families. When it overflowed, landlords often turned a blind eye, and the yard filled with sewage. Disease was common. Rows of 'back‐to-back' houses were built, with with light and air coming only through the front windows and door. No wonder that there were frequent fights among neighbours. This photograph shows the tenements of Glasgow in 1868, some of the most squalid slums in Britain.

Shelfmark: 6057.i.7.

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Find out more about the City slums Here

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Share In the new industrial cities, the poor were housed in unhygenic and overcrowded slums. Miles of terraced cottages were built cheaply, with few facilities. Water came from a stand pipe in the neighbourhood, which flowed only a few hours in a week. There might be a toilet in a yard serving a group of families.

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Wash houses 'steamies' were first opened in Glasgow in 1876

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Wash houses 'steamies' were first opened in Glasgow in 1876

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A living time capsule of Victorian Glasgow: The Tenement House

145 Buccleuch Street in Glasgow looks like any other block of tenements, but a trip inside will warp you back a century.

Enter the home of Mrs and Miss Toward - a mother and daughter who shared a home and a love for finer things that middle-class living could offer.

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A living time capsule of Victorian Glasgow: The Tenement House

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A living time capsule of Victorian Glasgow: The Tenement House145 Buccleuch Street in Glasgow looks like any other block of tenements, but a trip inside will warp you back a century.Enter the home of Mrs and Miss Toward - a mother and daughter who shared a home and a love for finer things that middle-class living could offer.

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During the Victorian era many Scots moved from the countryside to towns and cities. Immigration brought many people from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.

The population of Scotland's cities grew quickly as people arrived looking for work in factories and new industries. Everyone needed somewhere to live.

Tenements were built in cities to house lots of people in a small area. People made rich by new industries could afford to live in new townhouses, terraces or villas in the suburbs, away from the crowded inner cities.

Many of these buildings are still standing - you might even live in one today!

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What home life was like for rich and poor in Victorian society

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Blackfriars Bridge (1896) - R.W. Paul | BFI

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hey can be expensive, noisy and annoying, yet today's pampered pets have never been more cossetted and adored. Now new research reveals that it is the Victorians who were responsible for changing attitudes towards domestic animals.

Historians are combing the historical archives for evidence of when familial, emotional attachments to pets became commonplace and socially acceptable in Britain. The work is part of a five-year project that will culminate in a book and an exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in east London.

"We thought we would find that there has been an increase in people's emotional investment in pets in recent times, but what we've actually found is that people in the early 19th century were also very emotionally invested in their animals. They just expressed that in a different way," said Jane Hamlett, professor of modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has been leading the study for the past three years along with Professor Julie-Marie Strange at the University of Durham. "They had a different cultural sense of what a pet should be."

Until the 19th century, keeping pets was frowned upon and would crop up in satirical prints criticising the elite and aristocracy. "Quite often, you get pictures of 18th-century ladies dressed in ostentatious, over-the-top costumes with a lapdog," Hamlett said.

Pet owners, particularly when they were female, were seen as frivolous consumers who spent their money in absurd ways: animals were generally expected to earn their keep or be eaten by their owners.

"What seems to happen in the late 18th century and early 19th century is that pet-keeping becomes culturally more acceptable," Hamlett said. Writers and artists in the 19th century assigned a new "moral value" to pets, and consequently saw keeping them as beneficial for children.

Pet ownership began to be seen as character building, particularly for boys, because it taught children to be caring and responsible. Pets were also thought to enhance the domesticity of a home for a potentially valuable social purpose.

"The Victorians were very interested in the home and domestic life, and bringing up children was seen as very important for creating the right kind of morality in society," Hamlett said. "And one of the things that children could do to develop morality was to keep a pet - so you get quite a lot of advice manuals from the mid-19th century onwards suggesting that children should keep pets to improve themselves and their moral qualities."

Queen Victoria with her pet dog, named Sharp, at Balmoral in 1867. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

Even poor working-class families would capture wild birds like blackbirds, linnets and thrushes to keep as pets, often hanging the cages outside their windows and feeding them scraps, while aspirational middle-class families would buy more expensive pets, such as pedigree dogs, to signal their higher wealth and status.

"Pedigree dog breeding really takes off in the Victorian period. Dogs were very popular for Victorians, partly because they embody cultural values Victorians were really keen on: they're seen as steadfast, loyal, plucky and courageous," Hamlett added.

Wild parrots and monkeys imported from the colonies were popular choices for the wealthiest families, as the Victorians did not perceive anything cruel or immoral about keeping such pets.

Rabbits were popular too - boys could be expected to build hutches from scratch and look after the animals single-handed - but cats were viewed less positively. "Many people kept cats during the Victorian period and felt affectionate towards them, but they were still very much seen as utility animals, which kept mice and vermin down," Hamlett said.

As a result, cats weren't as well-fed as other pets and developed a reputation for being sly and calculating. This wasn't helped by their traditional association with witches. "It's only in the 20th century that cats start to be seen wholeheartedly as pets."

As pets became integrated into family life, contemporary publications and handwritten diaries show just how emotional the Victorians could be about their pets, triggering a new form of consumerism well-known to animal owners today. Self-help books on how to care for specific pets, particularly difficult exotic ones, such as monkeys, began to be published from the 1850s onwards. Health remedies such as "cough pills" for dogs and cats were sold widely and pet food began to be manufactured. Pet cemeteries were even created in London.

Surprisingly, the love Victorians felt for their pets and the role of pets in family life has been largely ignored by historians in the past. "No historian has written about that topic and no research had been done specifically on the history of pets in people's homes," said Hamlett. Some of the historical documents her team has looked at have never even been studied before. "But actually, people wrote about their pets quite a lot."

