Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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the parks, libraries and art galleries built in the later part of the century were a
very visible outcome of the municipal state. This growth in municipal activity
was associated with the creation of a municipal culture. It was powerful enough
for men like Joseph Chamberlain and William Chambers to stake the reputation
and leisure of a successful capitalist upon their association with that culture; ‘if a
man has leisure, and wants occupation, his taste must be difficult indeed if he
cannot find some congenial employment in connection with the multifarious
duties of the Town Council of Birmingham’.
69
By , municipal Britain was represented by a series of major and minor
monuments, each of which had a half-understood iconography. Leeds Town
Hall, conceived and built in the s, was not just an assertive rival to nearby
Bradford’s St George’s Hall. There were classical echoes of power and citizen-
ship. Birmingham had a forum and Liverpool its acropolis. Other places looked
to Florence and Flanders. Halifax had a mixture of Renaissance palace and medi-
eval cathedral. These historical references all entailed success in trade, indepen-
dence in citizenship and claims to recognition for taste and artistic creativity.
Lions were everywhere. Foundation myths as powerful as anything found in the
ancient world were created, reproduced and celebrated.
70
When City Square was
laid out in Leeds in the s it was peopled by the Black Prince, Joseph Priestley
and several naked ladies, all in a stone which was rapidly covered in soot from
the smoke of local prosperity, a subtle mixture of local historical mythology and
claims for classical taste.
71
Middlesbrough, of recent origin, had to be satisfied
with statues of its founding capitalists, ironmasters, Bolkow and Vaughan. St
Andrews in Fife mixed crow stepped gables with Flemish elements combining a
Scottish statement with a reference to the municipal glories of Flanders. In
Dunfermline, the new corporation buildings of – mixed Scottish Baronial
and French Gothic quietly asserting a mythic Scottish past and claims for
European importance. There was a statue of Robbie Burns inside.
72
Ceremony
was as important as stone in this culture. When the prince of Wales opened
Middlesbrough Town Hall in , he was presented with a key of gold and
Cleveland steel representing local produce as well as the money its production
would make. A wide range of social groups were incorporated in social ritual as
well as political negotiation. When the foundation stone of Glasgow municipal
buildings was laid in , the ceremony was a municipal sacrament. The pro-
cession not only included all elements of authority but also represented the trades
R. J. Morris
69
Quoted by B. I. Coleman, The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, ), p.
.
70
Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Princeton, ).
71
Asa Briggs, ‘Leeds, a study in civic pride’, in Briggs, Victorian Cities, pp. –; Fraser, ed., Leeds,
p. ; Derek Linstrum, West Yorkshire: Architects and Architecture (London, ).
72
John Gifford, The Buildings of Scotland: Fife (London, ), and Glen L. Pride, The Kingdom of
Fife:An Illustrated Architectural Guide (Edinburgh, ). My thanks to Helen Morris for help with
this section.
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of Glasgow. It was an assertion of Glasgow. The mottoes represented that pop-
ulist brand of universality which was so important in working-class culture, both
in England and Scotland; ‘May the tree of liberty flourish around the globe, and
every human being partake of its fruits’; ‘Trust and try.’ The metal workers
carried a working model of the riveters at work. Amongst the corporation trades
people were the gas works employees with model of a gas works, bronzed
furnace rakes and gilded repairing lances. Their banner recommended ‘light,
truth, purity, heat and power’. The cleansing department had a water butt
inscribed ‘down with the dust’. The sanitary department proclaimed ‘testing
your drains saves sorrow, fever and pains’.
73
By the s this municipal culture
had drawn in the aristocracy as patrons, whilst the new associations of the
working classes saw gaining municipal power as a major objective.
Both the historical literature and contemporary reflection provided much less
guidance on the relationships of urban structure and cultures after . This
was the result of a variety of processes which reduced the specific nature of the
links between culture, structure and the urban place. These processes worked in
a number of ways. They increased the universality of many cultural influences.
They also worked to destroy the coherence and integrity of the specific urban
place both as a structure and as a cultural entity.
Between and , the membership of urban economic, social, politi-
cal and cultural elites was overlapping, closely integrated and identified with
place. J. H. Chance the West Bromwich glassmaker was typical of many who
were active in local government, in voluntary and charitable activity as well as
being major local employers and owners of capital. In many Lancashire towns,
leading manufacturers were regarded as natural leaders of local government.
