What is a Tenement?

Rooms were often divided up into two or three smaller rooms – a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. Entire families crammed into small living spaces and shared an outside tap and lavatory with many others in the same building. Often, two toilets outside would have been expected to accommodated 70 people.

The bedrooms would have been damp and cold with many sharing a bed like the one that can be seen in the picture. People would cook, eat, sleep all in the one tight space. We can see a child sleeping in the bed in the above picture, it's likely she was ill with cholera, typhus, or tuberculosis.