1 - Urban geography and social history

Summary

This book is about the social geography of nineteenth-century industrial towns and cities. ‘Industrial’ is defined to include major seaports, such as Liverpool and Hull, as well as towns whose wealth derived from mining or manufacturing. London is excluded, as much because in terms of size it merits a book to itself as on the grounds of its uniqueness, nor is any attention paid to the growing band of resort towns that have attracted the notice of several social historians in recent years. The emphasis of the book is on the industrial towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and South Wales, and on the regional capitals of these areas. Industrial towns have offered a rich vein for doctoral theses and research projects in recent years and the present work reflects its dependence on such research in the frequency with which examples are cited from the likes of Huddersfield, Halifax, Cardiff, Wolverhampton, Preston and Oldham.

A second term that requires definition is ‘social geography’. In this book I use it to indicate the spatial patterns of ‘social groups’, defined with respect to attributes of status, class, ethnicity, religion, family and kinship, the population movements that articulated such patterns, and the economic, cultural and political processes responsible for their configuration. In keeping with recent trends in social geography, my emphasis is on people rather than their artifacts; and on processes which are inherently aspatial but necessarily have spatial implications, rather than the more obviously geographical, important but limited, forces embraced by the term ‘friction of distance’, a phrase that obscures more than it reveals.