Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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as a whole went through in the later nineteenth century. In the cotton district
of Lancashire, the town of Preston was exceptional in being able to recover from
economic decline in the later nineteenth century to diversify away from reliance
on an export-oriented staple and benefit from its growing importance as a
regional service centre. Even in regions which suffered from very heavy unem-
ployment in the interwar years, the individual characteristics of towns mediated
the impact of depression. So also in the more prosperous regions of the South
and South-East, there was no uniform pattern of urbanisation.
29
Few, if any, urban locations were dominated exclusively by a single industrial
activity, depending more typically on a variable mix of economic interests. It was
the mix of these interests – manufacturing industry as contrasted with commer-
cial activities, several complementary industries or a single sector, dominated by
skill in contrast with unskilled and irregular employment opportunities, males as
opposed to female-dominated workplaces – which perhaps more than anything
else imprinted towns and cities with different social structures and characteris-
tics. Without wishing to be unduly deterministic, urban social and political
fingerprinting resulted in no small measure from the employment characteristics
within the city boundaries.
The most obvious general comparison to make perhaps is that between highly
specialised industrial towns and cities and those with a greater variety of indus-
tries and of economic functions. Some locations were entirely dominated by a
single industry – for example, Ebbw Vale, Middlesbrough and Motherwell
where steel works predominated, or shipbuilding centres, such as Jarrow and
Birkenhead, or the engineering towns of Crewe, Coventry and Derby. In these
and other towns concentration was reinforced when the leading industry was in
the hands of one or two large organisations, such as Pilkington’s at St Helens,
the railway works in Derby, the two large firms (after ) of Dorman Long
and Bolckow Vaughan in Middlesbrough, the Thames-side naval dockyard
towns and those with ordnance factories which were so heavily reliant on gov-
ernment contracts. Such highly specialised towns, with their large proletarian
workforces, had a very different character from cities with an extensive middle
class, but they also differed from each other and from exclusively textile centres
in relation to the nature of the production process, extent of female employment
and levels of skill in the workforce. Particular values were dominant, as in the
case of Dundee where the jute industry relied heavily on single girls who had
migrated from particular counties in Ireland, and, as with textile towns gener-
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
29
On Teesside, Middlesbrough and Stockton had very high rates of unemployment but the depres-
sion affected Darlington – an older market town as well as a heavy engineering centre – less
severely and for a shorter period. See K. Nicholas, The Social Effects of Unemployment on Teesside,
– (Manchester, ), pp. –. For a comparison between the Black Country towns, see
R. H. Trainor, Black Country Elites (Oxford, ), pp. –. On Preston, see M. Savage, The
Dynamics of Working-Class Politics (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –.
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ally, the gender balance, marriage prospects, mortality and fertility rates of the
town were affected accordingly, as were the songs, stories and leisure time pur-
suits.
30
More importantly from the perspective of this chapter, a highly spe-
cialised town concentrated on one or two industries was likely to experience
very rapid growth whilst market conditions were favourable but was, by the same
token, all the more vulnerable to cyclical downswings and secular decline in the
dominant industry or industries.
On the other hand, most larger cities and especially the regional centres, by
the nature of their size and functionality, offered just such complementarity. This
was their comparative advantage. Together with the industrial sector with which
they were often first identified larger cities offered finance, markets, a multiplic-
ity of specialist suppliers, education, justice and administration. In this respect
there was a qualitative difference between the regional city and even the larger
of the factory towns. In particular, the presence of an educated middle class,
often employed in commercial and legal activities, meant income levels largely
insulated from the vagaries of the trade cycle. Consequently, middle-class pat-
terns of consumption offered employment stability for domestic servants and
gardeners, printers, stationers, engravers, coachbuilders and instrument makers,
as well as providing a measure of predictability for clothiers, butchers, spirit
dealers and numerous building tradesmen concerned with the repair and main-
tenance of suburban houses. Perhaps nowhere in Britain was this more highly
developed than in Edinburgh, the epitome of the diversified economy, where an
unusually high proportion of professional employment produced an equally
heavy concentration of specialist craftsmen, clerks and domestic servants who
were themselves thereby shielded from the vagaries of the trade cycle.
