Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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the walking city the inhabitants were limited to those who could afford their
own transport. Many partially retired from business would ride into the count-
ing house two or three days a week. Between and a series of west ends
and new towns served those seeking socially exclusive residential locations. The
horse omnibus from the s, the suburban railway in the s (dates were
earlier in London) and the horse-drawn (s) and electric tram (s) enabled
the full development of the middle-class residential suburb.
37
Nowhere was the
interaction of urban structure and culture more clearly demonstrated than in
such suburbs. They were the perfect outcome of the cultural ambitions for
middle-class domesticity, privacy, the separation of home and work, the combi-
nation of rural tree-lined romanticism with the best features of urban civilisa-
tion, the clear and respectable separation of gender roles, the controlled display
of consumer achievement and the discreet leisure of church, chapel and tennis
club. At the same time, this achievement depended upon the market-driven
income structure of the urban place. Property developers experienced consid-
erable tension between cultural pressures and the profit-seeking, effective
demand-responding imperatives of the apparently impersonal forces of the cap-
italist market. In Edgbaston, one of the most firmly controlled suburban places
in Britain, estate managers stopped the building of a chimney for some unfor-
tunate resident’s glass house but in the end they had to admit artisan house build-
ing at the edge of their property as the expansion of Birmingham reordered the
patterns of price and demand upon the landscape.
38
By the suburb not only
sustained the culture of domesticity but acted as a major spatial restriction frus-
trating and limiting social action and imagination. In , H. G. Wells followed
the thoughts of his fictional Ann Veronica,
She walked down the station approach, past the neat unobtrusive offices of the coal
merchant and the house agent . . . Morningside Park was a suburb that had not
altogether, as people say, come off . . . her eyes wandered to where the new red
and white villas peeped among the trees . . . ‘Ye gods!’ she said at last. ‘What a
place! Stuffy isn’t the word for it . . .’.
39
With an Irish-born population of between per cent to per cent in most
major British cities as well as important sectarian divisions amongst Protestants,
the impact of ethnic and sectarian relationships in British cities has been under-
estimated. Liverpool was an urban economy dominated by casual and unskilled
labour, with no leavening of industrial and skilled labour as in east London. A
liberal patrician elite, like the Gregs and the Rathbones, offered a philanthropic
balm to social relationships but without the coherence or authority of east
R. J. Morris
37
A. D. Ochojna, ‘The influence of local and national politics on the development of urban passenger
transport in Britain, –’, Journal of Transport History, new series, (), and above, pp. ‒.
38
D. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords (Leicester, ), pp. –.
39
H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica (Harmondsworth, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
London.
40
Liverpool, controlled by a Tory Anglican elite, came as near as any
British city to a ‘boss’ system of client populist politics. The Conservative
Working Men’s Associations (CWMAs) tied the ward parties to the Orange
Order and other Protestant organisations. The system thrived in a labour market
in which jobs depended upon personal links, the clerk seeking a ‘situation’ or
the dock workers at the daily hiring,
41
and where ethnic identities had their own
labour market niches, the Irish in the docks, the Welsh in the warehouses and
the Protestant English amongst the carters and corporation workers.
The potential for such ethnic and sectarian politics in Glasgow was consider-
able. In the last half of the century per cent of adults were Irish born and
per cent came from the Highlands. Despite the presence of evangelical Protestant
preachers and an Orange Order dominant in nearby single-industry towns,
Glasgow followed a liberal then labour path of class bargaining and class conflict
for several reasons. One key to this was the nature of the male labour force. The
per cent who were skilled had a strong sense of collective identity in defence
of workplace autonomy when faced with the fluctuations of the international
market for engineering and shipbuilding. Insecurity meant there was little spatial
segregation in housing. The squalid housing conditions of Glasgow and Irish and
Highland memories created a strong shared collective ‘interest’ against the land-
lords which found a ready response in the liberal elites’ hostility to the aristoc-
racy. The institutional infrastructure of the Glasgow working class was very
different from that in Liverpool. Friendly societies, trades unions, cooperatives
as well as nonconformist Presbyterian chapels were joined in the s by ILP
branches and a Trades Council. All these were on offer in Liverpool but little
regarded by those who preferred the CWMA, Tontines or the ethnic specificity
of Welsh chapels and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The strikes of to
in Liverpool saw frequent violence which spilled over into sectarian house-
wrecking and demonstrations. In Glasgow, working-class action on rents, wages
and working practices was more disciplined. The ‘Red Clyde’ was feared in
London not because it was violent but because it was organised.
