Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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Yorkshire towns, and it served as a wholesaler to village shops.
49
Thomas Lipton’s
firm quickly expanded from his main store in Glasgow to local branches and then
to a network of shops in Scottish cities, combining wholesale trade with his own
retail operations. His chain first developed strong regional roots and linkages
before it spread to other areas in the s, when he opened branches in the
major cities of England and Wales. As the business spread, he found sources of
supply from Ireland to the Antipodes to satisfy the nearly insatiable demand of
British consumers for hams, meat pies and tea. From the Glasgow docks, food
imports went to warehouses and processing sites before transshipment all over
the country. With his entry into the tea trade and contracts with Ceylon and
Indian producers, London took on additional importance, and he moved the
head offices to London in . But it would be a mistake to see Lipton’s as a
London-based concern, given its world-wide reach and its regional divisions of
labour and distribution, in which Glasgow sites played a major part.
50
The single most important actor driving the integration of regional urban
systems in Britain was the state itself, which used paper, ink and parliament to
weave the localities together. By mid-century, railway regulation, factory laws,
school inspection and the New Poor Law created a wide paper trail between
London and the provinces. After , Edwin Chadwick bombarded poor law
unions with endless circulars demanding information and compliance. Clerks at
the registrar general’s office laboriously transcribed thousands of births, marriages
and deaths into huge, black volumes. Mr Podsnap’s complaint, ‘Centralization.
No. Never with my consent. Not English’, had already fallen on deaf ears.
British centralisation was, of course, following a much different path from that
of France. Driven largely by ad hoc improvisation, the reshaping of local govern-
ment by parliament in the nineteenth century added modest reforms to a grab-
bag of residues from the past, resulting in multiple, asymmetrical linkages to
London, rather than tightly controlled flows of services and permissions that
moved up and down the designated steps of an administrative urban hierarchy
from the capital. During the early and mid-nineteenth century, administrative
ties between towns and the centre in Britain multiplied, overlapped and com-
peted. Simplification came during the s and after, when intermediary layers
of administration were created; finally a rough system of regionalisation emerged
from independent decisions to decentralise services.
If we look at the administrative linkages among British towns existing around
, several different patterns can be seen. Religious administration privileged
Canterbury, York and Edinburgh, with secondary ties to cathedral towns. The
judicial system linked royal courts in Westminster to the assize towns within
regional circuits. Postal service ran through London until , when procedures
Lynn Hollen Lees
49
J. Blackman, ‘The development of the retail grocery trade in the nineteenth century’, Business
History, (), .
50
P. Mathias, Retailing Revolution (London, ), pp. –.
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for ‘cross-posts’ between provincial centres spread.
51
Local government reforms
added new, intermediate layers of administration between parish and centre, as
hundreds of poor law unions, improvement commissions, rural and urban dis-
tricts, new boroughs and special boards were created thoughout the realm.
Overlapping boundaries and confused jurisdictions only added to the complex-
ity, which legislation regularly revised. Greater order came in and ,
when large numbers of local authorities were consolidated under county coun-
cils, county boroughs, urban and rural districts.
52
Restructuring created series of
islands, virtually coequal administrative units, responsible in limited ways to the
Local Government Board and parliament in London, but left untouched poor
law unions.
The combination of a strong central state with hundreds of weak but direct
links to the localities lasted well into the twentieth century. Schemes for formal
regionalisation in the interests of efficiency during and after the First World War
were largely ignored, but despite parliament’s lack of interest, the informal divi-
sion of Britain into provinces had taken place by the s through a series of
independent decisions.
53
The post office set up regional administrative offices in
Edinburgh and Leeds in , and added five others in . By , the
Ministry of Labour’s employment exchange service operated through seven dis-
tricts with headquarters in Cardiff, Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester,
Bristol and London. Telephone service, civil defence, agricultural assistance,
road traffic administration, as well as many private organisations, operated
through regional offices in major towns linked to the capital. Without official
sanction, a series of cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Newcastle,
Nottingham, Edinburgh and Cardiff – emerged as local capitals, anchoring a
‘practical regionalism’.
54
A second tier of cities, among them Liverpool,
Glasgow, Leicester and Sheffield, also acquired regional functions to a lesser
extent. This multiplication of administrative services in the larger cities increased
their centrality, further adding to the pressures for their growth.
