Labor History Commons^™

"There Is Great And Awful Immorality In This Place": Environment, Character, And Reform In South Wales, 1847-1919, Allison Kirkpatrick

University Honors Theses

In the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, sanitarians and reformers in Britain undertook a wide range of public health campaigns aimed at improving the conditions of the industrialized urban environment. Some turned their attention to south Wales, where the coal industry had spurred rapid urban growth and transformed the region into one of Britain's industrial centers. The negative effects of this transition were most acutely felt in working-class communities in the south Wales coalfield, where a near-complete lack of urban planning had left a legacy of overcrowding, nonexistent or inadequate drainage and sewage systems, …