Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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A number of studies emphasise the role of political and interest group activ-
ity in dock or harbour development, or focus on the relationship between urban
resources and port facilities, but in the present context the investigation needs to
run also the other way. If a port is more than an interface between land and water,
then a port town or city was more than just the settlement behind the water-
front. How much, and in what ways it was more, is the question which forms
the subject of this chapter. It is a historical question, but it is also implicitly com-
parative. What, if anything, was distinctive about the urban experience in British
cities which provided port services, as against other cities which did not, and
how far did such port cities share common features?
The geographer James Bird, to whom anyone concerned with port history owes
an enormous debt, in a detailed investigation of the history of all major British
seaports, categorised his subjects under various headings. Under ‘Industrial and
commercial estuaries’ he placed Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough,
stressing the way in which in all three cases the port spread from the original site
to produce respectively Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside. Glasgow and
Clydeside, as also Belfast, are placed in the same group.
The significance of this categorisation becomes evident when the next of his
groupings is considered. Hull and Humberside, Southampton, Bristol and
Avonmouth are ‘Commercial and industrial estuaries’, with the implicit empha-
sis on their trading functions, rather than industrial developments.
The South Wales ports (Swansea, Milford Haven, Port Talbot, Cardiff, Barry,
Newport) are placed in a geographical set of their own, each the end point of
different river valley systems leading into the interior. The packet ports (Dover,
Harwich, Holyhead), with development based on access to near sea crossings,
are similarly seen to have common features. The Port of Manchester, immedi-
ately established as a major player when it opened in , stands in a category
of its own as an inland port, while London and Liverpool are the ‘General cargo
giants’.
4
Bird’s analysis stressed the importance of site but other approaches to group-
ing British ports are possible. Gordon Jackson has emphasised the causative
factors in port creation, in particular the role of railway companies, and makes
more of the variety of cargoes handled by ports as a defining distinction rather
than the physical setting, though the two of course are not unconnected.
5
A
related, if somewhat basic, way of looking at ports is to divide them into those
which specialised in coasting trades and those in which foreign trade was more
Sarah Palmer
4
J. H. Bird, The Major Seaports of the United Kingdom (London, ), pp. –.
5
See G. Jackson, The History and Archaeology of Ports (Tadworth, ); and G. Jackson, ‘The British
port system c. –’, in A. Guimerá and D. Romero, eds., Puertos y Sistemas Portuarios (Siglos
XVI–XX): Actas del Coloquio Internacional El Sistema Portuario Español, Madrid, (Madrid, ),
pp. –.
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important. The difference is well drawn out by considering shipping movements
in English ports in . The coastwise trade pecking order runs one to ten,
London to Hull last, with Newcastle in second place. In contrast, Hull was nearer
to the top of the range for foreign trade, coming third. Although coasting busi-
ness was to prove more resilient in the face of competition from railways than is
sometimes assumed, the survival of a port into the twentieth century as a
flourishing enterprise was associated with competence in handling foreign-
going vessels.
6
Still another mode of categorisation is to distinguish ports accord-
ing to their system of ownership and control. A variety of forms of port
authority developed, all regulated by act of parliament, most of which were some
type of public trust, with varying degrees of connection with municipal govern-
ment, but a number were privately owned, principally by railway companies.
Finally, not all ports had a commercial function. As naval bases Plymouth,
Portsmouth and Chatham were in a category of their own. Their sites, initially
chosen as sheltered, defensible anchorages, rather than points of entry, proved
what have been described as ‘frequently idiosyncratic locations’in relation to the
naval dockyard function which became dominant. Private developments were
hampered by the connection and the comment made in about one such
port, not only applied more generally but held true until the mid-twentieth
century: ‘Portsmouth, with its surpassing geographical advantages has not kept
pace in commercial progress with places far less fortunate in position: indeed the
very circumstances of this port being a government arsenal and depot, was prej-
udicial to it as a place of trade.’ The advance of commercial port functions in
these towns was deliberately impeded by restrictive Admiralty policies.
