Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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local autonomy and opposition to centralisation in the nineteenth century was
in part an attempt to maintain those distinctive urban features that contributed
to the prosperity of local inhabitants. This perspective on the internal dynam-
ics of the industrial city challenges the view, characteristic of a post-s phase
of industrialisation, that cities are at best an irrelevance and at worst a hindrance
to economic development. This was certainly not the case in the heyday of the
industrial city. Then the different factor endowments of highly individual towns
contributed a powerful supply side explanation for the specific character of
industrialisation in a given urban locus and these distinctive characteristics in
turn redefined relationships both within and between regional economic
systems bound together by a network of external economies.
2
However, the
urban context of regional economic development is a neglected subject and on
the externalities which this context offered to firms are frequently taken for
granted.
Conventional accounts of economic change have not only tended to reinforce
the stereotypical view of the industrial city; they have also given the impression
that it was a dependent variable whose fortunes were prey to powerful economic
forces over which they had no control. If, therefore, one aim of this chapter is
to survey the impact of industrialisation on the modern city economy, and on
the city itself, to an extent, another aim is to highlight the ways in which the
industrial city operated to promote and retain business. The question then to
consider is whether this role was maintained or undermined during the course
of the twentieth century.
(i)
Towns and cities were the information superhighways of the nineteenth century.
The coffee-houses, clubs and pubs to be found in urban locations offered infor-
mation about local trading conditions, investment and work opportunities,
where labour might be hired and supplies obtained. Not to be in touch incurred
a risk for business and from the second quarter of the nineteenth century the
proliferation of trade directories, masonic lodges and trade associations was
indicative of a demand for business news. Information concerning risk and
uncertainty, key variables in business survival, could be evaluated more fully
where bankers, insurance agents, brokers, merchants and distributors coexisted
in close proximity. Just how significant knowledge-based human capital is to the
process of industrial development has been underlined in a recent econometric
study whose authors demonstrate that as represented by professional groups, it
exerted a systematic influence on the long-run growth of British cities from
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
2
See, for example, the work of P. Hudson, ‘Capital and credit in the West Riding wool textile indus-
try c. –’, in P. Hudson, ed., Regions and Industries (Cambridge, ), pp. –. For the
origins of regional economies see Clark, ed., Cambridge Urban History of Britain, .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
.
3
As they provocatively assert: ‘The talk of the bourgeoisie, not the smoke
of the factory, was the defining characteristic of the modern city economy’ – an
interesting reversal of the conventional view of the role of the city in the growth
of commerce and the professions. However, there were more direct and infor-
mal ways of acquiring the knowledge necessary to assessing the credentials and
trustworthiness of business contacts, and to monitoring quality and ensuring
supplies – all of which were imperative to success in the volatile business envi-
ronment of the Victorian city.
This volatility was a particular feature of urban economies dependent on the
operations of small firms. Predictably, one man firms and family enterprises
tended to cluster in retail and building – sectors that served a predominantly local
market – but they were also to be found in the manufacturing sectors of the
urban economy with national and even international markets. A striking feature
of the economies of Scottish towns in the mid-Victorian decades and after was
the existence of both concentration and fragmentation in business organisation
with per cent of firms in employing over a quarter of the total workforce,
whilst per cent of firms employed fewer than twenty workers apiece.
4
There
is no reason for thinking that this pattern was not replicated in England and
Wales, as the county-based evidence on employment sizes indirectly suggests.
Even in the North-West region, where small firms were relatively less well rep-
resented, the Manchester factory system of the s had a dualistic character
‘which was dominated by a small number of large-scale firms overlooking a thick
undergrowth of very small scale enterprises’.
5
One reason for the number of
small firms in manufacturing was that traditional techniques and labour-
intensive production methods enabled workshop-based, handicraft production
to coexist with more technically advanced and larger scale activity for much
longer than a simple chronology of scientific inventions.
6
In this highly com-
petitive world of small producer capitalism, personal reputation and a first-hand
knowledge were at a premium.
Crucial to the strategies of small and medium-sized firms seeking to achieve
stability or growth was a private world of social networks established, for
example, through church and chapel, or by means of personal and kinship
ties, or through overlapping leisure and cultural pursuits. Chapel-going in
Industrialisation and the city economy
3
C. J. Simon and C. Nardinelli, ‘The talk of the town: human capital, information, and the growth
of English cities, –’, Explorations in Economic History, (), –.