42
Close examination of urban labour forces indicated that very few were likely
to experience their situation as a coherent ‘interest’ in conflict with their
employers. Although different urban labour markets could be classified as factory
work, casual labour or workshop employment, there was little homogeneity of
Structure, culture and society in British towns
40
M. Simey, Charity Rediscovered (Liverpool, ; repr., Liverpool, ); J. Smith, ‘Class, skill and
sectarianism in Glasgow and Liverpool, –’, in Morris, ed., Class, Power and Social
Structure, pp. –.
41
P. J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism (Liverpool, ); G. L. Anderson, Victorian Clerks
(Manchester, ); D. Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker (London, ).
42
Smith, ‘Class, skill and sectarianism’; Alan McKinlay and R. J. Morris, eds., The ILP on Clydeside,
–: From Foundation to Disintegration (Manchester, ); William Kenefick and Arthur McIvor,
eds., Roots of Red Clydeside, – (Edinburgh, ); and see above, p. , and below, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
experience. The factory labour force was divided by hierarchies of gender, skill
and age. In many occupations the relationship of labour and capital were medi-
ated by jobbing labour and subcontracting.
43
The potential which the
labour–capital relationship might have for conflict and radical political challenge
was often mediated by a variety of paternalist employer strategies which, though
based on older traditions of social relationships, were strategies which were
renewed and thrived in urban environments.
Metaphors of family and community shaped relationships right across the
manufacturing districts. The mills of Messrs Lawrence in Chorley were deco-
rated when their son came of age in . Many mills and workplaces organised
trips and feasts. Owners sponsored schools, reading rooms and mechanics insti-
tutions providing land, buildings and finance.
44
Paternalism marked out territo-
ries within the urban place as in the spectacular factory ‘villages’ like that of Titus
Salt on the edge of Bradford or the two simple pillars which marked the indus-
trial suburb of Prinlaws in the burgh of Leslie in Fife. Such paternalism survived
into the twentieth century. In Glasgow, engineering employers like Beardmore
sustained their authority by direct involvement in the work and drinking culture
of the firm. In these firms the wage relationship was a personal as much as a
market one. The flax-spinning firm of John Fergus and Son in Fife must have
been typical of many in which the ‘maister’ walked around the firm stuffing five
pound notes in the pockets of his employees as the end of year bonus. Housing
was important. In Prinlaws, those who occupied the houses of John Fergus were
expected to send their daughters to work in the mill or lose their house. In
Saltaire no washing was to hang out on Sundays. Paternalism was a hard asser-
tion of authority. Some of the most bitter industrial conflicts of the century arose
from the breakdown of such strategies.
45
It was a bargain which ensured the
stability of an often low-paid labour force and should not be confused with
benevolence.
46
The paternalism of the mill town was not some deviation or manipulation of
the class outcomes of the capitalist relationships of labour and capital but found
a ready response in the ‘populist’ perceptions of social reality which pervaded the
culture of these towns and which ran alongside and interacted with class percep-
tions. Broadsheet ballads, dialect poetry, popular theatre, often through the
melodrama of good and evil, and, by the end of century, the seaside postcard
R. J. Morris
43
R. Samuel, ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian
Britain’, History Workshop Journal, (), –; P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (Brighton,
); P. Joyce, ‘Work’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain
–, vol. : People and their Environment (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
44
Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, pp. –.
45
H. I. Dutton and J. E. King, Ten Per Cent and No Surrender (Cambridge, ); Robert Duncan,
Steelopolis:The Making of Motherwell, c. – (Motherwell, ).
46
R. J. Morris and J. Smyth, ‘Paternalism as an employer strategy, –’, in J. Rubery and F.
Wilkinson, eds., Employer Strategy and the Labour Market (Oxford, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
were some of the media for this culture. A virtuous people faced those in author-
ity with deep distrust and a contempt for ‘putting on airs’. At the same time this
critique recognised the true gentleman and the fair employer.
47
In this context,
John Fielden, employer of thousands and radical leader in Oldham, was no
paradox but a capitalist acting out the popular model.
48
Class was not an inevi-
table expression of the antagonism of labour and capital but rather a sense of ‘us’
and ‘them’ centred on an assertion of the dignity of work and a pride in our own
folk. Trades union banners carried not just portraits of labour leaders but details
of the tools and products of labour – looms, ships, railway locomotives, printed
books.