7
It is, then, possible to classify ports, employing alternative criteria to produce
groupings which will vary according to the approach and sometimes also over
time. Such classifications hint at the range of factors, not all economic, of which
an urban history of ports should take account. The overall effect of these con-
siderations is seemingly to highlight the unique character of every port – each
of which self-evidently has its own story – but it has also been suggested by Bird
that as a result of the need to respond to widespread changes in shipping tech-
nology and organisation port development followed a recognisable geographical
pattern. Fundamental here was the long-term upward trend, fuelled by demo-
graphic increase and the spread of industrialisation, in the quantity of goods
being moved by water, with high volume bulk cargoes of raw materials,
Ports
6
J. Armstrong, ‘Coastal shipping’, in D. H. Aldcroft and M. J. Freeman, eds., Transport in the
Industrial Revolution (Manchester, ), p. ; J. Armstrong, ‘Coastal shipping: the neglected
sector of nineteenth-century British transport history’, International Journal of Maritime History,
(), –.
7
R. C. Riley and J. L. Smith, ‘Industrialization in naval ports: the Portsmouth case’, in B. S. Hoyle
and D. A. Pinder, Cityport Industrialization and Regional Development (Oxford, ), pp. –; PP
, Second Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the State of Large Towns and Populous
Districts, Appendix , p. .
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foodstuffs and fuels becoming of increasing significance. This growth was made
possible by an increase in the size and speed of vessels, first discernible when iron
hulls began to replace timber, but gathered pace with the application of steam
power and with the substitution of oil for coal in the twentieth century. The
typical response of a port to the resulting pressure on existing facilities, Bird
argued, was the spread of the port downstream, or away from its original urban
nucleus, but with earlier facilities continuing to occupy a place in port activity.
8
The eventual abandonment of these, together with the impact of containerisa-
tion post-, can be added as further stages in this process.
9
In terms of detail Bird’s ‘Anyport’ model arguably fits some ports better than
others, but its central contention, that the course of technological change in
shipping meant that port activity within a particular settlement was by its very
nature a mobile phenomenon, is helpful in identifying one distinctive urban
feature which port cities shared: the need for space. Moreover, as in the larger
established seaports each successive wave of investment gave access to deeper and
deeper water, greater and greater quay length, the effect was physically to dis-
tance the outer limits of the seaport quarter from its older site. As long as tradi-
tional, non-mechanised systems of loading and unloading persisted, a corollary
of expansion was the need to sustain a large labour force, settled in the area of
the facilities. A factor here was the role of ports as storage sites, with warehouses
and sheds a common physical feature of the city port urban landscape. Security
was an important consideration, so in contrast to the juxtaposition of street and
quayside typical in the past, nineteenth- and twentieth-century waterfront areas
tended to take on a fortress character, closed to outsiders. Furthermore, the uses
to which land was put – the digging out of docks, the construction of quays, the
raising of great walls – were so specialised that in the short to medium term they
inoculated the port areas against alternative, non-maritime uses, to become in
recent times identified with decay and dereliction, though, from a different per-
spective, also to serve as a means by which inner-city areas came to be reserved
for future development.
The process of investment, of course, was not automatic; it required the exis-
tence of agencies to implement the required changes, and presented a consider-
able challenge to local organisation and enterprise. Fundamental conflicts of
interest between port users and port operators, as also local competition between
rival ports, ensured that the running and the development of dock and harbour
facilities were seldom other than a contentious process. Since the capital costs
involved in most, though not all, cases put port investment out of the range of
private individuals, and given that the rewards were both dispersed and long
term, it is understandable that port development was commonly a corporate
Sarah Palmer
8
J. Bird, Seaports and Seaport Terminals (London, ).
9
J. Charlier, ‘Dockland regeneration for new port uses’, in B. S. Hoyle and D. A. Pinder, eds.,
European Port Cities in Transition (London, ), pp. –.
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activity. Although many ports had taken the first steps towards improvement
within a local government context, by the mid-nineteenth century many port
authorities either were, or were about to become, non-profit-making trusts
dominated by local maritime and mercantile representatives, with varying
degrees of municipal involvement. The success of maritime-based vested inter-
ests in persuading parliament to minimise the role of municipalities in running
ports was an example of central government suspicion of local authorities
evident in other fields, rather than an informed assessment of what was required
for efficient port operation or what the public interest might dictate. It is
significant here that London was to remain the domain of joint-stock dock com-
panies and private wharves until the docks were transferred in to a novel
type of public corporation, the Port of London Authority (PLA), despite the
ambitions of the London County Council to become a port authority. Indeed,
among major ports only Bristol was to survive as an entirely municipally owned
enterprise, run by a council committee and independent of sectional interests.
10
Not all harbours or docks were run by public or quasi-public bodies. In
as a government commission reported, there were cases where, ‘although appar-
ently a public work and undoubtedly of public importance’, port facilities were
private property.