4
R. Rodger, ‘Concentration and fragmentation: capital, labor, and the structure of mid-Victorian
Scottish industry’, JUH, (), –; P. Johnson, ‘Economic development and industrial
dynamism in Victorian London’, LJ, (), .
5
R. Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis, Manchester and the Age of the Factory (Manchester, ), p. .
6
M. Berg, ‘Technological change in Birmingham and Sheffield in the eighteenth century’, in
P. Clark and P. Corfield, eds., Industry and Urbanisation in Eighteenth Century England (Leicester,
), pp. –; R. Samuel, ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in
mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal, (), –.
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nonconformist business communities, to highlight one element in this, was not
only important in shaping the outlook of the parvenu industrial entrepreneur, but
in factory towns relatively devoid of family connections, involvement in the
chapel played a ‘large, sometimes overwhelming part in the establishment of
business reputations’.
7
Recent work on the operations of small firms has empha-
sised the importance of family to business survival, whether in terms of family
partnerships – important to those industrial sectors with a need for relatively
high levels of fixed capital – or in terms of a multitude of small individual enter-
prises which relied on their families to provide capital, labour and premises.
Indeed, the survival of any city business beyond the life span of the founder
depended to a considerable extent on the ability and willingness of family
members to become involved. Families were of importance also in the forma-
tion of locally based networks of trust; and in several of the manufacturing
trades, informal networks, external to the firm but internal to local communi-
ties, were reinforced by geographical concentrations into particular districts or
localities.
8
Early access to local information networks was one of the external
economies that Alfred Marshall thought significant enough to substitute for the
internal economies of large-scale production in what he called the ‘industrial
districts’.
9
The development of a more formal institutional framework to help provide a
measure of control in an uncertain world complemented but never replaced
these informal links. The Chamber of Commerce was perhaps the most impor-
tant of these institutions, formed in the major towns and cities from the eigh-
teenth century, mainly by leading employers but seeking to represent the
interests of the business community as a whole, a responsibility which in Scottish
burghs was discharged by the guildry – members of the general business com-
munity – who elected representatives directly to key council committees. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, associations of specific producers –
iron and coal masters, employers in engineering, cotton manufacturing and
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
7
T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society (Cambridge, ), p. .
8
S. Nenadic, ‘The small family firm in Victorian Britain’, Business History, (), –;
S. Nenadic, et al., ‘Record-linkage and the small family firm: Edinburgh –’, Bulletin of the
John Rylands Library, (), –; S. Nenadic, ‘The life-cycle of firms in late nineteenth-
century Britain’, in P. Joubert and M. Moss, eds., The Birth and Death of Companies (Carnforth and
Park Ridge, N. J., ); and S. Nenadic, ‘The Victorian middle classes’, in W. H. Fraser and I.
Maver, eds., Glasgow, vol. : to (Manchester, ), esp, pp. –. See also G. Jones
and M. B. Rose, ‘Family capitalism’, Business History, (), –; M. B. Rose, ‘Beyond
Buddenbrooks: the family firm and the management of succession in nineteenth-century Britain’,
in J. Brown and M. B. Rose, eds., Entrepreneurship, Networks, and Modern Business (Manchester,
), pp. –; and R. Church, ‘The family firm in industrial capitalism: international per-
spectives on hypotheses and history’, Business History, (), –.
9
Marshall, Principles, Bk , ch. , quoted by W. Lazonick in B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick, The Decline
of the British Economy (Oxford, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
shipbuilding – consolidated their mutual interests into loose federations, forfeit-
ing a measure of independence principally in the quest for a more concerted
approach to wage negotiations.
10
In such cases, mutual gain outweighed indi-
vidual autonomy in the search for industrial expansion, and in other respects,
too, industrialists acknowledged that they needed to concede a degree of inde-
pendence for the advantages conveyed by provincial stock and commodity
exchanges, banks and new forms of company organisation fostered by legisla-
tion governing joint-stock companies () and limited liability (). Even
at the more modest level of the small producer and distributor, a network of
city-based Trade Protection Societies developed in the second half of the nine-
teenth century to inform members of those debtors against whom they had
taken action through the courts on their behalf to recover debts.