The meaning of regionalism took a new turn after , when nationalisa-
tion, national insurance and national health services both extended the arm of
the state and gave London civil servants the whip hand. The rhetoricians of the
welfare state spoke with a language of equality and uniformity that belied con-
tinued divisions. Indeed, changing social geographies of production intensified
regional social differences, as management and white-collar employment shifted
to the South-East, leaving low-skilled production jobs in the North and the
Urban networks
51
M. J. Daunton, Royal Mail (London, ), p. .
52
V. D. Lipman, Local Government Areas, – (Oxford, ), pp. –.
53
Early defences of regionalisation came from C. B. Fawcett, ‘Natural divisions of England’,
Geographical Journal, (), –; and G. D. H. Cole, The Future of Local Government
(London, ).
54
E. W. Gilbert, ‘Practical regionalism in England and Wales’, Geographical Journal, (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Celtic Fringe.
55
The information-based economy of the twentieth century priv-
ileged the capital, where bureaucrats, bankers, diplomats and MPs could rub
shoulders in the same restaurants and clubs.
(v) :
Urban networks create multiple pathways – not tracks that confine, but chan-
nels none the less – from the core of the island to its periphery. At any given
moment, people, products and information are in motion from one site to
another. Within central-place systems, transfers normally tend to operate
between levels of an urban hierarchy – either toward higher ranking places from
lesser centres or from the centre outward to hinterlands and downwards to less
complex settlements. But well-articulated urban networks offer multiple choices
of destinations.
Skilled workers followed interurban routes when organising their lives. James
Beardpark, who joined the Steam Engine Makers’ Society in Bolton around
, moved through Manchester, Bury, Leeds, Blackburn, Preston and
Rochdale in search of a job in . Finding no permanent place, he then
shipped to London via Hull. But the capital too did not provide a easy berth, so
he moved on to major towns in the South, West, and Midlands, dying in Derby
in .
56
Urban networks structured his trips, although he did not follow
strictly hierarchical principles or a gradient of distance. News of openings, con-
tacts with friends and relatives probably led him onward, but the organisation of
his union in the larger towns provided the fixed points among which he trav-
elled. Yet what is unpredictable for any given person is strongly patterned for
groups as a whole. Even if individuals meandered from town to town, the net
effect of their seemingly random choices was the ceaseless growth of the larger
towns and the continued urbanisation of the British population.
Migration offers a good illustration of hierarchical theories of movement. The
British census records a heavy movement of people toward the metropolis and
then outward into the Home Counties, particularly after .
57
When people
migrated from Wales to England, they chose destinations strongly influenced by
the size of town and its distance from their birthplace. By , substantial
numbers of Welsh had moved to Liverpool, Chester, Shrewsbury, Bristol, Bath,
London and the towns of the Black Country. In the next twenty years, a
diffusion from major cities to the smaller towns of their hinterlands took place.
58
Lynn Hollen Lees
55
Massey, Spatial Divisions, pp. –.
56
H. R. Southall, ‘The tramping artisan revisited: labour mobility and economic distress in early
Victorian England’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –.
57
D. Friedlander, ‘London’s urban transition, –’, Urban Studies, (), –.
58
C. G. Pooley, ‘Welsh migration in Great Britain, –’, Journal of Historical Geography, ,
(), –.
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Hierarchies streamed migration by the Irish too. They entered Britain
through the major ports, where many remained and some moved inland; more
rapid diffusion down an urban hierarchy – into the Scottish Lowlands from
Glasgow, from Liverpool through Lancashire and the West Riding, and from
London into the Home Counties – took place in the decades after the famine.
59
These and other similar studies using published census data, which track move-
ment only at decadal intervals, generally confirm linkage of migration paths to
urban hierarchies. But such research captures only part of the movement from
place to place.
Using other sources, scholars paint a more nuanced picture of population
movements. With the aid of census manuscript schedules, Richard Lawton and
Colin Pooley have tracked migration into Liverpool. While some newcomers
followed the classic stepwise path into the city up a local urban hierarchy, major
direct, long-distanced streams of people came into the port from Ireland and
Scotland. The unskilled moved to the nearest large market for work, while skilled
migrants, who had better sources of information, shifted among the urban labour
markets where there was demand for them. As a result, migration into Liverpool
had both a rural-to-urban component, particularly large in the early phases of
industrialisation, and a substantial city-to-city movement, especially from large
towns in the second half of the century. From London came proportionally large
numbers of professionals and entrepreneurs, while those from Lancashire and
nearby villages worked most typically in agriculture or mining.
