Can anyone describe city life in a late 18th Century English industrial city?

Answer 1

Let's choose London just before 1800. The population is one million souls. There are many unemployed persons living near starvation - the "urban poor" who make up 20-40% of the population. Many are homeless or live in severely crowded conditions. This leads to crime for survival. The reaction of the wealthy is to make a very large number of crimes punishable by death or deportation.

There is no sewer system. Human waste collects in pits or is washed into the Thames river which stinks on the east end where the poor live. Drinking water from wells is unsafe. People drink beer which is safer. It is small beer, so they are not necessarily drunk. (low percentage of alcohol).
People do not wash. They do not have changes of clothing.
Fleas are prevalent on people. Lice on the poorest.

The air is filled with smoke from wood or coal fires. It is damp and cold in the winter with inadequate heat for most.
Nearly everyone has latent or active tuberculosis. Milk, if you can get it, is teeming with a surface layer of tubercle bacilli since there is no Pasteurization.

There are no loud sounds other than the clatter of horses hooves on cobblestones, the ringing of church bells, or the hacking coughs of the miserable and sick. Big Ben is not there yet. Close to half of children born do not survive to be 6 years old. The overall life expectancy at birth is barely thirty - not improved since the 400 years when Rome controlled Londinium at this spot. Smallpox is still widespread though vaccination has been known for a few decades. Women die in childbirth with regularity - one woman in five.

Bread is fairly cheap at a silver penny per pound, but a silver penny if hard to come by. A power loom operator may earn 5 shillings a week - that's 60 pence. He might be able to pay rent and purchase fuel for heat and have enough to buy bread for himself. There is little for a wife and children. There is no money for recreation. Gin or laudanum (cheap opium mixed with alcohol) can relieve the drudgery at the expense of more healthful food. Rickets disease (vitamin D deficiency from poor diet and inadequate sunlight on the skin) causes shortening and deformity of legs among the poor. Good mothers try to compensate with spoonfuls of cod liver oil. (Yuch!) Medical care is more harmful than helpful if it is available or affordable at all.

For those men who visit the pubs - public drinking houses - in London, there is the risk of press gangs from His Majesty's ships who can forcefully drag you off to do sea duty without a moment's notice. You will be gone for years, and your wife/children may starve or die of diseases while you are trapped aboard warships serving your country. In the city, Cholera, typhoid, and dysentery are widespread from water contaminated with human excrement. At least being a man on shipboard your health could improve and nutrition would be adequate except for the weevils in the hard biscuits and the spoilage of the salt pork, beef, or mutton.

England is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, but the wealth is concentrated in the hands of very few. The top 10% or so live fairly well. About 400 families own 25% of the land in England. The bottom 70-80% own nothing and live in squalor. They have no political power at all. There is a middle class which is rising at this point and will become a political factor over the next century.

After the "Big Stink" of 1857, London will finally engineer a sewer system at a level that might compare to that of the Romans sixteen centuries earlier.

Answer 2

A large subject to cover.Try reading these 2 books but I'm sorry I can't remember the authors!
The London Underworld
or
The London Mob

Answer 3

the city life was horrible , people were homeless and there was loads of pollution