11
Only where
sufficient numbers of industrialists or members of employers’ organisations
existed could the advantages and the overheads associated with formal cooper-
ation outweigh the costs. It was the larger towns and cities, therefore, which
were the forcing house for institutional development, as they were for informal
contacts, and in conveying this advantage, the improved information networks
which developed themselves reinforced the position of the larger urban and
regional centres.
In contrast to such forces for more concerted institutional development, the
financing of industry is worth further comment since it illustrates the parallel
development of relative autonomy in the provision of credit and capital prior to
the twentieth century.
12
In the mid-Victorian decades banking was conducted
locally and on a relatively small scale by private and joint-stock banks whose
business was heavily dependent on the economy of the immediate vicinity. In
many urban localities in the northern and Midland industrial regions, interrela-
tions between banking and industry were close: businessmen were influential
participants in the work of local banks, and, as directors, able to offer their per-
sonal knowledge of the credentials of applicants for overdrafts, a common source
of business capital. This was, however, a system under pressure as structural and
institutional changes in banking began to undermine these local links which
became increasingly mediated through people and institutions based in or con-
nected with regional capitals. However, financial historians have argued that in
the later nineteenth century there were other sources of funds available locally
Industrialisation and the city economy
10
See, for example, J. McKenna and R. Rodger, ‘Control by coercion: employers’ associations and
the establishment of industrial order in the building industry of England and Wales –’,
Business History Review, (), –.
11
N. Wood, ‘Debt, credit and business strategy: the law and the local economy, –’ (PhD
thesis, University of Leicester, ).
12
For a review of the sustained importance of local capital supplies see R. Burt, ‘Segmented capital
markets and patterns of investment in late Victorian Britain: some evidence from the non-ferrous
mining industry’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –.
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to British businessmen, many of them small specialist producers, and the endur-
ing nature of locally funded firms cannot be stressed enough.
13
An evolving apparatus of commercial and financial institutions was comple-
mented by the provision of private and public infrastructural support.
Businessmen, including industrialists, were like other middle-class investors
active in the market for railway stock, and the railway companies’ sidings, engine
sheds and operating facilities occupied some to per cent of the urban area of
the larger British cities.
14
In contrast to these private initiatives, albeit with very
public results in terms of the zoning of cities and the development of transport
corridors through them, a public contribution to industrial development was
also forthcoming. Through the town council and its committees, new roads and
sewers were laid out, streets straightened and widened to facilitate commerce and
insanitary areas prejudicial to business interests cleared; gas and water undertak-
ings were increasingly taken into the public domain, and in the later part of the
century technical schools and colleges were built, franchises for trams and power
generation granted, and licences of various sorts approved.
In varying degrees, each of these municipal strategies provided infrastructural
support for business activities financed overwhelmingly by a system of local tax-
ation whose incidence fell almost exclusively upon residential rather than busi-
ness interests. However, municipal relations with business were not always
harmonious. In many towns and cities there was a tension between a wish to
attract business and a perceived need to mitigate through by-laws and other reg-
ulations the diseconomies caused by industrialisation from smoke emissions and
water pollutants. Concern for environmental standards was used to legitimate
official interventions which, though designed to contain industrial contamina-
tion, could also be to the advantage of industrial and business interests.
15
The
provincial cities, and the burgeoning administration they required, offered a way
forward by which business interests might hope to shape their own future while
displaying civic involvement. Whilst this remained the case, as it was for most of
the century, the business elite represented an important constituency in council
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
13
We have drawn mainly on M. Collins, Banks and Industrial Finance in Britain, –
(Basingstoke, ), and P. L. Cottrell, Industrial Finance – (London, ). The few local
studies include M. Collins and P. Hudson, ‘Provincial bank lending: Yorkshire and Merseyside
–’, Bulletin of Economic Research, (), and L. Newton, ‘Regional bank–industry rela-
tions during the mid-nineteenth century: links between bankers and manufacturing in Sheffield,
c. to c. ’, Business History, (), –. F. Capie and M. Collins, ‘Industrial lending
by English commercial banks s–. Why did banks refuse loans?’, Business History, (),
–, show that banks did approve lending to industrialists but only after very careful thought.
14
J. R. Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities (London, ), p. .
15
For the Manchester experience, R. H. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester (Manchester, ),
pp. –. More generally see B. W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial
Revolution (London, ).