31
Lower
down the urban hierarchy, a similar point can be made about county towns, as
we have seen, whose particular specialisms were balanced by a greater range of
manufacturing and service employment than in the specialised industrial centres.
(iii) :
In a more systematic way the diversity in the employment structures of urban
Britain and the main trends in employment as between the three census dates of
, and are presented in Tables .–. These summary tables are
Industrialisation and the city economy
30
It was not simply the dominance of one industry that brought economic difficulties for Dundee
but the gender composition of the labour force reflecting a heavy reliance on female labour and
lack of opportunities for male employment; see J . Butt, ‘The changing character of urban employ-
ment –’, in G. Gordon, ed., Perspectives of the Scottish City (Aberdeen, ), p. .
31
For further detail on Edinburgh, see R. Rodger, ‘Employment, wages and poverty in the Scottish
cities, –’, in Gordon, ed., Perspectives, p. . Rodger and Butt provide a systematic com-
parative study of the employment structures of four Scottish cities to in this volume,
and Rodger’s chapter is reprinted in R. J. Morris and R. Rodger eds., The Victor ian City (London,
), pp. –.
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Table . Percentage of workforce in manufacturing industry –
Males Females
Coventry . . . Dundee . . .
Stockport . . . Preston . . .
Preston . . . Stockport . . .
Sheffield . . . Coventry . . .
Birmingham . . . Leicester . . .
Dundee . . . Glasgow . . .
Northampton . . . Northampton . . .
Leicester . . . Derby . . .
Leeds . . . Manchester . . .
Wolverhampton . . . Leeds . . .
Derby . . . Birmingham . . .
Manchester . . . Sheffield . . .
Glasgow . . . Ipswich . . .
Newcastle-upon-Tyne . . . Bristol . . .
Bristol . . . Cardiff. . .
Reading . . . Wolverhampton . . .
Ipswich . . . Liverpool . . .
Cardiff. . . Newcastle-upon-Tyne . . .
Oxford . . . Edinburgh . . .
Edinburgh . . . Reading . . .
Liverpool . . . Oxford . . .
Maidstone . n/a n/a . Maidstone . n/a n/a .
St Helens n/a n/a . . St Helens n/a n/a . .
Middlesbrough n/a n/a . . Middlesbrough n/a n/a . .
GB ... GB ...
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calculated from census occupational data for twenty-four towns and cities chosen
to represent specialised industrial centres, regional and port cities and smaller
county towns with manufacturing interests.
32
An industrial city might be defined in terms of an employment structure with
more than half of the male population engaged in manufacturing industry. On
that criterion, fourteen towns and cities in the sample (Table .) made the
grade in of which ten had more than per cent so employed. However,
this seems too narrow a definition since it would exclude cities such as Bristol
and Newcastle whose manufacturing components for male occupations were
not much more than a third in and but still above that for Great Britain
as a whole. Moreover, account needs to be taken of female employment: the
importance of domestic service to women evidently reduces the proportions
engaged in female manufacturing employment in but the tables clearly
show how in the textile and clothing towns especially female participation in
manufacturing reinforced the manufacturing bias of their urban economies at
that date and continued to make a significant contribution to industrial employ-
ment thereafter.
Comparing with in Table . shows that in all cases manufactur-
ing employment was a smaller proportion of employment structures in the later
year. This is elaborated upon in Table . to show the changing pattern of
employment categories. By the category of transport services had taken
over from building and construction as the leading non-manufacturing employ-
ment category in our select list of towns and cities. Amongst manufacturing
employment, category X (metals and engineering, but also including shipbuild-
ing) was more strongly represented in whilst the categories of textile man-
ufacture and clothing were less well represented as leading categories of male
employment, although still amongst the principal female employments along
with the food and drink trades. In the case of females, the decline in domestic
service after was compensated to an extent by growth in the categories of
commercial and service employment, but the most significant increases in the
proportions employed were still to be found in those occupational categories,
mainly textiles and clothing, that had been dominant in . On the other
hand, in respect of male employment the problems affecting cotton textiles in
the later nineteenth century were largely responsible for the declining ratios of
the male workforce employed in manufacturing in the case of Stockport and
Manchester and this would have been a more pronounced feature presumably if
other more specialised textile centres had been included.