74
Change was slow and uneven but there were three elements. The coming of uni-
versal suffrage between and enabled the Labour party to gain power
in several towns challenging an older elite and creating a new concentration of
power which had no relationship to the ownership and control of local capital.
In the Scottish steelmaking town of Motherwell, David Colville, leading indus-
trialist, and John Craig, one of his employees, were members of parliament and
leaders of the YMCA and Temperance movements. In the s, they were
replaced as a political elite by the Labour party which used the poor law, an
agency of the local state to support the dependants of strikers during the mining
disputes of and .
75
In Ashington, in the Northumberland coalfield, the
power of the duke of Portland was reduced by the mutualist agencies of the
local Co-operative Society in the organisation of retailing and leisure.
76
The
Structure, culture and society in British towns
73
Description of Ceremonial on the Occasion of Laying the Foundation Stone of the Municipal Buildings in
George Square Glasgow, th October (Glasgow, ), pp. –.
74
Trainor, Black Country Elites, p. ; Garrard, Leadership and Power, p. .
75
Duncan, Steelopolis, p. .
76
Mike Kirkup, The Biggest Mining Village in the World:A Social History of Ashington (Morpeth, ).
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authority of many professional groups employed by local government grew
slowly and became decisive in the s when the town clerk, the health pro-
fessionals like the medical officer of health and above all the borough planning
officer and the borough architect were career professionals whose point of ref-
erence was their own professional organisation rather than the local political
elites who employed them.
The most important change was in the structure of the ownership of local
capital. In the Scottish county of Fife, the town of Kirkcaldy was dominated by
the linoleum making firm of Nairn’s. The family lived in or near the town. Their
influence like the smell of their production process pervaded the town. The
cottage hospital was financed in whilst the museum and public library were
memorials to a son killed in the – war.
77
On a larger scale, Benwell, a
western industrial suburb of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was dominated by the great
engineering firms. The families of Armstrong, Stephenson, Hawthorne and
Joicey were linked through marriage and business transactions. They provided
MPs and mayors. They financed schools, hospitals and churches. They were a
visible presence in Newcastle.
78
The change was cumulative. By the s, many
of these families relied on national organisation for their power. The challenge
of the engineering trades unions in the s was met by the Engineering
Employers Federation (). In , the Armstrong Company was forced to
amalgamate with its rival Vickers to avoid bankruptcy. In , coal nationalisa-
tion accelerated the loss of the control of local capital by local families. In
Kirkcaldy, Sir Michael Nairn found he could no longer treat the local hospital
as a personal benevolent interest when he tried to order the relaying of faulty
linoleum. The hospital had recently been transferred to the National Health
Service. Locally owned and controlled companies found themselves increasingly
alongside incomers. In the s, the local companies in the Fife town were now
compared with incomers like De La Rue. In the Clyde shipbuilding towns, US
management styles increased the turmoil of local labour relations.
79
This was not
just a matter of wage rates and differentials but of small things such as setting
aside a room for workpeople to eat their midday ‘piece’. Loss of local control
accelerated in the late s. Many family firms, which survived the s
paying low or no dividends to family shareholders, because they offered employ-
ment to other family members, were closed or taken over.
80
Families which once
owned this local capital had acquired widespread national and international assets
and power. Some retained a local interest in financial services, property devel-
R. J. Morris
77
Morris and Smyth, ‘Paternalism as an employer strategy’.
78
Benwell Community Project, The Final Report No. .The Making of a Ruling Class (Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, ).
79
John Foster and Charles Woolfson, The Politics of the UCS Work-In (London, ), pp. –.
80
Robin Mackie, ‘The survival and decline of locally based and family firms in the Kirkcaldy area,
c. –’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, ).
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opment and in local politics, tending to favour non-elective positions such as the
new town corporations. Urban economic structure was now based upon the
multi-national and multi-locational firm. Headquarters, located in a metropol-
itan centre like London, took the authority which once belonged to the resi-
dent of the ‘maister’s’ house. Many towns were dominated by branch plants,
some ‘footloose’, others more dependent on local skills.
81
Between and the
s, the major owners of capital had detached themselves from the specific
urban place so that control was now mediated through a variety of institutional
forms based upon the state, the market and bureaucracy.