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chambers throughout the United Kingdom, even if the extent of their repre-
sentation and commitment to developing municipal services varied as between
different towns and cities.
These externalities apart, perhaps the most obvious advantage which towns
and cities offered manufacturers was an almost infinite supply of labour.
Although urban population growth rates in the established industrial regions may
have peaked in the s, the impact of net natural increase as well as of contin-
uing urban immigration (proportionately less significant in the later decades of
the century) ensured that until the s at least the population growth of most
industrial towns and cities was sustained. An accumulating reservoir of labour,
particularly amongst the unskilled and semi-skilled, exerted downward pressures
on wages and thus reduced manufacturers’ labour costs. Furthermore, with social
welfare costs absorbed in varying degrees by charity and poor law guardians,
fluctuations in output and pressure on profitability could be met by forcing
adjustments on to labour, specifically through lower wages and bouts of unem-
ployment. British industrialists’ preference for an essentially labour-intensive
mode of production was consistent with this continuing supply of low-skilled,
low-wage labour, and, it has been argued, was a rational business strategy, at least
at the plant if not at a national level, which contrasted markedly with the high-
technology innovation and investment approaches adopted by German and
American industrialists from the s.
16
That said, some manufacturing employers acknowledged the importance of
their relationships with workforces and local communities. By the s this was
reflected in the strategy of factory paternalism, of particular significance in the
smaller textile towns, where it was based on the cultivation of personal rela-
tionships between the business-owning family and the families of the work-
force.
17
Elsewhere, the existence of a dominant employer had far-reaching
consequences for local communities taken to an extreme in factory districts such
as Ackroyden, Saltaire, Port Sunlight and Bournville where relatively enlight-
ened entrepreneurs, often Quakers, accepted responsibility for infrastructural
provision and social facilities. Even where this kind of paternalism was not prac-
tised, a factory owner with a dominant position in a town was able to exert con-
trols over the housing and living conditions of the families he employed, as in
Clydebank, or in various colliery districts, where supervisors and foremen have
been likened to ‘non-commissioned officers’ able to exercise considerable
Industrialisation and the city economy
16
For the argument about rationality, see D. N. McCloskey and L. G. Sandberg, ‘From damnation
to redemption: judgements on the late-Victorian entrepreneur’, Explorations in Economic History,
(), –; for an extensive bibliography on British business see P. L. Payne, British
Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, ).
17
P. Joyce, Work,Politics and Society (Brighton, ); H. F. Gospel, Markets,Firms,and the Management
of Labour in Modern Britain (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
influence over their workforce and families by favours concerning the availabil-
ity of work and housing accommodation.
18
In manufacturing industry generally, recruitment of labour was usually ad hoc
and often based on family contacts. Where the local economy was not firing on
all cylinders, these informal contacts were all the more important, with foremen
able to dispense considerable patronage through the allocation of a limited
amount of work. Wage bargaining was also locally based although from the s
subject less to plant level negotiations and increasingly to more formal negotia-
tions between employers’ associations and city-wide branches of trade unions.
These changed institutional arrangements were complemented from in
certain industries by compulsory conciliation and arbitration procedures, though
to begin with such arrangements were usually locally based too, ‘covering a town
or district which suited a situation where labour and product markets were still
often local in scope’.
19
Finally, it is worth noting how the operations of craft-based industries, par-
ticularly the metalworking industries, were closely linked into the labour
resources of local communities. Small firms producing a wide range of
differentiated products benefited from the traditions of skill in localised manu-
facturing districts in which knowledge of materials and methods was transmit-
ted across the generations by parental example and in locally based
apprenticeship systems. This practical, low-cost approach to training and recruit-
ment had come to be supplemented by the end of the century with the evening
classes of the city technical colleges and the quasi-vocational and more practical
studies of higher grade schools.
20
To summarise, towns and cities offered the advantages of concentration to
industry as expressed through a supportive network of institutional structures
which added a measure of social stability as well as of economic stability under
conditions of rapid change. The economic advantages of concentration were
associated with reduced costs of production, giving a commercial edge in an
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
18
J. Melling, ‘ “Non-commissioned officers”: British employers and their supervisory workers,
–’, Soc. Hist. (), –; K. Burgess, ‘Authority relations and the division of
labour in British industry, with special reference to Clydeside –’, Soc. Hist., (),
–. For historical commentaries on labour strategies and the management of labour more
generally, see H. F. Gospel and C. R. Littler, eds., Managerial Strategies and Industrial Relations
(London, ) and Gospel, Markets, p. , notes that ‘there was insufficient organisational ability
in most British firms to develop and administer strong internal systems of labour management’.