49
For the urbanist this presents two dimensions of analysis. Many of these cul-
tural products were place specific – the mill, the trade, the processional route,
the holiday week for sending postcards. Regional identities, often expressed in
language, bound groups of towns together – Lancashire was gradely, Tyneside
canny and the Lowland Scots couthy. At the same time the media and much of
the content were part of an urban national network. Print was an urban media.
True it was not excluded from the countryside but the urban place and the urban
network was the focus of production, consumption and distribution. The
Northern Star, Chambers Edinburgh Journal and later Reynolds News were urban
products that spread along the networks of road and rail. The travelling theatre,
the political orator on the stump, the traditions of banners, meetings and marches
were all urban. The railway with its point delivery system more than road and
canal made the urban the contact point between local and national culture. The
increasing concentration of population, as Vaughan predicted, created the
market and the audience for such products.
The notion of towns as an arena of class conflict driven by the confrontations
of wage labour and capital was at best only a partial account, even for a town
dominated by factories and other relatively large units of production. The social
and political relationships of British towns and cities in this period were subject
to a much more complex set of influences which included the opportunities,
problems and limitations set by the economic relationships of production and
reproduction, the nature of local leadership amongst elite and other social
groups, the legacy of past history and historical memory and the identities of
gender, ethnicity and religion. Each town was part of a national and sometimes
international network. Cultural products and structural effects were rarely
derived from a specific place but were influential because of the interaction of
the town with the rest of the network. This network brought not just news-
papers, periodicals, new novels, sheet music, travelling lecturers, politics and
Structure, culture and society in British towns
47
P. Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge, ).
48
Stewart Angas Weaver, John Fielden and the Politics of Popular Radicalism, – (Oxford, ).
49
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, ); John Gorman, Banner Bright:An Illustrated History
of the Trade Union Banners (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
plays but also the glazed pipes for the sewage system, the rails which linked the
suburb to the centre, the steel frame for the piano at the music festival and the
dozens of products which filled the department store. The urban nature of
the town, the influence of the transactional density, the variety of experience
and choice, the town as a focus of power in terms of the market, the state and
the production of culture directs attention to the Vaughan as well as the
Chalmers form of inquiry.
Whatever the complexities of urban social behaviour, the language of urban
social description in the period went back again and again to a language of class.
Such language was there in Chalmers’ work as well as in the account of
Manchester written by one of his pupils, James Kay.
50
This language was often
mingled with that of ‘the people’and of ‘the poor’. Alexander Brown, a Glasgow
letter press printer, produced his Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs in :
the public, the middle and higher classes of society, the poor, the occupants of the
low closes and wynds, an immense concourse of men, women and children, their
pestilential dwellings, virtuous and vicious, the lower classes, smart little factory
girls, the lowest lodging houses for travellers and others, beggars, the Christian
community, the people, the poor . . . their dirty pestilential dwellings, evangelical
protestants, the merchant, the industrious mechanic, idle workmen, the lower
orders, respectably dressed people, a crowd of low people, this social volcano, this
lowest class of people.
51
This was a language of class, poverty and threat which linked the lowest status
groups with specific areas of the great cities, reinforcing this link by statistical
and cartographic presentations. In Andrew Mearns’ account of London in the
early s, ‘the poor and outcaste classes of society’ were distanced from the
potential actors, ‘the Christian people’.
52
The real change, seen most clearly in
the work of Booth and Rowntree, was the greater attention paid to the relation-
ships of reproduction in the household. Lady Bell’s account of the iron workers
of Middlesbrough started with a clear recognition of the complex class basis of
production: a thousand working men’s homes; lady visitors; the relations
between capital and labour, between employers and employed; these workmen,
their conditions, mental, moral and physical; employers; professional men;
tradesmen; arms of powerful men; the ironworkers; the working men. It was also
a language of the dissonance between production and reproduction. It was a lan-
guage of household budgets, of women as good or bad managers, of drink and
gambling as the difference between order and disaster in the working-class
R. J. Morris
50
J. P. Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture
in Manchester (Manchester, ; repr., Didsbury, ).
51
‘Shadow’ (Alexander Brown), Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs (Glasgow, ; repr.,
Glasgow, ), with an introduction by John McCaffrey.
52
A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London, ; new edn, ed. A. S. Wohl, Leicester,
).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
home.
