Victorian Houses

During Queen Victoria 's reign, many people came to work and live in factory houses in towns. A typical factory house comprised of a kitchen, a parlour, two bedrooms and an attic bedroom. Many houses were built in terraces; they were quick and cheap to build but lead to severe overcrowding in the large Victorian families where there might be seven or eight people living in a two bed roomed house. Usually several houses would be sharing one ‘privy’ there was no sewerage system so they got very smelly and unhealthy. The water for all of these houses might be a tap in the yard, or a pump so that people had to go to the pump with water containers to get any water at all.

Out in the country other people often lived small, damp and draughty cottages. These may be tied to a farm job so that if the man lost his job for any reason, even illness, his family would lose the house. The upper class families were the luckiest, they usually lived in huge houses with servants. These were very often big and elaborate buildings with plenty of rooms, fires in all of the rooms to keep them warm and usually huge gardens to provide fresh fruit and vegetables for the family and all of the workers.

House work was very hard, there was no electricity and the houses were heated by dirty coal fires. There was usually a range in the kitchen for all of the cooking, this had to be cleaned with black lead, it was hard dirty work. The coal had to be brought indoors and carried upstairs in a big house. The ashes had to be taken out. There was a lot of dust but no hoover to clear it up quickly and easily. The house would be light by candles ot lamp, these were smelly and created a dusty, smoky atmosphere. All of the cleaning had to be done by hand. It was all done by women – either the women who lived in the house or by servants if the family was wealthy. All of the washing has to be done by hand. The water had to be heated on the fire, the actual washing done by hand or clothes were pummeled with a dolly then lucky families had  a mangle to squeeze the excess water out of the clothes before they were hung up to dry. They had to be ironed with a flat iron that had to be heated in the fire.

http://telematics.ex.ac.uk/virvic/ - Virtual Victorians

http://www.cadburylearningzone.co.uk/history/ Cadbury History

Sarah and Taz

Notes from Sarah's ICT book:

We used the ICT web site history links to find some Victorian web pages. We used the Cadbury one and Virtual Victorians to search for information about houses. We had to type in what we were searching for - we put houses. We found a diary which gave us lots of information. In the Cadbury site we found lots of information about slums.

Level 3

Pupils use ICT to save information and to find and use appropriate stored information, following straightforward lines of enquiry. They use ICT to generate, develop, organise and present their work. They share and exchange their ideas with others. They use sequences of instructions to control devices and achieve specific outcomes. They make appropriate choices when using ICT-based models or simulations to help them find things out and solve problems. They describe their use of ICT and its use outside school.

Next steps in Exchanging and Sharing Information: Give the work some organisational features such as headings and sub-headings. Next steps in Finding Things Out - write down how they carries out their searches and the questions they asked to find this information.

 Back to portfolio

This page of information is to be put into a class book on Victorians. The next page is to take some household artefacts and describe how they differ with modern ones. It would be an interesting next step to put this into a web book instead of a paper book to make an on-line presentation.