19
Gospel, Markets, p. . Note also the importance of familial and community checks in monitor-
ing apprenticeship in the shipyard trades: A. McKinley, ‘A certain short-sightedness: metal
working, innovation, and apprenticeship –’, in H. F. Gospel, ed., Industrial Training and
Technological Innovation (London, ), p. .
20
For recent commentaries on apprenticeship as a form of industrial training see C. More, Skill and
the English Working Class, – (London, ), and B. Elbaum, ‘The persistence of appren-
ticeship in Britain and its decline in the United States’, in Gospel, ed., Industrial Training, pp.
–. See below, pp. –, for the development of scientific and technical education.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
increasingly well-informed market. The urban dimension through formal
markets and informal networks offered opportunities to producers to secure
credit, screen sharp practices, regulate quality of workmanship, control access to
suppliers and customers, enforce contracts and thereby to delimit the scale of
risk. In the language of the business historian, cities offered externalities which
helped minimise transaction costs. New factors affecting this process were trans-
port changes and the further development of communications with the inven-
tion of the telegraph and telephone. These developments, particularly rapid after
, exposed producers to greater competition and narrower margins by
shrinking distance and time, thereby putting a further premium on commercial
information and institutional control.
(ii) -
The linkages between industrialisation, the growth of employment opportuni-
ties and the fortunes of British towns and cities are both obvious but yet difficult
to disentangle, given the considerable variation in the trajectories and resulting
profiles of urban-industrial development. One approach emphasises the impor-
tance of regional specialisation in a periodisation which uses the Kondratief long
waves as an heuristic device to identify phases of development.
21
Thus the period
from the s to the s can be depicted as an extended ‘Industrial
Revolution’ phase in which urban growth was concentrated on towns and cities
in established textile, mining and metalworking regions, and from the s was
a notable feature also of those regions whose economies were being transformed
by the application of new engineering techniques, development of steel, expan-
sion of chemicals, the growth of railway terminals and locomotive construction.
On Tyneside, Teesside and Clydeside, the interdependency of a group of
leading sector industries – coal, iron and steel, engineering and shipbuilding –
was the driving force in economic growth benefiting older established industrial
centres such as Newcastle as well as bringing new centres of mushrooming pop-
ulation into being, such as Middlesbrough or Barrow-in-Furness, to take an
example from the North-West industrial region. Developments in the iron and
steel industry were pivotal and because iron bars, pipes and tubes, sheet steel and
plates were essential intermediate products for railway, marine, civil and related
areas of heavy engineering, then for reasons of convenience and transport costs,
the location of firms in these specialist areas was almost invariably near the point
of production. As a general rule, the ratio of value to volume in iron and steel
was low and so transport costs ruled out moving such heavy and bulky goods far
Industrialisation and the city economy
21
G. Shaw, ‘Industrialisation, urban growth and the city economy’, in R. Lawton, ed., The Rise and
Fall of Great Cities (London, ), pp. –.
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from the blast furnace or coal pit, a circumstance which contrasted strongly with
consumer goods industries where high value added was not overturned by long-
distance transport costs. South Wales was the exception, failing to develop its
coal- and iron-producing capabilities into this kind of interlinked regional
economy, with adverse consequences for the nineteenth-century growth of
Cardiff, the coal metropolis of the west, but a city with a negligible manufac-
turing base. Old industrial cities, outside of the dynamic regions, were unable
to sustain momentum, as in the case of Norwich, whose successor industries to
the defunct textiles were insufficiently important to arrest this city’s slide down
the urban rankings from fourteenth to thirty-second place between and
.
22
Regional economic development set the parameters for the economic
growth of particular towns and cities, although in Scotland there were always
pockets of industrial nonconformity in which regional influences were minimal.
There were also English county towns, such as Ipswich, which developed a man-
ufacturing basis dependent on a mainly agricultural region.
In the phase after the s to the First World War, the links between indus-
trialisation and urban growth were affected not only by a more complex pattern
of regional trends but also by an altogether wider economic base to urbanisation
with the expansion of commercial services and service-oriented industries.
