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6
In the industrial revolution, improved communications —
turnpike roads, canals, railways,—combined with mechanical inventions—power-loom,
steam power,—and the commercial use of
coal and iron, substituted the factories for the domestic workshop.
The internal combustion engine, the application of electricity to industry,
and other inventions, have had the effect of removing many
industries to the neighbourhood of London, and Acton, in common
with other suburbs, has become the seat of many and varied industries.
In each case, a world wide upheaval had an effect, if not
in originating the change, at any rate in accelerating it.
In the industrial revolution, the economic and other effects
which accompanied and followed the Napoleonic Wars profoundly
affected the industrial development of the first quarter of the nineteenth
century: the Great War also determined the course and
nature of industrial developments and inventions, and we are not
yet aware of the final issue.
Fortunately for Acton, there is one outstanding difference
between the two periods: the industrial revolution caught this
country unawares and unready. The new towns were built hastily
and without foresight or regard to town-planning. Houses were
put up regardless of soil, site, convenience, curtilage, water-supply,
drainage, sewage, treatment—small in capacity, poor in structure,
damp, unventilated, badly lighted, back-to-back. There was overcrowding
of houses on the land and people in the houses.
In most instances, the sole object of the builders seemed to
be the erection of the maximum number of bouses on the minimum
of space. There were problems of cleanliness, feeding and education:
the control of infectious disease was almost non-existent and
epidemics were frequent. Young children, of as young as six years
of age worked in the mills, and the normal hours of employment were
17 a day. The new towns sprang up in the pre-sanitation era, and
the local administrators of those towns are even now reaping the
legacy of the unpreparedness of the period and trying to remove the
burden by slum clearance schemes. We have been saved from these
difficulties. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Acton
remained small and until the dawn of the twentieth century it
had only one industry. Its development took place after the sanitation
era: the vast majority of its houses have been built after the
adoption of building bye-laws, and the installation of a complete
sewage scheme.
The growth of Acton was very slow in the first half of the
nineteenth century. The population in 1801 was 1,425 and in 1861
it was 3,151. Most of that increase occurred in two decades 1821