Industrialisation and the city economy
32
The data upon which the occupational tables are based are taken from the published censuses for
, and . From occupational categories identified in , adjustments have been
made in those for and to render them as consistent as is possible, though it is recognised
that this has limitations because of the definitional changes and different systems of classification
used by the census authorities. For further details contact Richard Rodger or David Reeder.
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It is not easy to assess the degree of specialisation characteristic of urban
economies in a systematic comparative way since the industrial categories used
in the published census tables frequently included a range of different trades. This
is the case, for example, with Birmingham – ‘a city of a thousand trades’ – many
of which were included within the all-encompassing category of metals and
engineering. Whilst leading sectors were important they can have a misleading
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
Table . Ratio of manufacturing to service employment: selected towns and cities
–
Males Females
Coventry .. . Dundee ...
Stockport ... Preston ...
Preston ... Stockport ...
Sheffield ... Coventry ...
Northampton ... Leicester ...
Dundee ... Glasgow ...
Birmingham ... Northampton ...
Leeds ... Derby ...
Wolverhampton ... Manchester ...
Leicester ... Leeds ...
Derby ... Birmingham ...
Manchester ... Cardiff...
Glasgow ... Sheffield ...
Newcastle-upon-Tyne ... Ipswich ...
Reading ... Bristol ...
Bristol ... Wolverhampton ...
Ipswich ... Liverpool ...
Oxford ... Newcastle-upon-Tyne ...
Edinburgh ... Edinburgh ...
Cardiff... Maidstone . n/a .
Liverpool ... Reading ...
Maidstone . n/a . Oxford ...
St Helens n/a .. St Helens n/a ..
Middlesbrough n/a .. Middlesbrough n/a ..
GB ... GB ...
A ratio of . indicates that the numbers employed in manufacturing employment and
service employment (professional, office, commercial, distributive and domestic
employment, or ‘non-industrial’ in the appendix) were the same. Thus, in Dundee, for
example, manufacturing employment in was six times greater than employment
in the broadly defined service sector.
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impression and attribute an undue importance to a single sector, understating
the contribution of a range of local industries which, though individually small,
make for a more or less variegated city economy than an association with one
or two products would imply.
33
What Table . offers, therefore, is only a very
crude indicator and one that can be interpreted from two points of view.
Looking at the situation in , it is possible to point to some highly concen-
trated local economies – for example, Middlesbrough and Coventry – yet, on
the other hand, from our select list, eighteen out of the twenty-three towns and
cities in had less than half of their male workforce employed in the two
leading employment categories. Edinburgh, as already indicated, had the most
diversified employment structure with a greater ratio of the male workforce
employed in professional, government and commercial services and in the
service industries. As expected, the regional centres and port cities were more
diversified than specialist industrial centres but they also differed in the degree
to which this was so. Regional cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester
Industrialisation and the city economy
33
M. Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City (Aldershot, ), pp. –, and Butt,
‘The changing character of urban employment’, pp. –, make this point for regional centres
such as Manchester and Glasgow.
Table . The concentration of employment: occupation distribution according to the
two largest employment categories –
Census
category Occupation Males Females Males Females Males Females
III Professional
IV Domestic
VI Transport
VII Agriculture
IX Mines, quarrying
X Engineering, metals
XI Precious metal
XII Building
XIV Bricks, glass, pottery
XVIII Textiles
XIX Clothing
XX Food, drink and tobacco
XXII General manufacturing
XXIII Dealing
This table shows, for example, that in nine towns and cities textiles, census category
XVIII, was one of the two largest areas of male employment, and in eight towns and
cities this was the case for female employment in .