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How the Victorians turned mere beasts into man's best friends

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hey can be expensive, noisy and annoying, yet today's pampered pets have never been more cossetted and adored. Now new research reveals that it is the Victorians who were responsible for changing attitudes towards domestic animals. Historians are combing the historical archives for evidence of when familial, emotional attachments to pets became commonplace and socially acceptable in Britain.

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The Victorian period witnessed a huge surge in the number of exotic beasts in the towns and cities of England - as creatures were imported from the far reaches of the British Empire. But Victorians' enthusiasms for wild and dangerous animals had some very unpleasant consequences, says Prof John Simons.

If you were born in rural England in 1837 and never travelled more than a few miles from your home, you would have been surprisingly likely to see a hippopotamus before you died.

The reign of Queen Victoria saw a surge in the construction of all manner of places where exotic animals could be viewed.

And as well as formal, educational settings - private and public zoos, natural history museums - the period brought animals for entertainment to the masses. Travelling menageries would tour towns and cities, featuring performers and their animals.

Or, if you were sufficiently interested (and wealthy), you could simply buy your own tiger or boa constrictor in a shop.

Most exotic pet shops were in London - by 1895 there were 118 wild animal dealers in London alone - but there were also shops in Liverpool, Bath and Bristol.

People could walk into a shop and purchase anything, from an elephant to a bear to a kangaroo.

And the greater politics of the British Empire drove this burgeoning industry into the rest of Europe.

Before the Suez Canal was built, for example, almost every ship coming from Asia or Africa touched land first in England. After it was built, Germany steadily overtook the UK in "the scramble for elephants".

One incident in particular became something of a legend in Victorian England. In 1857, a tiger escaped in the East End of London and prowled down St George's Street, picking up a small boy named John Wade as it went.

It was not even the first time that a tiger had been loose in that very street - one had escaped from a travelling menagerie some years earlier.

This tiger was being delivered to a shop owned by Charles Jamrach who was, at that time, the pre-eminent wild animal dealer in the world. He had a network of agents all over the globe.

Jamrach stocked all manner of exotic beasts - elephants, lions, tigers, bears, tapirs, armadillos - pretty much anything. And he claimed to be able to get his clients any animal they wanted through his network of agents.

On at least one occasion he sourced a rhinoceros.

Contemporary accounts of his premises also speak of thousands of parrots and exotic birds packed so tightly together in cages that they couldn't move.

But this particular tiger, it seems, was not content to be put on display.

As it was being delivered, it put its feet against one side of the all too flimsy wooden crate in which it was being transported, and its back feet against another side. Pushing with all its strength, it managed to burst out and make off down a busy London street.

Not willing to lose his quarry, Jamrach set off after the tiger.

In an extraordinarily incongruous street scene, he grabbed the tiger by the throat.

His account of the event, entitled My Struggle with a Tiger was published in the Boy's Own Paper - an illustrated magazine, which carried a mixture of factual and fictional stories - in February 1879.

In it he describes what happened next:

"My men had been seized with the same panic as the bystanders, but now I discovered one lurking round a corner, so I shouted to him to come with a crowbar - he fetched one and hit the tiger three tremendous blows over the eyes.

"It was only now he released the boy. His jaws opened and his tongue protruded about seven inches. I thought the brute was dead or dying, and let go of him, but no sooner had I done so than he jumped up again.

"In the same moment I seized the crowbar myself and gave him, with all the strength I had left, a blow over the head. He seemed to be quite cowed, and turning tail, went back towards the stables, which fortunately were open.

"I drove him into the yard and, and closed the doors at once. Looking round for my tiger, I found that he had sneaked into a large empty den that stood open at the bottom of the yard.

"Two of my men who had jumped onto an elephant's box, now descended and pushed down the iron-barred siding of the door; and so my tiger was safe again under lock and key."

In spite of saving young Wade, Jamrach was sued for damages by the boy's father and had to pay £300 pounds - equivalent to more than £30,000 today.

But he had one other consolation - he sold the animal to Wombwell's menagerie for the the same amount where it was exhibited as "The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy".

In 1857, England was in the grip of a panic caused by the Indian Mutiny and so a tiger - the symbol of India - was an especially frightening thing, especially when it was loose in the heart of the Empire's capital.

One contemporary newspaper account linked the event explicitly to what was going on in India.

The event is also memorialised in a strange sculpture placed in the defunct shopping centre at Tobacco Dock.

England was a clearing house for the animals of the world and they poured in by the thousand - both alive and dead.

The trade in these wild animals was unregulated - there was only the most rudimentary consciousness about the idea of endangered species.

The very first animal welfare laws had been passed by this time and, although there were concerns about the extent of the fur trade and the conditions suffered by animals undergoing live export for slaughter, there was not the systematic legislation there is today nor any international framework to protect wild animals.

Demand was high, and it persisted at the end of Queen Victoria's reign. One Indian based taxidermy company, Van Ingen & Van Ingen, stuffed roughly 43,000 tigers and leopards between 1900 and about 1950 to supply the European and Indian demand for trophies.

They moved from fair to fair with the travelling menageries, they underpinned new scientific research and they sat glumly in architect-designed cages in the grounds of the most fashionable country houses.

The capture, trade and display of exotic animals was one of the many ways in which the British Empire made its influence felt.

John Simons is executive dean of the faculty of arts at Australia's Macquarie University and author of The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy

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The Victorian period witnessed a huge surge in the number of exotic beasts in the towns and cities of England - as creatures were imported from the far reaches of the British Empire. But Victorians' enthusiasms for wild and dangerous animals had some very unpleasant consequences, says Prof John Simons.

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