53
Sir William Collins, the lord provost who had promoted the Glasgow
City Improvement Scheme which provided houses ‘for the working classes’, was
keenly aware of the manner in which class structure, urban space and the house-
hold labour market related to each other. Men preferred to live centrally so that
their household had access to the more varied labour market of the city. They
might travel to the shipyards but wanted their wives and daughters to be able to
work in the city when the fluctuating labour markets of Clydebank and Partick
put them out of work.
Witnesses separated the working classes from a lower social stratum. This was
not simply a matter of Irish influence, ‘they are very destructive’, but a broader
cultural influence which the policy makers sought to combat ‘The wife of a
working man living up a common stair among miscellaneous neighbours, not
probably all of good character may be subjected to bad influences’ ( James
Gowans, chairman of the dean of guild court in Edinburgh).
54
This complex
language of class was the language of urban problem solving and policy making
for the urban elites and middle classes. The languages of gender, ethnicity and
religion, often embedded in these accounts, tended to be languages of prescrip-
tion and moral assertion. When the middle-class elite and their intellectual allies
tried to understand the urban places in which they lived and worked it was this
language of class to which they turned.
55
The world of Oldham, Liverpool, Glasgow and the rest was not just a world
of class, of conflict, of consciousness and ideology, it was also a world of meet-
ings, debates, of motions proposed and voted upon, of petitions and public sub-
scriptions, of voting and elections. It was a world of continual contest over the
use, accumulation and control of the material resources of the town. In many
contests, legitimacy was increasingly allocated to rule-based decision making in
courts, societies, partnerships and above all in representative institutions.
Increasing authority was attributed to public argument based upon evidence and
reasoning. Legitimacy went with representative power which was only indirectly
related to any notion of democracy. The key figures were members, citizens,
inhabitants. In the abstract the definition of such groups lacked any precision,
but in practice definition was usually clear and rule-based, the payment of a sub-
scription, the ownership of property and increasingly residence within a spatially
defined area, the town. This process was not just a matter of municipal councils
and their growing number of subcommittees. The identity of organised social
life with the urban place was also linked to the increasing density of voluntary
associations. This accelerated and became more public in the middle years of the
nineteenth century. A wide range of institutions, from charitable societies like
Structure, culture and society in British towns
53
F. Bell, At the Works (London, ); E. J. Yeo, The Contest for Social Science (London, ), pp.
–.
54
PP, –, , Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, Qqs. , and
,.
55
A. Lees, Cities Perceived (Manchester, ); Yeo, The Contest for Social Science.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
the Stranger’s Friend Benevolent Societies, cultural societies like the Literary and
Philosophical Societies and economic interest groups like the Chambers of
Commerce and the Licensed Victuallers Societies all saw the town as the focus
for their activities.
The urban place in Britain was the site for the creation, extension and con-
solidation of a civil society. This was a long process with origins in the seven-
teenth century. Civil society involved the increasing range of social activity
which was free of the prescriptive relationships of family or of the state – free of
the tyranny of cousins and the tyranny of the state.
56
The creation of civil society
was a process and many of its achievements were imperfect. The decision to join
or form a political party in a pluralistic society based upon the rule of law was
open to an increasing number of people, but for many their Whig or Tory iden-
tity was still prescribed by family or religion. The increasing dominance of the
market economy and the spread of associational culture also increased choice.
Central to these processes were many of the issues of class relationships. Civil
society involved processes of bargaining between ‘interests’. The notion of
‘interests’ economic or cultural must be at the heart of any relationship between
structure and culture. Civil society allowed plurality in the conflicts and bargain-
ing which took place. Conflict was not just a matter of class but a matter of status,
occupation, religion, ethnicity and gender. The growth of civil society in British
towns allowed the negotiation of such conflicts as an increasingly rule-based
process in which the process itself became a touchstone of the legitimacy and
general acceptance of any resolution reached. It was a process which allowed
dominance without homogeneity.