A powerful municipal culture, the integration of local political, economic and
social elites and the local identity and ownership of capital were key features of
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century towns in Britain, but during the
s and s key institutional structures which had supported all this began
to be diminished, undermined and replaced. The poor law which had been the
basis of local power and decision making for three centuries was replaced by
national agencies in and . In Poplar and West Ham, control of the local
elective Board of Guardians was a major target for the local Labour party, as a
means of increasing the welfare of the unemployed. Poplar’s efforts were illegal
and councillors were imprisoned.
82
West Ham was defeated by the refusal of the
Local Government Board to make loans and by the realisation that a spatially
limited agency could do little to counter the effects of international economic
factors which produced the spatially specific and uneven outcome of unemploy-
ment. At the same time, the local elective body was vulnerable to local demon-
strations, pickets and demonstrations. In West Ham, the Guardians were howled
down at public meetings.
83
In , all this was replaced by the Public Assistance
Committees which were controlled from London and had no powers of local
discretion. The process was completed in , when the National Health
Service took over poor law and voluntary hospitals. Very often there was no
direct demolition of a municipal/urban place structure but as new technologies
began to deliver the sort of services which had once been urban-based, new
national rather than urban agencies were formed often as much for political as
for technological reasons. Gas and water had been at the centre of municipal
culture. Electricity rapidly became part of a national grid despite formal own-
ership by local agencies.
84
Newspapers, often two or three per town, had been
a key aspect of urban identity. The new medium of radio was carefully fashioned
as a national identity. Lord Reith the first governor general of the British
Structure, culture and society in British towns
81
D. Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour (London, ).
82
Gillian Rose, ‘Locality, politics and culture: Poplar in the s’, Environment and Planning D:Society
and Space, (), –.
83
John Marriot, The Culture of Labourism (Edinburgh, ).
84
PEP Report on the Supply of Electricity in Great Britain (London, ), pp. –; Report of the
Committee of Inquiry into the Electrical Supply Industry (the Herbert Report), Cmnd (London,
HMSO, ).
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Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) believed that strong central direction would
enlarge cultural interests and help overcome social divisions. The result was the
dominance of a London-centred middle-class elite culture.
85
Universities in their
modern form played a major and complex part in the reproduction of British
culture. Owen’s College in Manchester and the Yorkshire College at Leeds were
products of local initiatives, sponsored by local groups of businessmen, with local
economic interests in mind. Lancashire chemicals and Yorkshire textiles both
stood to gain from the work of their local colleges. Local identity was rapidly
disciplined by two factors, the financial power of the University Grants
Committee and the desire of all institutions to participate in an active and
resourceful international scientific and humanistic culture.
86
The Labour move-
ment changed in the same way, based upon local organisation, the Co-op, the
ILP branch, the socialist Sunday School and the Woodcraft Folk it was rapidly
restructured as a national movement with powerful centralising ambitions. In St
Helens ‘the men at that time became labour people through reading books and
papers . . . the party nationally used to send them out’.
87
At the same time the urban places were changing their social identity. During
the nineteenth century, British towns were middle class. Municipal heroes like
Joseph Chamberlain and William Chambers were from the middle-class elite. In
map, newspaper and directory towns were presented as creations of their middle-
class elite. By the mid-twentieth century middle-class identity had retreated to
the suburbs. For the working classes the journey was in the opposite direction.
The late nineteenth-century working classes operated around the neighbour-
hood.
88
The poor were a product of the slum.
89
During the s and s, the
identity of the town became a working-class one. This move can be seen in
urban politics, in urban leisure identities and in the cultural products and expe-
riences of the towns. This reflected the slow change in the relationship between
capital, labour and the specific urban place. During the nineteenth century,
urban capital mobility was limited. Transaction costs were high because of the
wide range of location specific externalities for the owners of local capital. The
owner merchant-manufacturer benefited from local reputation in terms of
credit. Each industry was surrounded by its supporting services. There was a
R. J. Morris
85
Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, vol. of The History of the Broadcasting in the United Kingdom
(Oxford, ), pp. and –; John Whale, The Politics of the Media (London, ); Raymond
Williams, Television,Technology and Cultural Form (London, ).
86
R. H. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester (Manchester, ), pp. –; P. H. J. H. Gosden
and A. J. Taylor, eds., Studies in the History of a University, to Commemorate the Centenary of the
University of Leeds, – (Leeds, ), pp. –.
87
Charles Forman, Industrial Town (London, ), p. .
88
G. Stedman Jones, ‘Working-class culture and working-class politics in London, –: notes
on the remaking of a working class’, Soc.Hist., (); E. Ross, ‘Survival networks – women’s
neighbourhood sharing in London before World War I’, History Workshop, (), –.