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were characterised by fairly diverse occupational structures in that all three pos-
sessed substantial manufacturing bases, and had, in addition, a developing range
of service industries. In Manchester, a city which had developed significant
commercial and distributive functions, manufacturing constituted a relatively
smaller element in the economy compared to other regional centres. There were
also contrasts between the regional cities and the port cities, the figures for the
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
Table . Index of concentration: proportion of males and females employed in the
largest single occupational category –
Males Females
(%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
Sheffield
Stockport
Northampton
Preston
Wolverhampton
Birmingham
Coventry
Leicester
Cardiff
Liverpool
Dundee
Leeds
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Manchester
Derby
Glasgow
Reading
Maidstone n/a n/a
Bristol
Edinburgh
Oxford
Ipswich
St Helens n/a n/a
Middlesbrough n/a n/a
GB
Though this table shows that, for example, per cent of male employment in Preston
in was in a single sector, it does not follow (and was not the case) that the figures
for subsequent dates refer to the same sector, but simply that this was the largest
concentration of employment in any census category.
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latter reflecting how their economies were shaped by and dependent on trans-
port, commercial and port activities. Amongst the leading categories of male
employment in these port cities was category X which included shipbuilding as
well as metals and engineering, and also category VI – transport services,
although for females the most important categories, apart from domestic service,
were dress, footwear and clothing – and the category of food, drink and tobacco.
It is also worth noting more generally the employment effect of transport on a
variety of urban locations, and how in particular the growth in the numbers
employed in transport made the economies of Cardiff and Derby considerably
more concentrated in than in .
Finally, a broad comparison of the with the data can be made,
although it is worth noting that this is a problematic exercise because of incon-
sistencies in the occupational categories in the census. There is no reason to
doubt, however, the very variable picture which the tables suggest with regard
to changes in the degree of dependency on a manufacturing base of these towns
and cities. Many reached or passed a peak of industrialisation with the propor-
tions in manufacturing male employment either little changed since or in
decline: thus the economies of Wolverhampton, Dundee, Northampton,
Middlesbrough and Preston all seem to have become less dependent on their
staple manufacturing industries. By contrast, other towns and cities became more
concentrated in terms of their reliance on a single industrial sector – Oxford
notably, but also Coventry, Birmingham, Derby and St Helens strengthened their
manufacturing base in terms of male employment. A degree of polarisation
emerged, therefore, in the first half of the twentieth century such that by
there were no towns and cities in the selection provided in Table . where the
concentration on a single occupational category was in the – per cent range.
The importance of the engineering sector to an increasing number of towns
and cities, as shown in Table ., was a contributory factor in the adaptation of
older manufacturing interests as well as the growth of new industries during the
interwar years. The way that women were absorbed into previously male-
dominated industrial employment in Coventry and Birmingham was an indica-
tion of this flexibility in working practices. Both Reading and Maidstone were
undoubtedly affected by new industrialisation in the interwar years and after,
though this was complemented by the growth of service employment. Indeed,
trends in these towns in relation to the growth of commercial and professional
employment in this forty-year period, –, were indicative of the greater
frequency of non-manufacturing employment generally (other than transport
service) in the table of leading employment categories – the category of dealers
in both male and female employment structures and the category of professional
and subordinate services for females. At the same time the growth of the service
sector, important though it was, had yet to transform the character of the leading
industrial centres of the country, many of which had become increasingly
dependent on employment in the category of light engineering.
Industrialisation and the city economy
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(iv)
Whereas some urban locations hardly changed the balance of their occupational
structures, or experienced only a modest degree of diversification, others were
able to adapt to changing market conditions by extending the range of their
manufacturing base. A number of cities replaced faltering or decaying industrial
sectors (or particular industries within the census categories) with new infusions
(see Tables .–). Diversification can be regarded as a consequence either of an
organic process of growth which derived from the demands placed on the
economy by the growth of urban populations or of the increasingly complex and
specialist needs of dominant sector industries. Diversification within a particular
industrial sector, however, was another possibility and one not without risk to the
city since it could lead to an over-reliance on a single sector and a vulnerability
to structural changes within it. The growth of nineteenth-century Nottingham
exemplifies the self-renewing process associated with diversification, triggered by
the multiplier effects of the introduction of lace and hosiery to the town. Building
construction, textile machinery firms and tertiary activity, especially in retailing,
helped to sustain a buoyant economy attractive to new industries such as Raleigh
in bicycles and Player’s in tobacco.
34
What this model does not explain is why
some towns and cities were more successful than others in attracting capital and
enterprise into new industrial developments.
