IN THE SHADOW OF THE ROSSE - Shipley

CHAPTER EIGHT
The creation of the Shipley Local Board of Health in 1853, and the powers specifically
given to the Board to control all new developments in the town, meant that from that
time on, all houses erected in Shipley had to be built to a certain minimum standard.
The Local Board were also required to ensure that there was sufficient ventilation,
within and around the houses; also that they were provided with a decent water supply
and adequate sewerage facilities. The planning records of the Shipley Local
Board, and the later Urban District Council, show that such powers were taken seriously,
and many original plans were rejected for breaches of the bye-laws on these matters.
Naturally, the standards and requirements for new buildings changed over the years,
both in terms of local and national legislation. But the most controversial of all were the regulations
regarding back-to-back house. Such houses had been a traditional way of providing
homes for low paid industrial workers in many parts of the country throughout
previous centuries. Though by the second half of the nineteenth century it had become
accepted by most public health experts, and many local authorities, that living in such
houses meant a poor standard of health for their occupiers.
For example, a study by the Local Government Board into the health of residents of
such houses, compared with those of through houses, suggested that there was an increase
of between 15 and 20 percent in the death rates of the occupiers of back-tobacks.
29 Although it could be argued that the people most likely to be living in such
houses were among the poorest within any district, and that, as such, they would be
more susceptible to debilitating illnesses anyway. Also, as George Sheeran has pointed
out, opposition to such houses from the medical profession was based on the false medical
theory of miasma. 30 Nevertheless, many local authorities in other parts of the country
had outlawed such houses.
However, Shipley, and many other towns within the West Riding continued to defend
the right of builders to put up back-to-back houses despite national and
county pressures to outlaw them. 31 Indeed, the pressure on the council from the
developers was so great that they were sometimes coerced into breaking their own
bye-laws. For example, during the course of 1892, Shipley council was in regular
correspondence with the solicitor of the West Riding County Council and the
Local Government Board in London, over the councils wish to pass plans for a new
block of back-to-back houses in Belgrave Square which were said to be in contravention
of such bye-laws. 32
The evidence from Ordnance Survey maps show that a large number of homes
built in Shipley during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century were back-tobacks.
And this, despite the example from Saltaire, that through houses were a viable,
and even a minimum requirement for decent housing - though there were even
a few back-to-backs at the bottom end of Saltaire village, which survived until the
1930s.
The largest development of back-to-backs in Shipley can be seen to have been in the
area bounded by St. Paul’s Road, Manor Road and Westcliffe Road, where over 450
26