11
Examples included the coal trade ports of Seaham Harbour
and Cardiff, as well as ports like Southampton, Grimsby and Hull, where quays
or docks were in the hands of railway companies.
12
In , out of ports,
were operated by trusts; were completely under municipal direction; were
run by some other type of public body and were wholly in private, primar-
ily railway, ownership.
13
Motives for railway company investment in waterfront facilities varied.
Sometimes the concern was to provide a terminus for onward shipment from
the interior, as in the Tyne and Tees coal ports and the packet ports. At both
Hull and Southampton companies took over existing facilities facing financial
problems. Local resources often proved inadequate when faced with the need to
build a new dock, even when promoted by a public body, hence the power
Ports
10
London County Council, Royal Commission on the Port of London, , Statement of
Evidence of the Clerk of the London County Council, pp. –; PP , Select Committee
on Transport, Second Report, Qq. –; D. J. Owen, The Origins and Development of the Ports
of the United Kingdom, nd rev. edn (London, ), pp. –. On Bristol, see K. P. Kelly, ‘Public
agencies and private interests: the port transport industry in Bristol, –’, in I. Blanchard,
ed., New Directions in Economic and Social History (Edinburgh, ).
11
PP , Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into Local Charges upon Shipping in the
Ports of the United Kingdom and the Islands of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark and Man,
Report, p. vi.
12
See G. Jackson, ‘Shipowners and private dock companies: the case of Hull, –’, in L. M.
Akveld and J. R. Bruijn, eds., Shipping Companies and Authorities in the th and th Centuries:Their
Common Interest in the Development of Port Facilities (The Hague, ), pp. –.
13
London County Council, Royal Commission on the Port of London, , Statement of
Evidence of the Clerk of the London County Council, pp. –.
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railway companies with their greater command of capital were able to exercise.
In most cases their interest in docks or quays was ancillary to their main busi-
ness, though in South Wales where, as one railway company chairman put it,
‘dock companies owned little railways’, the position was reversed.
14
With the exception of London and the PLA, Westminster and Whitehall
played little active part in promoting port development as such, though inter-
vention in port labour issues was a persistent theme for much of the twentieth
century. Although in a number of ports (together handling a quarter of
national trade) were transferred to the state sector, this was a consequence of
railway nationalisation rather than an attempt to replace local control by a
national ports policy.
15
Even so, in the nineteenth century to be a major com-
mercial port was already routinely to invite the attentions of central government
to a degree arguably not experienced by any other type of town or city, other
than in relation to the poor law. The state was represented on the quayside not
only by customs officers, but in emigrant ports also by officials charged with the
implementation of the Passenger Acts and, from , by those operating Board
of Trade shipping offices dealing with the signing-on and discharge of seamen.
16
The world enclosed within the dock wall encompassed outposts of central
government.
Despite the trend for port facilities to be treated by parliament less as public
works and more as the privileged province of special expert interests, links
between ports and the wider economic community remained strong. For much
of our period, the effect of the movement towards deeper water facilities was
site extension, rather than displacement; port and city remained in proximity and
maintained a relationship. One factor here, depending on the availability of alter-
native modes of transport, was the place of a local consumer market in provid-
ing custom for incoming goods; the bulk of London’s nineteenth-century sea
trade, much of it carried coastwise, was destined to feed and warm Londoners.
Another was employment; port activity in these towns and cities was a source of
jobs, feeding into urban growth via a number of routes. First, there were the
demands of the loading and unloading of vessels which took place on the water-
front itself. The number of workers involved, as also when they worked, was
determined by both the type of cargo and the flow of business, but in the longer
term was also determined by the amount of investment – the size of the enter-
prise. In large foreign trade ports, like London and Liverpool, dealing with a
complex mix of seasonal cargoes, many thousands of labourers were periodically
needed on hand to cope with the amount of business, whereas the ‘drop’ system
Sarah Palmer
14
PP , Select Committee on Transport, Second Report, Qq. , .
15
P. Turnbull and S. Weston, ‘Employment regulation, state intervention and the economic perfor-
mance of European ports’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, (), .
16
See O. MacDonagh, A Pattern of Government Growth – (London, ); C. H. Dixon,
‘Legislation and the seaman’s lot’, in P. Adam, ed., Seamen in Society (Paris, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
of loading adopted in the north-eastern coal ports to cope with the steep terrain
was less labour intensive. Beyond the immediate transhipment aspects, there
were the related demands for special services such as chandling, outfitting,
stowage, shipbroking and forwarding. Associated too with the work of every
port, though varying in extent, was a distributive sector encompassing whole-
saling, merchanting, warehousing and transportation inward and outward. Part
of this work was clerical. Indeed, port development meant the creation of two
labour forces, one associated with moving cargoes, the other with moving paper-
work – one possible reason why mid-nineteenth-century standards of literacy
and educational attainment were higher in port towns than elsewhere.