60
Migratory movements in Scotland confirm the mixed origins of newcomers
to major cities and their multiple paths. The heavy flows of people from both
Highland counties and Lowland agricultural areas into the urban industrial belt
included migrants from towns as well as rural parishes. Professionals and artisans
from Inverness, St Andrews or Oban tried their luck in the towns of Lanark or
the Midlothians. Young Highland women moved directly into the mills in
Dundee or took service jobs in Edinburgh, while male labourers trekked to the
herring fisheries in east coast ports or became construction workers in Glasgow.
Using registers of paupers, Charles Withers and A. J. Watson have tracked
Highlanders moving into Glasgow during the second half of the nineteenth
century, most of whom came from Argyll and Inverness-shire. All of the move-
ment was hierarchical in nature – by definition, because of Glasgow’s relative
size. Most migrants had moved directly into Glasgow from the parish of their
birth. Of the per cent that had chosen an intermediate destination before
entering Scotland’s major city, most had lived in a mid-sized town closer to
Urban networks
59
L. H. Lees and J. Modell, ‘The Irish countryman urbanized: a comparative perspective on the
famine migration’, JUH, (), –. See also R. Swift and S. Gilley, eds., The Irish in the
Victorian City (London, ).
60
R. Lawton, ‘Mobility in nineteenth-century British cities’, Geographical Journal, (),
–; C. G. Pooley and I. D. Whyte, Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants (London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Glasgow than the parish of their birth. The urban born – who came from Oban,
Inverness, Campbeltown, Stornoway and Rothesay – either went directly to
Glasgow or stopped first in a Scottish town of intermediate size.
61
Technology multiplied the drawing power of the bigger cities, which com-
pounded the prospects of new jobs with the lure of novelty. Alan Pred’s analy-
sis of the linkage between urban growth and innovation outlines the process:
inventions spur industrial expansion and new construction, and produce contin-
ued structural change and invention. As a result workers are drawn into places
where changes are introduced.
62
New technology, therefore, has systemic effects
that lead to growth. The impact of new technology in the nineteenth century,
however, was greatest at the top of urban systems. Brian Robson, who has com-
pared the spatial diffusion of many technologies between and , argues
for ‘the hierarchical diffusion down the ranks of the urban size array’, as well as
a ‘neighbourhood spread’ of changes to the small towns of a city’s hinterland.
For the most part, gas works, building societies and telephone exchanges were
established first in the largest cities and only later in lower-ranking places. To
focus on the example of the telephone, all of the ten largest English and Welsh
cities had exchanges by , while adoption was limited among smaller cities
and virtually non-existent among small towns at that time. By , almost all
of the largest sixty towns had built telephone exchanges, and indeed there was
a linear relationship between rank in the urban hierarchy and the acquisition of
an exchange. The proportion of towns with a telephone office dropped as urban
rank declined.
63
The number of potential customers living within a small radius
was a major factor in locational decisions.
The diffusion of the telephone also moved outward from the larger towns into
their hinterlands, particularly in the densely urbanised North. Although in the
early years of telephone installation licences restricted operations to the radius
of a few miles, trunk lines between towns in the vicinity of Manchester,
Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle developed during the s, creating
regional networks that were not initially interconnected. The post office, which
had tried to protect the monopoly of the telegraph over long-distance commu-
nication, gave up its opposition to the expansion of these networks by the mid-
s, and by , a major trunk line joined London to the already linked cities
of the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire.
64
Engineers, entrepreneurs and city
officials slowly came to terms with the potential of the telephone for long-
distance communication, and the system that they built grew within the confines
Lynn Hollen Lees
61
J. A. Agnew and K. R. Cox, ‘Urban in-migration in historical perspective’, Historical Methods,
(), –; R. H. Osborne, ‘The movements of people in Scotland, –’, Scottish
Studies, (), –; C. W. J. Withers and A. J. Watson, ‘Stepwise migration and Highland
migration to Glasgow, –,’ Journal of Historical Geography, (), –.
62
A. R. Pred, The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, – (Cambridge, Mass.,
).