89
Mayne, The Imagined Slum.
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network of credit based upon family, friends and even religious congregation.
The cost of leaving those multi-dimensional but coherent elites was high. In
many cases a skill-specific labour force tied businesses to a particular location. By
the mid-twentieth century capital became more ‘footloose’ and was embedded
in national and international organisation.
90
The influence of structural change
on labour mobility was different. In the nineteenth century transaction costs
were low. Labour had few possessions to carry. There was some loss of poor law
rights but this was reduced in the s. Those with highly paid skills were pre-
pared to move considerable distances, as were Irish and Highland migrants. Wage
earners developed a facility for what would now be called community develop-
ment. Women worked by way of neighbourhood, whilst men devised institu-
tional supports in trades unions and friendly societies. In the twentieth century
transaction costs for labour grew. As the availability of local authority housing
increased, then the length of residence was related to ‘points’ in the queue for
such high quality housing. As the expansion of employment slowed in many
urban areas, the importance of family and friends to ‘speak for’ a job applicant
became increasingly important.
91
In the s and s, urban politics became identified with the working
class, or at least with the working-class party. There was no simple basis to this
identity. The labour politics of Poplar in east London were driven by the moral-
ity and mutuality of its neighbourhood communities as well as the melodrama of
the public meeting and street demonstration.
92
In nearby West Ham, dominated
by Labour from to , the working-class population was more organised.
An industrially weak union movement around the railway and gas works saw pol-
itics as an alternative means to achieve their aims. The Co-op, especially the
Women’s Co-operative Guild was an important means of educating and drawing
people into politics. Stratford Co-op was also used to organise food supplies
during strike action. The unevenness of local Labour political power was an
expression not only of ‘interests’but also of ‘capacities’and ‘alternatives’. In places
like Middlesbrough the Liberal party proved able to accommodate the ambitions
of a mainly skilled organised working class. By , Labour-controlled local
authorities included West Ham, St Helens, Wigan, Merthyr Tydfil, Smethwick,
Birkenhead and Sheffield, the only large-sized town. In Sheffield the ‘success’ of
labour was related to the weakness of local municipal traditions and the incoher-
ence of the urban elite.
93
It was not until the s that labour administrations
gained power in major centres like Leeds and Glasgow.
The impact of these changes appeared in a series of articles on major provin-
cial cities which appeared in Picture Post in the late s. This was a self-conscious
Structure, culture and society in British towns
90
Massey, Spatial Divisions.
91
M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, ); P. Willmott and
M. Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London, ).
92
Gillian Rose, ‘Poplar in the s’, –.
93
Smith, Conflict and Compromise.
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middle-class informed radical paper with a forceful London-based perspective. Its
reporters and camera men were both disturbed and filled with wonder at what they
saw. In Glasgow, they met a ‘veteran socialist’ P. J. Dollan and saw a labour city
which had made progress ‘with slum clearance and re-housing . . . [and the] free
distribution of milk to schoolchildren’.
94
On the Tyne, they were troubled by ‘one
class towns’; ‘what can you do to build up a properly balanced local government
in a place like Jarrow, when more than half the working population were out of
work for years and the middle class does not exist’.
95
In many towns, working-class
neighbourhoods came to represent the town. In Newcastle, the ‘Scotswood Road’
was a symbol of Newcastle and the Tyne, in part because of the regional national
anthem, the Blaydon Races, and in part because it was the basis of a powerful
working-class culture. In Glasgow, the Gorbals played the same role.
96
The complex relationship of working-class identity with the urban place was
not just a matter of politics but was expressed and experienced through profes-
sional sport. Professional sport was one of the most distinctive products of the
industrial towns. The new codes which the gentlemen evangelicals brought to
the boys clubs of the s were rapidly appropriated. This development
reflected many defining aspects of the urban. The new codes involved a disci-
plined rule-based contest on the spatially bounded area of the pitch, a perfect
response to the scarcity of space and complexity of the urban. They were played
before growing crowds of paying spectators recruited from a massed population
which was just beginning to experience a little surplus time and income for
leisure. The multiplication of teams allowed these urban populations to make
choices of identities and loyalties. Such sport was market-based, rule-based and
bounded. It was urban but the actions and cultures produced a web of identities
and relationships which went well beyond sport.
