Women, Children and Industrialisation · Part 3

which he had not experienced, but about which he had heard from older people. ‘Eastwood…must have been a tiny village at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a small place of cottages and fragmentary rows of little four-roomed miners’ dwellings, the homes of the old colliers…But somewhere about the company must have sunk the first big shaft…and installed the first machinery of the real industrial colliery…Most of the little rows of dwellings were pulled down, and dull little shops began to rise along the Nottingham Road, while on the down-slope…the company erected what is still known as the New Buildings…little four-room houses looking outward into the grim, blank street, and the back looking into the desert of the square, shut in like a barracks enclosure, very strange’.