17
In
general, it can be said that distribution functions, other than transport, were most
significant where trade was diverse and multi-sourced, so that sorting became
imperative. Finally, there were maritime related sectors: the industries process-
ing sea-borne products, such as sugar, oilseeds and grain, together with, in some
cases, shipbuilding and, more commonly, shiprepairing. These activities contrib-
uted to what had become by the turn of the century an increasingly industrial-
ised, polluted and inhospitable port landscape, with the dock or harbour area
inhabited primarily only by those forced to live near their work. Unsurprisingly,
merchants, shipowners and other shipping industry professionals, who a century
earlier would have been housed close to the port, now chose to have their resi-
dences in more salubrious environments.
18
Not all these functions were of equal weight everywhere. As the following
summary survey of the history of ports demonstrates, there is a fundamental dis-
tinction, based on the range of overall economic activity, between towns and
cities which were also ports (nineteenth-century London, Glasgow, Newcastle,
Belfast and twentieth-century Bristol) and those centres (Liverpool, Cardiff,
Southampton, Hull, Plymouth) which were port towns or cities in the sense that
this dimension was central. This centrality can be demonstrated by the share of
port-related employment in the workforce. In , for example, a third of all
workers at Cardiff were employed as seamen, dockers or on the railways and in
on Merseyside half of all workers were in shipping, trade or transport.
19
Such dependence meant that these specialised port cities were vulnerable to
developments in trade and shipping over which they had little or no influence.
The effects of maritime dominance, however, went deeper than this, becom-
ing embedded into the wider urban social structure, influencing such aspects as
Ports
17
W. B. Stephens, ‘Illiteracy in provincial maritime districts and among seamen in early and mid-
nineteenth-century England’, in E. Jenkins, ed., Studies in the History of Education (Leeds, ),
pp. –.
18
See G. Norcliffe, K. Bassett and T. Hoare, ‘The emergence of postmodernism on the urban water-
front: geographical perspectives on changing relationships’, Journal of Transport Geography,
(), –.
19
Daunton, Coal Metropolis, p. ; University of Liverpool, Survey of Merseyside,Vol. (Liverpool,
), pp. –.
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the character and preoccupations of local elites, as also influencing social, relig-
ious, political identification at all levels. These are complex matters, which can
only be touched on here, but three later nineteenth-century examples may stand
as indicative of the types of relationship and their variety. At Liverpool,
Liberalism, the creed of the Mersey’s shipowning elites, lacked working-class
roots in part because the self-help fellowships of cooperation and trade union-
ism which were its base elsewhere depended on greater permanency of employ-
ment than Liverpool offered to much of its working class. At Portsmouth, with
a large and skilled workforce, managed by a supervisory stratum, employed by
the state, the middle class did not possess the sources of wealth or economic
power available to their peers in other port towns, and neighbourhood and
locality, rather than class distinction, structured cultural patterns. At
Southampton, middle-class control of law enforcement agencies, against a back-
ground of regular employment of transport workers and local men as seafarers
by railway and liner companies, contributed to its reputation as a quiet, respect-
able place.
20
In the mid-nineteenth century London and Liverpool were the giants among
English ports, in together accounting for per cent of all inward ship-
ping, while Glasgow handled per cent of Scotland’s import tonnage.
21
These
centres were distinct from all others not only in the quantity of cargo handled
but also in its range and variety. Import and transhipment business predominated
in London, the ‘emporium of the world’, whereas Liverpool, drawing on the
manufacturing and industrial strengths of its hinterland, was export oriented but
this distinction should not be overstressed – both ports were general cargo ports.
Though their locations as tidal ports were very different, with London inland
and Liverpool on an exposed near-coastal site, each port had substantial and
extensive dock and quay facilities, with a commensurate range of waterfront
ancillary services and maritime-related industries. Each port too had canal links
into the interior, but Liverpool was at this time better served by rail and road
connections than were the docks and wharves of London.
