The shallow, gradual, almost imperceptible subsidences which occurred in the neighbourhood of the towns of Northwich and Winsford were at first infrequent and of comparative unimportance, but as time went on the damage to property increased so rapidly that, in 1860, the house-owners of Northwich combined in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain legal redress. By 1880, many parts of the towns were rendered unfit for habitation. In Northwich alone, nearly 400 houses and other property to the value of over £100,000 were more or less seriously affected, while water-mains, sewers, and gas-pipes were being continually repaired; houses were condemned, pulled down and rebuilt, and bridges had to be raised. The rents of many lots of property were absorbed in keeping them in repair, and in some districts property had been raised and rebuilt three times in eleven years. “The area of the mischief is extending yearly,” wrote Mr. Thomas Ward in 1881, “and a larger proportion of property is becoming affected, and more and more land is sinking beneath the water and increasing the area of the already existing extensive lakes. Very few, except those conversant with the district, have the slightest knowledge of the amount of suffering caused to property owners by this subsiding of the land.” For over half a century the appearance of Northwich, with its undulating streets, its ramshackle, dilapidated houses, its fissured walls, and its system of shoring and bolting-up of property to postpone as long as possible its inevitable condemnation and demolition, has presented a tragico-comic spectacle. “If a stranger were to be set down some morning in the town of Northwich,” wrote a _Times_ correspondent, “without any previous knowledge of its peculiarities, he would be struck with a startling and novel spectacle. He would see buildings of every sort, from the humble, two-storeyed cottage of the artisan to the solidly built church or chapel, standing many degrees out of the perpendicular, and suggestive, all of them, were it not for the props and iron stays with which they are secured, of some recent convulsion of nature. In main thoroughfares and back streets alike there are houses whose sloping floors and cracked walls would lend considerable colour to such an effort of the imagination. The inhabitants seem to take this tumble-down state of their dwellings quite as a matter of course. They have, in fact, to make the best of a condition of things from which there is absolutely no escape. The effects described are produced, not indeed by any sudden catastrophe, but by a slow, though equally effective process of subsidence, which may be detected in continuous operation over nearly the whole area of the Cheshire salt field, and which will continue to operate so long as the earth yields its vast stores of salt for human consumption.”