During this phase urban growth was itself a potent influence in generating new
employment opportunities especially in food processing, retailing, the building
industry and transport, with multiplier effects which may have had as much or
more importance than the direct contribution of manufacturing employment
for which the larger industrial towns and cities were noted. The growth of
demand for services and consumer-oriented industries gave competitive advan-
tages to towns within the metropolitan orbit resulting in the beginnings of a
migrational shift from older areas of traditional manufacturing to London and
the South-East.
23
Prior to the First World War the experiences of the established industrial
regions became more variable. Some regions – the Black Country for example
– went through a transitional phase in the later nineteenth century. The
Lancashire cotton region was beginning to suffer from competitive pressures on
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
22
For Teesside and Tyneside, see N. McCord, North East England (London, ), esp. Part
–, and I. Bullock, ‘The origins of economic growth on Teesside, –’, NHist.,
(), –; for Clydeside, A. Slaven, The Economic Development of the West of Scotland –
(London, ); for Merseyside, see S. Marriner, A Social and Economic History of Merseyside
(London, ); for South Wales, see M. J. Daunton, Coal Metropolis (Leicester, ), pp. –.
The reference to Norwich comes from Clark and Corfield, eds., Industry and Urbanisation, p. ix.
23
C. H. Lee, ‘Regional growth and structural change in Victorian Britain’, Ec.HR, nd series,
(), – and C. H. Lee, ‘Regional structure and change’, in J. Langton and R. J. Morris,
eds., Atlas of Industrialising Britain, – (London, ), pp. , –; and C. H. Lee, ‘The
service sector, regional specialisation and economic growth in the Victorian economy’, Journal of
Historical Geography, (), –.
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its chief export, whilst other regions, such as Tyneside, were still rapidly expand-
ing production and urban populations. But if stability of employment is taken
into account, it can be argued that the most important contrast emerging before
the end of the nineteenth century was that between the industrial North
(including industrial Scotland) and a broadly defined southern region, especially
outside London, whose superiority in terms of higher levels of employment was
structural in nature.
24
A significant element in the structural advantage of the
Kentish region prior to was ‘the existence of small scale, often traditional
forms of manufacture, of the kind that abounded in Kent’
25
and which helped
to make the Kentish towns, outside of the Thames-side industrial belt, less vul-
nerable to cyclical influences.
During the s regional experiences tended to polarise in terms of wage
rates and unemployment levels, as the Barlow Report on the distribution of
industrial population was to make clear in making a distinction between the
declining outer regions of industrial Britain, affected by structural and cyclical
unemployment in export-oriented staple industries, and the more prosperous
regions, which included parts of the Midlands, the metropolitan region and the
South-East.
26
Contrasting regional fortunes lay behind the somewhat jaundiced
comparison that J. B. Priestley made in his English Journey between the sooty and
ugly environment of the mill and foundry towns of an old industrial England
‘no longer added to’ and ‘with no new life poured in’ and the consumerism and
modernity of a new urban England ‘of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling sta-
tions and factories that look like exhibition buildings’.
27
The continued advances
of electric power generation contributed to this new industrial geography by
reducing the former dependence on coal supplies. A liberating development, it
enabled the service-oriented industries of towns and cities on the edges of met-
ropolitan areas to gain competitive advantage as new growth centres.
Whilst regional trends provide a discursive framework for interpreting the
differing experiences of industrial towns and cities, the regional effect cannot be
statistically demonstrated and needs to be complemented by an approach that
concentrates more on the changing mix of economic activities in particular
industrial centres. It was never the case that all towns in a region had similar
growth rates, since their experience varied according to the composition of
declining and expanding industries within them.
28
Thus different towns in the
Black Country were affected to differing degrees by the crisis which the district
Industrialisation and the city economy
24
H. R. Southall, ‘The origins of the depressed areas: unemployment, growth and regional eco-
nomic structure before ’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –.
25
A. Armstrong, ed., The Economy of Kent – (Maidstone, ), p. .
26
Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, Report, Cmd ().
See also J. P. Fogarty, Prospects of the Industrial Areas of Great Britain (London, ), pp. –.
27
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (New York, ), pp. –.
28
B. T. Robson, Urban Growth (London, ), pp. –. See also the discussion by R. Dennis,
English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
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