Such parallels between the two great English ports take too little account of
the wider context to be convincing within an urban perspective. London had a
long history as the maritime metropolis and the system of the reformed port,
with foreign trade docks developed by private companies, had belatedly
extended rather than replaced the earlier framework of port activity based on the
river. In London the old and the new coexisted, with no authority responsible
Sarah Palmer
20
See J. Smith, ‘Class, skill and sectarianism in Glasgow and Liverpool, –’, and J. Field,
‘Wealth, styles of life and social tone amongst Portsmouth’s middle class, –,’in R. J. Morris,
ed., Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester, ), pp.
–, –; V. C. Burton, ‘The work and home life of seafarers, with special reference to
the port of Southampton, –’ (PhD thesis, University of London, ), p. .
21
PP , Trade and Navigation Accounts.
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for the government of the port as a whole. Furthermore, the port, no more than
any other type of economic activity, could not claim to be the central feature in
the capital’s economy, characterised as it was by diversity which included a sub-
stantial manufacturing sector. London was a port – but much else besides.
22
On the Clyde, thanks initially to the improved access provided by steamtugs,
Glasgow was just emerging from the shadow of Greenock in serving large
ocean-going shipping with further development ensured over the following
half-century by an ambitious programme of river deepening and dock construc-
tion. Here the pace of urban development was forcing an improvement in com-
munications.
23
In contrast Liverpool in the s was the product of just over a
century of trade-related expansion, which drew in population, rapidly extended
the area of settlement and both reflected and promoted a continual flow of addi-
tional facilities provided by the dock trustees, under the control of the
Corporation. Such was the pressure for land close to the waterfront to meet
demands for processing of bulk imports that older industries, including ship-
building, were progressively being displaced. Already Liverpool was defining its
longer-term role as a narrowly based, trade-centred port city.
24
On the east coast, the long-established Baltic port, Hull, was similarly focused
on trade, though with less success in expanding its share than Liverpool since
handicapped by a difficult site, underinvestment in facilities, poor inland trans-
port links which inhibited exports and the development of other Humberside
ports. With the noteworthy exception of cotton manufacture, employing over
, at mid-century, its main industries were small-scale processing or maritime
based: shipbuilding, marine engineering, tanning, oilseed crushing and paint
manufacture. Whaling was on the decline, and the expansion of the fishing
industry still to come.
25
Bristol, declining as a port from the late eighteenth century with the loss of
trade to Liverpool, by the s was at the juncture of a new phase in its devel-
opment as the city began to gain the benefit of railway links and to find means,
administrative as well as technical, of tackling the physical problems of its difficult
river access. Its future, however, was to lie in industrial development rather than
Ports
22
On the Port of London see J. Broodbank, History of the Port of London, vols. (London, );
J. H. Bird, The Geography of the Port of London (London, ); R. D. Brown, The Port of London
(Lavenham, ); R. J. M. Carr and S. K. Al Naib, eds., Dockland (London, ). On the Port
of Liverpool see F. E. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey (Newton Abbot, ); N. Ritchie-Noakes,
Liverpool’s Historic Waterfront (Liverpool, ); A. Jarvis, Liverpool Central Docks, –
(Stroud, ).
23
See G. Jackson and C. Munn, ‘Trade, commerce and finance’, in W. H. Fraser and I. Maver, eds.,
Glasgow, vol. : to (Manchester, ), pp. –; D. Turnock, The Historical Geography
of Scotland since (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
24
See R. Lawton, ‘From the Port of Liverpool to the conurbation of Merseyside’, in W. T. S. Gould
and A. G. Hodgkiss, eds., The Resources of Merseyside (Liverpool, ), pp. –.
25
J. Bellamy, ‘The Humber estuary and industrial development’, in N. V. Jones, ed., A Dynamic
Estuary (Hull, ), pp. –.
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in a revival of its past trading tradition.
26
Southampton was also at the beginning
of a new phase, but one in which port activity was to come to the fore. Already
gaining population on the basis of tourism, in the opening of the London
and South-Western Railway, shortly followed by the first dock, was to form the
basis of a passenger business bringing Southampton to the position of fifth port
in the country within twenty years.
27
Of the remaining significant port towns at the start of our period Newcastle
and the associated Tyneside settlements were already developing as industrial
centres based on proximity to the coalfield, supplementing, though by no means
supplanting, a long-established focus on the export of coal. The control of the
Tyne itself had long been a cause of dispute between Newcastle and the centres
of population at Gateshead, and at South and North Shields, and the river
remained in its natural state, with passage hampered by shallows, islands and
sandbanks. In the creation of the Tyne Commission provided the admin-
istrative basis for the necessary improvements, in particular the deepening of the
river, which also served to promote a growing specialism in the construction of
iron vessels.