63
Robson, Urban Growth, p. .
64
Ibid., pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
of a central-place system. Outlying regions – Wales, much of Scotland, East
Anglia and most of the South-West – had to wait for exchanges. Where the
number of potential customers was a strong influence on the siting of a new
technology, the largest cities had an obvious advantage, until such time as econ-
omies of scale and rising levels of effective demand meant that smaller places
could be profitably serviced.
The extreme flexibility of telephones as a means of communication, however,
means that in the longer run interconnections were not confined within any
tight, hierarchical structure. Continued urbanisation brings with it dynamic
forms of communication, which transcend physical movement and rigid pat-
terns. During the s and early s small towns in Wales became oriented
to ever larger cities. While patterns of trunk calls made in mid-Wales in
showed tight linkages between small settlements and Aberystwyth or Hereford,
the closest large central place, these same areas in the s moved much more
into the orbit of Cardiff. Cultural and economic linkages multiplied between
low ranking towns and the regional capital at a time when urbanisation levels
were static.
65
The flow of information along urban networks evolves over time
and is not a simple function of distance and physical movement.
At any given time, multiple processes of decision-making shape patterns of
exchange. They do not necessarily operate in tandem or with consistency.
Alongside the pull of markets and entrepreneurial decisions have operated the
sometimes contradictory policies of the central government, which through
licensing, parliamentary bills and planning decisions shape investment. Early
negotiations over the location of airports in Britain illustrate the point. During
the First World War aviation shifted from sport to weapon, leading to the build-
ing of more than airfields throughout the United Kingdom. After the war,
enthusiasts looked forward to the growth of a new transport industry, and hoped
for sale of disused Royal Air Force fields to nearby towns. The issues of siting,
investment and government control were to be hammered out by the
Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) and the Treasury. The head of the DCA,
Frederick Sykes, recommended a network of eleven ‘key aerodromes’ covering
the major cities in Britain, plus an additional two in Belfast and Dublin, and in
the early s, municipal officials in Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham
worked with London authorities to set up local airports. The lack of financial
support from the Treasury combined with insufficient traffic meant that these
early experiments soon collapsed, but the DCA persisted in its efforts to link
airfields to cities, announcing in that ‘every town of any importance will,
sooner or later, find it essential to possess well sited aerodromes as it does today
Urban networks
65
D. Clark, ‘Urban linkage and regional structure in Wales: an analysis of change, –’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, (), –; W. K. D. Davies and C. R. Lewis,
‘Regional structures in Wales: two studies of interconnectivity’, in M. Carter and W. K. D. Davies,
eds., Urban Essays (London, ), pp. –.
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to possess railway stations, roads, [and] garages’. By , all the major cities
except for Sheffield and Edinburgh, as well as many ports and county towns, had
built airfields. In fact after the DCA’s early attempt at centralisation failed, many
more were built than could be sustained in the longer run.
66
By the later s,
traffic in and out of the London airports dwarfed activity in the rest of the
kingdom. The fields at Southampton, Portsmouth, Liverpool and Cardiff each
serviced over , passengers per year, but elsewhere the passenger traffic was
tiny and ran at a deficit. Profit and usage had trickled uniformly down the British
central-place hierarchy. Air service was indeed interurban, but in its early years,
it was directed abroad and to offshore islands, rather than to internal destinations.
Even if its location conformed to the logic of central-place systems, its early
usage did not. Planes pointed to larger networks overseas, overleaping internal
hierarchies.
(vi)
Urban ties do not stop at national borders. Communications via water – and now
air and electricity – allow cities to forge tight links round the world. Indeed,
before the era of the railway, it was far easier to get from Hull to Hamburg than
to either Leicester or Manchester. Cities, particularly the larger ones and those
with access to the sea, have for centuries participated in a network system whose
organisational logic is not territorial and geometric but maritime and irregular.
67
With cities as their ports of call, capitalists looked overseas for investments and
customers, extending British influence into Latin America, West Africa and the
Pacific.
68
As empire added political ties, long-distance city-to-city exchanges of
products, people and services changed from the exotic to the everyday. Indeed,
the world systems described by Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel
operated through an ‘internationale of cities’, whose core included not only
London but major Atlantic ports such as Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow and
whose peripheries stretched to Sydney, Capetown and beyond.
