Housing 2

It is a testimony to the enduring skills of the stonemasons that today almost all the houses and the mills in the village are still standing, restored and looking much as they were when they were first constructed.

Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine today the village as it must have been with over 2,000 people living in it. The movement to and from work, the horses and the carts, the washing lines, the village gossipers, the children playing games in the streets, the girls washing their clothes down by the river, the constant ‘hustle and bustle’, have all gone. However, a visit to the village does allow you to glimpse the New Lanark of old, especially as you can visit the houses and see for yourself the conditions in which the workers lived their lives, faithfully recreated by the New Lanark Trust.

HOUSING CONDITIONS LONG ROW, DOUBLE ROW AND WEE ROW

Together these “rows,” with their relatively simple and descriptive names, made up the bulk of the village houses. Composed of tall tenements, they were of a high standard compared to the industrial housing in Scotland at that time. Each house had a single room in which an entire family would live, eat and sleep.

Sleeping accommodation was managed by hurley beds which ran underneath the built-in box-beds, so common at the time. A typical tenement had two ‘set-in’ beds, consisting of a strong wooden frame, with slats on which to position a simple straw mattress. The slats were taken out once a year and ‘spring cleaned’ and the straw was also changed from time to time, often once a month.