When Newcastle United won the English Football Association Cup in ,
and , they exposed the dynamic relationships of class, city and region
in the first half of the twentieth century. The nature of the team, the newspaper
press and local government gave the town and the municipality a central place.
The triumphant return of the team to Central Station and the pre-match dinner
involved mayor, sheriff, town clerk, councillors, MPs and the Tramways Band.
Emphasis was placed on social unity. Supporters were greeted by a director of
the London and North-Eastern Railway (LNER) at King’s Cross. There was still
some coherence between local people and local capital. When the winning goal
was scored in , ‘men who had never met before shook hands, Byker and
Jesmond, Scotswood and Gosforth had forgotten all social barriers’.
97
This
was during a decade of bitter trades union conflict especially in the locally
important mining industry.
R. J. Morris
94
Picture Post, Apr. .
95
Ibid., Dec.
96
A. McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, No Mean City (London, ); A. Desmond Walton (com-
piler) Old Scotswood Road (Newcastle, ).
97
Sunday Sun, Apr. .
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The experience of ‘the match’placed Newcastle in a hierarchy of village, small
town and wider region. Many of the players came from the villages and small
towns around Newcastle. Jack Allen who scored the goal in came from
Newburn, a small village long ago overtaken by the expansion of Newcastle. His
mother went to see the match but his dad was doing the delivery rounds from
the shop. As he did so people kept coming out of their houses to tell him the
news from the ‘wireless’. The new technology made this a shared event for the
whole of Tyneside. In the crowds had gathered around the newspaper
offices to hear the results coming over the telegraph.
98
Ashington continued to
provided players like Jackie Milburn into the s but by the s the Charlton
brothers went to Leeds and Manchester to play their football. The national and
later international market destroyed the coherence of the local and the urban.
The central event was the ‘invasion’ of London, a class event and a centre
periphery event. The ‘cloth caps’ took over London. The cloth cap was a pow-
erful image of the working class and the North. When Picture Post went to
Wigan, the dominant photograph was of two men standing at the bar in cloth
caps drinking their beer from a glass without a handle. There was no need for a
caption.
99
The notion of the ‘invasion’ of London by the North was one which
went back at least as far as the Great Exhibition.
100
It was based upon the railway
network. The railway made the trip to the final a major collective experience in
a way which the dominant road system of the late twentieth century does not.
This was an important provincial metropolitan relationship embedded in the
structure of an urban hierarchy dominated by London but in which Newcastle
was a powerful independent and self-confident part. London was a dynamic and
exciting source of cultural energy. There was a mixture of naive wonder and self-
confidence in taking over the metropolis. In , the crowds were ‘admiring
the wonderful electric signs’.
101
They were equally pleased with the statue put
up in Trafalgar Square (the Newcastle captain was called Jimmy Nelson ). At the
same time the Tynesiders were sure that they could teach London a thing or two
about friendliness and enjoying themselves.
The manner in which urban culture represented urban experience led to a
number of newspaper cartoons which appeared in the s reflecting s
boyhood experience. Andy Capp first appeared in the Daily Mirror in . He
was so named because he wore a cap and was one (at least to his wife). His creator
Reg Smyth claimed that ‘the workshy little fellow who bullied his wife and liked
his beer . . . [was] . . . just like they are in Hartlepool’.
102
Maybe that was true
but the workshy bit was a charivari inversion of the skilled heavy industry wage
earners’ need to control the pace of labour and the ill-treated wife reflected
the power relationships of an economy in which high paid male manual labour
Structure, culture and society in British towns
198
Ibid.
99
Picture Post, Nov. .
100
Tommy Tredllehoyle, Trip to Lunnan (Manchester, ).
101
Newcastle Daily Journal, Apr. .
102
Northern Journal, Nov. .
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dominated. It was quite different from the Broons, a Dundee-based cartoon in
which a large turbulent family maintained a contested gender balance, reflecting
a local economy dominated by female factory work. Glasgow took a different
approach. Lobey Dosser, the Calton Cowboy, rode the Wild West with a
Glasgow accent.
103
It could only have been the product of many boyhood hours
in cinemas showing film after film from Hollywood. The universal experience
of the cinema was turned into a very specific local experience just as a hundred
years before the middle-class elite of the great cities had appropriated the music
of Europe to create their own specific urban traditions such as the Hallé
Orchestra. This tension between the international product, often of US origin,
and the local and specific was a major feature of urban culture after the s.