28
Among the other coal ports, Sunderland was also a major ship-
building centre, first in timber then in iron, while on the Tees Middlesbrough
and Stockton were essentially new ports created by the Stockton and Darlington
Railway link to the interior.
29
In the early s Cardiff’s role as ‘Coal
Metropolis’ still lay in the future, but its direction had been recently set by the
opening of the Taff Vale Railway and the first of the Bute docks.
30
Over the following decades the railway was to have an increasing impact on
port development, reshaping hinterlands and creating new trading opportunities,
not least for railway companies themselves. But the most significant influence on
port business was the gradual, but relentless, transition from sail to steam once
the compound engine had been perfected in the mid-s. The associated
growth in the size of individual vessels, as also in the quantity of cargo handled
by British ports created a need for additional, more extensive dock, quay and
storage accommodation and, in established ports, rendered facilities designed to
cater for sailing vessels increasingly outdated and inappropriate. By way of
response, between and over £ million was invested in English
ports and harbours alone.
31
Though no port of any size was physically unaffected by the change in ship-
ping technology, nor by the continued expansion of trade which characterised
Sarah Palmer
26
F. Walker, The Bristol Region (London, ), pp. –.
27
F. J. Monkhouse, A Survey of Southampton and its Region (Southampton, ), pp. –.
28
H. A. Mess, Industrial Tyneside (London, ), pp. –; Bird, Major Seaports, pp. –.
29
Bird, Major Seaports, p. .
30
H. Carter, ‘Cardiff, local, regional and national capital’, in G. Gordon, ed., Regional Cities in the
UK, – (London, ), p. .
31
A. G. Kenwood, ‘Port investment in England and Wales, –’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic
and Social Research, (), –.
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the later nineteenth century, the consequences varied according to local circum-
stances. In the case of London the scale of investment in new docks owed as
much to rivalry between dock companies as to the objective needs of shipping,
but, as in the other great ports, Liverpool and Glasgow, the effect was to supple-
ment and extend the reach of earlier maritime activity, with consequent exten-
sions of the area of port-related settlement. The deep water modern facilities of
these three ports made them the main beneficiaries of the development of steel
screw steamers, as the home bases for the main passenger and cargo liner com-
panies. At Bristol viable accommodation for shipping in the city centre was ham-
pered by poor access from the Avon, with the consequence that Avonmouth
() and Portishead () were constructed, effectively serving as outports to
the Port of Bristol, into which they were incorporated.
32
Swansea saw four docks
constructed between and , though at Cardiff the reluctance of the
Butes to finance new docks, despite the overcrowded state of what was by the
s the leading coal export port in the world, meant that the response was
unduly protracted, leading to the opening of rival facilities at Barry ().
33
Southampton’s progress was hampered by the tardiness of its dock company in
providing deep water berths, which led to the transfer of P & O’s business to
London in –, but was able to recover its dynamism once the South-
Western Railway Company took control of waterfront facilities.
34
At
Manchester, an inland port brought into being by the completion of the Ship
Canal challenged Liverpool’s dominant role in the carriage of cotton.
35
On the
Humber, additional railway connections allowed Goole, another inland port,
and Grimsby to syphon off central England trade from Hull. Both Hull and
Grimsby, in common with Fleetwood were, however, to benefit when the intro-
duction of the steam trawler fostered phenomenal growth in the fishing indus-
try which led to the opening of docks specifically designed to serve its needs.
36
In general the effect of the change in shipping technology in the later nine-
teenth century was to encourage the emergence of additional ports without
undermining the position of the former leaders. But whereas earlier port activ-
ity had given life to a central business district based on mercantile and commer-
cial activity, providing work opportunities for middle-class professionals,
subsequent development closely linked to railway systems, where goods or
people passed through but did not linger, had no parallel effect.
If in some cities commercial activity initially associated with port-based trans-
actions can subsequently be said to have developed a life and momentum of its
Ports
32
Walker, Bristol Region, pp. –.
33
Daunton, Coal Metropolis, p. ; G. Hallett and P. Randall, Maritime Industry and Port Development
in South Wales (Cardiff, ), pp. –.
34
A. Temple Patterson, ‘Southampton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in Monkhouse,
ed., Survey of Southampton, p. ; Burton, ‘Work and home life of seafarers’, pp. –.
35
See D. A. Farnie, The Manchester Ship Canal and the Rise of the Port of Manchester, –
(Manchester, ).
36
Bellamy, ‘Humber estuary’, pp. –.
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