The British town proved an ideal site for creating the social processes and rela-
tionships vital to civil society. This development was not restricted to the nine-
teenth century but was one which had origins in the seventeenth century. A
tentative, fourfold, overlapping periodisation indicates the dominant sets of rela-
tionships in urban culture, structure and action. The late seventeenth-century
settlement established a variety of corporatist urban structures, many of which
survived into the s. These institutions were structured by limited forms of
representation and rule-based forms of debate and decision taking. Some form
of chairman, convener, mayor or sovereign was appointed, often in rotation or
by vote, and always with specific and circumscribed authority. Motions were
debated and voted upon. Decisions were recorded in minutes. Between about
and voluntaristic and ad hoc agencies dominated. Schools, hospitals,
libraries, gardening clubs were directed by voluntary societies which held public
meetings, published accounts and offered membership to all who would pay sub-
scriptions. Water, gas, even cemeteries were provided by joint-stock companies
which followed the same type of public form. Paving, lighting, police and the
R. J. Morris
56
E. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty (London, ); Hall, ed., Civil Society.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
care of the poor were provided by a variety of disparate tax-collecting agencies
with legal powers and specific spatial references usually to the urban place.
57
Somewhere around the emphasis changed to the municipal, a representa-
tive corporate structure which dominated urban culture. The twentieth century
saw the slow disintegration of the urban place as structure as a result of the
impact of processes which made the urban culture itself universal.
The extension and organisation of the non-prescriptive aspects of urban life
enabled people to use the structures of civil society, the market, the voluntary
society, the open and representative institutions of local government to make
choices. Hence the complexity of any explanation of urban social behaviour and
culture. It also helps explain many features of that complexity. The nineteenth-
century British city was a middle-class place in terms of culture, government,
property ownership and social authority. Within the middle classes the mer-
chants and professional men tended to find it easier to gain influence in govern-
ment and the voluntary sector. The merchants were used to the bargaining and
rule-based activity of the partnership and contract whilst the professional groups
were skilled in the rule-based corporate guarding of their income as well as the
application of science or rule-based systems of knowledge and expertise. The
manufacturers used to the direct authority of capital over labour had to learn
other ways.
58
There was considerable evidence of aristocratic influence but this
was only obtained through the institutionalised, rule-based, social and political
processes of civil society. In Scotland, the attempts of the duke of Buccleuch to
sustain his authority in Hawick by the older methods of direction and client pol-
itics were a messy failure. In Edinburgh where he operated by quiet influence,
notably as patron in many voluntary societies, he was able to take a quiet share
in the culture and authority of that city.
59
By the s and s, many groups
of skilled male wage earners had learnt the rules and procedures of civil society
and were able to claim a small part in the exercise of legitimate authority at the
urban level. Their trade societies and educational traditions were an ideal base
from which to debate the motion in the informed and argued manner required
by civil society. Those elements of the population who took direct action
through riots, crowds or violent strikes could be controlled by military action or
the new police. Those who played by the ‘rules’ were much harder to dominate.
Many other ‘interests’were formed. Small property owners, especially shopkeep-
ers, organised to defend themselves against increased local taxation. By the s,
Structure, culture and society in British towns
57
R. J. Morris, ‘Clubs, societies and associations’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social
History of Britain,‒, vol. : Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
58
Morris, ‘The middle class and British towns and cities’; Trainor, Black Country Elites; J. Garrard,
Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns – (Manchester, ); E. P. Hennock, Fit
and Proper Persons (London, ).
59
R. J. Morris, ‘Urbanisation and Scotland’, in W. H. Fraser and R. J. Morris, eds., People and Society
in Scotland, vol. : – (Edinburgh, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
‘labour’ saw the municipal as the arena for asserting their interest through fair
labour clauses and the amelioration of the poor laws.
Some towns were better than others at creating an expanding and stable civil
society. Medium-sized towns which had no tradition of coherent local govern-
ment or a weak structure of mediating voluntary organisations were especially
vulnerable to breakdowns of law and order. This usually meant industrial towns
with an experience of rapid growth in the early nineteenth century but no tra-
dition of incorporation. Other places had a weak professional and mercantile
middle class to sustain a mediating and leadership role.
60
This role was often
expressed through organisations like the mechanics institution or local hospital.
Breakdown was not just a matter of riot and crime but might involve the inabil-
ity to counter epidemic disease because of poor organisation. Birmingham
despite its late incorporation still had a rich array of institutions such as the
grammar school, a number of dynamic nonconformist elite congregations and
later the university. This was associated with a strong civic culture. Sheffield on
the other hand had a strong neighbourhood culture with very little respect for
town wide institutions and hence was unable to generate a strong civic culture.
Later in the century the growth of retail cooperative societies and associated
social and political activities drew working people into a stable relationship with
civil society, which had a strong regional concentration in the northern indus-
trial areas.