After , the language of urban social description and the conditions under
which that language was generated changed in ways which reflected changes in
urban structures and institutions. The main architects of these descriptions
were no longer clergyman and doctors deeply embedded in the local elite, but
were more likely to be academics and planners whose points of reference were
national and even international peer groups. The Social Survey of Merseyside
carried out by D. Caradog Jones and his assistants from the School of Social
Sciences in Liverpool University was characteristic of a number of surveys of
poverty which included that by Herbert Tout on Bristol and the New Survey of
London. Explanation and understanding was sought in class terms but there was
little evidence of the sense of conflict evident in mid-nineteenth-century studies
nor even the ‘threat’ which remained in later studies. Class was expressed in
terms of consumption through a concept of poverty and through housing con-
ditions. The middle class, excluded from the survey, ate more meat and fresh
vegetables than the working class and regarded the bath as a ‘necessity’ not a
luxury.
104
There was little effort in Britain to study ‘an urban way of life’
although much attention was given to the relationship between urban and rural.
Social structure and the city were related in both academic and popular work
through area and place as the unit of study and description. In Liverpool and
Birkenhead ‘mostly working class property [had] sunk into slums’ which were
quite different from ‘rows of villas and new housing estates, together with super-
ior middle class suburbs’.
105
Picture Post in its accounts of provincial cities used
the association with instinctive skill; ‘the snack bar of the Grand Hotel . . . fash-
ionable Birmingham . . . , the Casino Dance Rooms . . . not quite so fashion-
able Birmingham, Hockley way . . . skilled craftsmen . . . , aristocratic
Edgebaston . . . , Handsworth . . . dull respectability’.
106
By the s, the under-
standing and identification of the relationships of social structure to the urban
R. J. Morris
103
Actually Bud Neill learnt his culture from the cinema in the Troon Playhouse; Ranald MacColl,
Lobey’s the Wee Boy: Five Lobey Dosser Adventures by Bud Neill (Glasgow, c. ).
104
D. C. Jones, ed., Merseyside, vol. (Liverpool, ), pp. and .
105
Ibid., , p. .
106
Picture Post, Jan.
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entered a new phase in which the specificity of the urban place declined. Bethnal
Green was the place to find the working-class family and examine the relation-
ship between the working-class family and space/place. Understanding was
based upon the ‘traditional urban space’ of densely packed housing with a stable,
interrelated population. This was contrasted with the new spaces of the munic-
ipal housing estate and middle-class villa development.
107
Banbury in
Oxfordshire was an ideal place to contrast the status-related behaviour of a tra-
ditional elite with that of the more privatised and conflicting values of the in-
migrant sections of the population. The account retained much of the specificity
of Banbury but the author admitted it was exceptional that ‘an area can be iso-
lated for study in so closely integrated a country as Great Britain’.
108
In the s,
Luton was simply a place in which the affluent workers could be studied. Little
reference was made to the specific nature of the place. The study was part of a
national debate about the manner in which well-paid wage earners acquired
middle-class values.
109
In Britain a society of urban places had completed its
transformation into an urban society.
Between and the urban place changed from an entity which could
be experienced as a unit to one which could be conceived as a unity before
finally becoming the environment which encompassed experiences and com-
munities. The ‘knowable community’ began in the coffee house or market place
in which walking and talking made possible the concept of an urban place.
110
By the s, the urban place was incorporated in the meeting, the organisation
that carried the name of the town and above all the municipal, the agent of local
government. This was ‘knowable’ through the media of print. Newspapers were
identified with the particular urban place. They created a basis of common
knowledge for drawing room and neighbourhood. The printed report and the
poster supplemented this knowledge. Philanthropy and voluntary action were
important but by the s it was the municipal, its buildings, actions and public
figures like the mayor who were the known community for each urban place.
Politicians and philanthropists who were often also owners of local capital and
leading professional people were public figures who inhabited reports and plat-
forms to the common knowledge of the urban population. It was this coher-
ence which fragmented in the twentieth century. Known communities were
national, specialised or neighbourhood.
Nowhere was this change clearer than in the novels produced at the start and
end of the period. Charles Dickens was a man who made sense of London. His
novels display anger and alienation. The uncaring detachment of governors and
profit takers was often represented by urban description like that of Tom All
Structure, culture and society in British towns
107
Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London.
108
M. Stacey, Tradition and Change (London, ), p. vi.
109
John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker,
vols. (Cambridge, ).
110
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, ).
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