As the earlier discussion of regional disparities suggests, part of the answer lies
in the extent to which resources of labour and capital were locked into the low-
growth industries of the twentieth century. The economic history of Glasgow,
for example, is a telling commentary on the inability of a once great commer-
cial and industrial centre to attract sufficient new industry significantly to arrest
a long-drawn-out syndrome of manufacturing decline which set in after the First
World War. Whilst Glasgow’s late nineteenth-century industrial structure was
more diversified than is implied by its dominant image as a centre of heavy indus-
try, the fate of shipbuilding and heavy engineering during the interwar years
determined the fortunes of associated trades, and led to depression in the
regional economy. In consequence, Glasgow ‘was unable to make the consumer
leap into the next stage of urban industrial growth’ and eventually entered a
period of contraction in which all the factors that had combined so successfully
in the growth phase were reversed.
35
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
34
R. A. Church, Economic and Social Change in a Midland Town (London, ); J. Beckett, ed.,
A Centenary History of Nottingham (Manchester, ).
35
S. Checkland, The Upas Tree (Glasgow, ); U. Wannop, ‘Glasgow/Clydeside: a century of
metropolitan evolution’, in G. Gordon, ed., Regional Cities in the UK, – (London
), pp. –; J. Butt, ‘The industries of Glasgow’, in Fraser and Maver, eds., Glasgow, ,
pp. –.
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Conversely, a city with a range of different industries serving different markets
was more likely to sustain long-term evolutionary growth. The case has been
made by the business historians of Bristol, a city with a somewhat chequered
economic history during the nineteenth century. During the first half of the
century several traditional Bristol industries lost their competitive edge vis-à-vis
the major industrial districts and eventually disappeared; but over the second half
of the century, other industries in and around the city – notably the consumer
goods industries of chocolate, cocoa and tobacco – showed considerable
resilience. The point is that none of the contracting industries had a sufficiently
large stake in the urban economy to induce a spiral of economic decline. Bristol,
unlike Glasgow, was able to generate or attract sufficient new industry both to
take up the slack and to create further employment opportunities: in construc-
tion, urban transport services, locomotive manufacturing, transport engineer-
ing, the motor vehicle and aircraft industries, the latter expanding greatly in the
s. The adaptability of its manufacturing economy, along with its role as a
consumption centre for a large urban cluster, lay behind the Bristol story of
‘gradual if rather unexciting economic growth in the late Victorian period and
beyond’.
36
The city of Leeds offers a further example of an evolutionary economy based
partly on its functions as a regional centre but also on the flexible nature of its
industrial structure. Always more than a textile centre, the growth of engineer-
ing, expansion of printing and the establishment of the clothing trades by Jewish
immigrants provided the dynamic for economic growth in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. This diversification more than made good the loss
of employment from the secular decline of the woollen industry and other sunset
trades during the interwar years. The secret of the Leeds economy lay in the
strength of industrial linkages as well as the persistence of localised concentra-
tions of ancillary trades, and the flexibility of production methods in the cloth-
ing trade with its subcontracting workshops. On the other hand, the continuing
success of these traditional industries meant that the new growth sectors of the
interwar economy were underrepresented and this was eventually to bring
increasing rigidities.
37
Industrialisation and the city economy
36
K. Morgan, ‘The economic development of Bristol, –’, in M. Dresser and
P. Ollerenshaw, eds., The Making of Modern Bristol (Tiverton, ), p. . According to
P. Ollerenshaw and P. Wardley, ‘Economic growth and the business community in Bristol since
’, in Dresser and Ollerenshaw, eds., The Making, p. , Bristol displayed a pattern of ‘undra-
matic but sustained economic growth, rising incomes, industrial innovation and structural change
over the long run’. See also C. E. Harvey and J. Press, ‘Industrial change and economic life in
Bristol since ’, in C. E. Harvey and J. Press, eds., Studies in the Business History of Bristol
(Bristol, ), pp. –.
37
This account is derived from S. Caunce and K. Honeyman, ‘Introduction: the city of Leeds and
its business –’, in J. Chartres and K. Honeyman, eds., Leeds City Business –
(Leeds, ), pp. –.
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