69
Moreover,
network linkages extended far down the British urban hierarchy; even tiny
waterside towns housed a few vessels that crossed the Channel or the Irish Sea,
while the many canals and rivers gave much of the country easy access to coastal
ports. Waterside settlements were part of a second set of urban linkages that
extended to the Antipodes.
Over time, the abundant maritime traffic became more regulated from
Lynn Hollen Lees
66
J. Myerscough, ‘Airport provision in the inter-war years’, Journal of Contemporary History,
(), –.
67
P. M. Hohenberg and L. H. Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, nd edn (Cambridge, ).
68
P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, ‒ and British
Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, ‒ (London, ).
69
I. Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, ); F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism,
th–th c., vols. (London, –).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
London and the major ports, channelling communication abroad through the
existing urban hierarchy. Although in the early nineteenth century, overseas mail
moved haphazardly on any vessel from any convenient port, post office steamers
also operated out of stations in Dover, Weymouth, Milford, Holyhead, Liverpool
and Portpatrick, but fixed contracts with private companies evolved during the
s. After the post office determined port-to-port needs and the Treasury
approved the schemes, the Admiralty was charged to negotiate terms with
bidding shipowners. Cunard won early contracts for the North Atlantic routes
beginning with Halifax and Boston, while by the early s, the P & O took
the mails to Gibraltar, Alexandria, Madras and Calcutta, soon expanding to the
ports of south China and the southern Pacific. The lure of government subsidies
and fixed rates brought the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company into existence
for service to Latin America and the Caribbean, fattening its coffers for decades.
Despite the competition for lucrative contracts, official demands for efficiency
and security soon produced a centralised system regulated from London and the
largest ports. Monopoly early replaced free competition, streaming the flow of
information abroad into a limited number of intercity channels.
70
The electric web of power that held the Empire together followed a similar
spatial logic. To the telegraph lines that fanned out from London along the rail
networks, engineers added early underwater cable connections. One of the first,
laid in , stretched from Calais to Dover; soon links to Ireland and across the
Atlantic followed. The British determination to control secure communications
with colonies abroad spurred entrepreneurs to spin out cables to the gateway
cities of the globe. During the s, the Falmouth, Gibraltar, Malta Telegraph
Company laid the line in nearby waters, while the British Indian Telegraph
Company connected Malta to Alexandria, and that city to Suez and Karachi.
After , the India Office could send secret cables to the viceroy in Calcutta
in a few hours, and receive an almost immediate reply. The Boer War triggered
a demand, soon satisfied, for a linkage to South Africa, which was quickly
extended to Australia. Although the logic of telecommunications permits
decentralised flows of information, the planning, maintenance and finance of
such networks is resolutely hierarchical. The spinal cords of the British Empire
stretched from London to colonial ports and capitals all over the globe.
71
Because British companies owned between and per cent of the world’s
merchant marine in the nineteenth century, her ports captured a major share of
international trade. In the s, London claimed the largest maritime business
in the world, ‘the tidal Thames bringing in its flow the treasure of near and
distant nations’.
72
Into its docks came rubber from Brazil, sugar from Jamaica and
tea from Ceylon. Schooners and clipper ships sped to Buenos Aires and
Urban networks
70
Daunton, Royal Mail, pp. –.
71
D. R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress (New York and Oxford, ), pp. –.
72
The Pictorial Handbook of London (London, ), p. .
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Kingston, Melbourne and Singapore. Heavily laden steamers left daily for Spain,
Germany, France and the Netherlands, exchanging yarn, textiles, metalwork and
machinery for food and raw materials. The Liverpool docks opened on to an
Atlantic world: fortunes made in the African slave trade later served to purchase
sugar from the Caribbean, cotton from the United States, beef from Argentina.
Glasgow and Bristol merchants imported food from Ireland and North America;
Thomas Lipton, for example, built huge warehouses for the hundreds of thou-
sands of hams he ordered yearly from Chicago and Omaha, for his frozen turkeys
from Canada, his consignments of cheese and butter from northern New York
State and from Ireland.
73
Hull firms dealt particularly with the Baltic, while other
east coast ports cultivated ties with Rotterdam, Hamburg and Bremen. Network
connections brought an ever-shifting cornucopia of goods and people into the
island’s ports. The large liners of the international passenger trade headed for
Southampton, as Liverpool became the major port for emigrant departures.
