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• 1 media/KS_HH5_Edit.jpg 2025-10-13T23:37:24+00:00 Introduction 10 plain 2025-10-13T23:47:53+00:00 Hopefully by the time you've finished exploring this exhibition, I will have convinced you of two things:
  
  The first is the documented fact that the streetcar at the turn of the 20th century rapidly changed society, allowing greater mobility throughout the city and beyond the average person's typical narrow radius. For the first time in history, many workers moved to the suburbs “as a refuge from the foul air, heat, noise, and dirt of the crowded city.” There they could own their own home, and commute to work downtown on the newly built Britannia streetcar line.
  
  The second is that the architectural heritage of Hintonburg’s small worker’s cottage’s - in an area once known as Manchesterville - serve to exemplify this sense of movement and change. In tracing this history we will see how some thought the working poor ought to live.
  
  This sense of movement is bookended by the immigrant population of predominantly French and Irish Catholics that first settled the area in the late 19th century, and the mid 20th century movement of people away from such working class districts, and towards the shiny new bungalow suburbs of the 50s. Throughout this story we will witness changing views of labour, social mores, and the ideal forms of housing for the ordinary person like you or me. Proximity to the LRT and bustling small businesses along Wellington street today still evidence this sense of movement and change that can be grounded in the nearly 140 year history of these now stoic worker’s cottages.
  
  To get a feel for the general atmosphere of early 20th century industrial working class life, we could look to the paintings of Britain's L. S. Lowry, whose depictions of sooty Manchester streets and bustling people sets a similar scene - though on a much larger scale - to that of Ottawa, which at the turn of the century was still largely an industrial lumber town. While L. S. Lowry would paint England's industrial Manchester, it was an Ottawa Manchester - a man by the name of David Manchester -, whom would first subdivide Hintonburg’s eastern section, creating a livable working class neighborhood, defined by his Methodist convictions, and echoing period urban planning and mores.