61
The voluntary societies produced and sustained a strong identity
built around the urban place. Most took the name of the town itself and sought
membership from the town. Thus the basis of stability and social mediation was
identified with the specific urban place.
As the power of the urban identity gathered pace it reproduced itself, through
another generation of cultural products such as municipal parks, statues and foot-
ball clubs all of which created, asserted and recreated urban character. The
second half of the nineteenth century saw the creation of a powerful municipal
culture. By the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, the word ‘municipal’
was closely associated with notions of local pride, of improvement and of
achievement. This was physically embodied in town halls, gas works, clean
water, improved housing, libraries and museums – it was closely allied with local
school boards and poor law authorities, with their school buildings and hospi-
tals. When overseas visitors came to Britain, they came to the best governed
cities in the world, whether that was Glasgow or Birmingham.
62
Municipal cor-
porations had been associated with exclusion and corruption before the s
and then with middle-class squabbles over spending.
63
Somewhere around ,
R. J. Morris
60
L. H. Lees, ‘The study of social conflict in English industrial towns, UHY (), –.
61
D. Smith, Conflict and Compromise (London, ); Martin Purvis, ‘Popular institutions’, in J.
Langton and R. J. Morris, eds., Atlas of Industrialising Britain, – (London, ).
62
B. Aspinwall, Portable Utopia (Aberdeen, ,) p. and appendix A.
63
Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
there was a change of mood, a change in both the quality and quantity of munic-
ipal activity. In Glasgow opened the new Loch Katrine water supply. The
importance of this move was indicated by the presence of Queen Victoria to
turn the taps. In , the Glasgow City Improvement Act provided authority
to clear and remodel acres (. ha) in the centre of Glasgow. By the
city owned , houses.
64
Birmingham was late entering this phase of munic-
ipalism, but the results were spectacular. In , the gas works were bought by
the corporation and water a year later. By , adequate national legislation was
available and there was no need for the expense of a specific local act. Outcomes
and motives were mixed. The Birmingham clearance scheme was announced
‘without any thought of profit, and with the one desire to advance health and
morality’. The plan was to buy acres (. ha) running through some of the
worst ‘back slums’ of Birmingham and ‘run a great street as broad as a Parisian
boulevard from the middle of New Street to Aston Road’. Communication and
retailing were as important as sanitation. Joseph Chamberlain freely admitted the
‘twofold aspect of the scheme’.
65
Municipal corporations entered a phase of service provision and the accumu-
lation of major blocks of urban capital. Activity included parks, libraries, slaugh-
ter houses, lighting, roads and police but in terms of income flow gas, water and
tramways dominated.
66
By , the municipal corporation was a major busi-
ness enterprise with the ratepayer as property taxpayer and consumer. Municipal
activities were a mixture of social engineering and the manipulation of eco-
nomic externalities. This switch of focus in urban culture was related to several
factors. The dissenting and evangelical members of the middle classes were no
longer outsiders in the local power structure. The energy they had channelled
into voluntary activities was now diverted towards the municipal and local state.
Their schemes gained authority from cultural representations of the town devel-
oped over the previous twenty years, notably maps, surveys and statistical reports.
Men like R. W. Dale in Birmingham preached, ‘the town was a solemn organ-
ism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped all the highest,
loftiest and truest ends of man’s moral nature’.
67
By the s, this moral agency
had extended to a commitment amongst many middle-class activists to ‘civilisa-
tion’.
68
Although they never matched the big spenders of gas, water and sewers,
Structure, culture and society in British towns
64
C. M. Allen, ‘The genesis of British urban redevelopment with special reference to Glasgow’,
Ec.HR, nd series, (), –; J. Graham Kerr, ed., Glasgow: Sketches by Various Authors,
British Association for the Advancement of Science, Glasgow Meeting, (Glasgow, ); T.
Hart, ‘Urban growth and municipal government: Glasgow in a comparative context, –’,
in A. Slaven and D. H. Aldcroft, eds., Business, Banking and Urban History (Edinburgh, ), pp.
–.
65
A. Mayne, The Imagined Slum (Leicester, ), pp. –.
66
W. H. Fraser, ‘Municipal socialism and social policy’, in R. J. Morris and R. Rodger, eds., The
Victorian City (London, ); J. R. Kellett, ‘Municipal socialism, enterprise and trading in the
Victorian city’, UHY (), –.
67
Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, p. .
68
H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, – (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008