Grimsby specialised in the grain and fish trade, and the South Wales ports were
configured for coal exports.
Dynasties of shipowning families ran their companies from office palaces in
London and Liverpool, commissioning new tramps and liners from builders on
the Clyde, Mersey or Thames and dispatching cargoes around the world. As
graceful sailing ships gave way to paddle steamers and then to steel vessels driven
by propeller and turbine, ports like Boston, Whitby and Whitehaven lost the
ability to service major cargoes. Elsewhere, giant wet docks and piers
reconfigured riversides to suit the requirements of gargantuan vessels.
Investments by railway companies helped Barrow, Tyneside and Southampton
outdistance competitors and keep up with changing maritime technology. By
, most of the export trade had concentrated in about twelve cities, rather
than the hundreds of small ports that had been active a hundred years earlier.
74
Conference agreements to regulate fares, market shares and routes for both
freight and passenger travel benefited the larger companies and ports. Until the
s, access to cheap coal supplies, to sophisticated finance and to information
via the international cable network gave British shipping conglomerates com-
parative advantages that brought prosperity to Liverpool, Glasgow and
Southampton, as well as the capital. The relatively high market shares of Cardiff,
Newport and Swansea testified to the continuing power of the Welsh coal trade.
But in the longer run not even a orgy of merger and manoeuvre would save
these same ports from foreign competition. By , British ships accounted for
only about a quarter of the world’s total tonnage, and they had less to carry, after
ships shifted from coal to oil as fuel. The market collapsed for South Wales’
central export product, while business contracted at all the major ports. Indeed,
by J. B. Priestley saw the Liverpool docks as ‘a vast amount of gloom and
Lynn Hollen Lees
73
Mathias, Retailing, pp. –.
74
H. J. Dyos and D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport (Leicester, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
emptiness and decay being carefully guarded’.
75
A few cities captured the shrink-
ing pie of British exports and imports. On the eve of the Second World War,
over half the value of the UK’s foreign trade was channelled through Liverpool
and London, and an additional per cent through Hull and Southampton;
these proportions remained roughly the same until after .
76
Air travel and electronic communications have shifted a major share of British
network linkages away from the ports in two directions – first up the urban hier-
archy into the trinity of cities (London, Manchester, Glasgow) tied to interna-
tional air traffic and then down the network into ordinary homes. Most physical
movement in and out of the country moves through London. In fact, London’s
international linkages have been reinforced by post-war shifts in economic struc-
tures and political power, which thrive on the economies of scale and the rising
importance of world trade and finance. During the s, the role of sterling as
an international reserve currency second only to the dollar made the Bank of
England the centre of a network linking London to the financial capitals of the
commonwealth and British colonies, whose object was to regulate trade within
the group and restrict competition with the United States. Until sterling became
freely convertible into dollars in , London bankers, along with their
counterparts in New Delhi, Johannesburg and Hong Kong, made the key deci-
sions about exchange rates and capital flows upon which British trade was
based.
77
Although the dimensions of London’s role as a world-city have been
reconfigured several times since , her position holds firm.
By the s, British cities so dominated the rural that the entire society was
effectively urbanised. A spreading consumer culture brought similar goods to
Sheffield shop girls and Sloane Rangers. Connected to a wider world through
the BBC and London newspapers, citizens from Cornwall to the Highlands
found themselves in the same informational universe, which was dominated by
the capital. They lived in a radically condensed landscape in which technology
and investment had successfully managed ‘the annihilation of space by time’, and
then had collapsed time differences as well. Telegraph, telephone and television
brought an illusion of simultaneity, and of the disappearance of distance. Yet the
built landscape of industrial urbanism still structured the natural landscape. Mid-
twentieth-century cities were linked by the capital investment of the nineteenth
and early twentieth – railways, roads and electricity grids, which provided the
infrastructures for communications and transport. The historical geography of
capitalism, whose waves of investment and disinvestment had transformed the
country, endured in multiple forms. Mills and markets, wetdocks and ware-
houses, town halls and tramways, department stores and schools dominated the
Urban networks
75
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London, ), p. .
76
J. W. House, The UK Space: Resources, Environment, and the Future (London, ), p. .
77
M. Collins, Money and Banking in the UK: A History (London, ), pp. –.
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