Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
own, the same can be said of shipbuilding. In the s ships were built in all
major ports, with their market primarily but not exclusively local or regional.
By the evolution of the metal-hulled steamship had confined shipbuilding
on any scale to the North-East, the Clyde and Belfast. For these centres the spe-
cialism in shipbuilding, repairing and engineering, boosted by the armaments
race, rendered port services progressively less significant in shaping the physical,
social and economic environment of such industrial rivers.
37
In a very different
geographical context, the Bristol economy had also been reshaped, with historic
port-related industries of tobacco and of cocoa and chocolate redeveloped and
joined by a variety of engineering industries, and its port, no longer the leading
sector, nevertheless prospering from the handling of foodstuffs and bulk raw
materials.
38
This was not the case for Liverpool, which, drawing its exports from a
restricted, highly developed surrounding manufacturing area, did not become a
manufacturing centre in its own right. Iron shipbuilding took hold across the
Mersey at Birkenhead, but Liverpool’s industrial base was rooted in the process-
ing of bulk imported raw materials, where land transport costs discouraged trans-
fer inland. Flour milling, seed crushing, soap making and sugar refining were the
dominant industries.
39
Hull also had a somewhat similar bulk-processing profile,
with interdependence between traditional industrial and maritime sectors
increasing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its ‘new industry’, fishing,
served to strengthen the maritime basis of the Humber economy, providing a
market for the construction of fishing vessels, which served as a lifeline for the
shipbuilding industry. A subsequent rapid transition from smack to steam trawl-
ing at Hull and the new port, Grimsby, radically restructured the fishing indus-
try and ancillary construction trades.
40
In both Hull and Liverpool, then,
maritime-related activity continued to be a major determinant of the wider eco-
nomic structure, but elsewhere the strength of linkages into the wider urban
economy varied. Cardiff’s failure, during the period of its greatest success as a
port, to widen beyond coal into more general trades or into shipbuilding, despite
contemporary identification of the potential and the need, provides an example
here.
41
Finally, while naval ports provided the extreme example of maritime dom-
ination, the industries promoted were not entirely what might be expected. In
Portsmouth it was the clothing industry which benefited in the later nineteenth
Sarah Palmer
37
See S. Ville, ed., Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (St Johns,
Newfoundland, ).
38
Walker, Bristol Region, pp. –.
39
E. P. Cotter, The Port of Liverpool, including Birkenhead and Garston: United States Department of
Commerce and US Shipping Board Foreign Port Series No. (Washington, ), p. .
40
See R. Robinson, ‘The development of the British North Sea steam trawling fleet –’,
in L. U. Scholl and J. Edwards, eds., The North Sea, Resource and Seaway (Aberdeen, ), pp.
–; R. Robinson, A History of the Yorkshire Coast Fishing Industry, – (Hull, );
Bellamy, ‘Humber estuary’, pp. –; E. E. Gillett, A History of Grimsby (London, ).
41
See Daunton, Coal Metropolis.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
century. This employed approaching half of the labour force, almost entirely
female. The link here was less with naval tailoring than with the superabundance
of low-wage labour, a result of the army and navy presence, which was available
to fill orders from London manufacturers.
42
The outbreak of the First World War had a varied effect on the business of
British ports. Liverpool, with its sheltered west coast position and suitability for
convoys, in particular benefited at the expense of London which from was
severely affected by the submarine campaign.
43
But the temporary redistribution
of trade produced by wartime conditions, followed by the post-war boom, was
to prove of minor significance for a number of centres in comparison with the
longer term impact of the loss of overseas markets and falling demand for
Britain’s staple products. The South Wales ports, with their extreme dependence
on coal, were hit particularly hard, but in the North-East the effect on trade
resulting from the problems of the coal industry were compounded by the crisis
in shipbuilding.
44
Yet elsewhere the interwar decline in export volumes, of more
significance for port operations than values, was counterbalanced by a rising
volume of imports from which London, Hull, Bristol, Southampton and, to a
lesser extent, Glasgow benefited.
45
This was not sufficient to exclude these ports
from the impact of depression on waterfront employment; in London average
daily engagements almost halved between and .
46
Liverpool’s situation,
however, stood out as the most dire, with unemployment in the city as a whole
rising to per cent in , as against the national average of per cent.
47
It
suffered a fall in exports as a result of diminishing demand for the products of its
Lancashire hinterland and failed to expand its imports in compensation, with the
consequence that every year from to on average per cent of its trade
was lost to other British ports, mainly in the South. Among other blows, the
transfer of much North Atlantic passenger trade to Southampton exemplified
Liverpool’s changing status.
48
Although there was some diversification of
Merseyside’s industrial base as a result of these difficulties, the economy remained
focused on its traditional port-based concerns.
49
The effect of the outbreak of war in was, as earlier in the century, to
benefit the trade of western ports at the expense of those on the east (Cardiff in
Ports
42
Riley and Smith, ‘Industrialization in naval ports’, p. .
43
See C. E. Fayle, The War and the Shipping Industry (London, ).
44
Michael Barke, ‘Newcastle/Tyneside –’, in Gordon, ed., Regional Cities, pp. –;
Hallett and Randall, Maritime Industry, p. .
45
W. J. Corlett, ‘The share of the Port of Liverpool in total imports’, in G. Allen et al., eds., The
Import Trade of the Port of Liverpool (Liverpool, ), p. ; Kelly, ‘Port transport industry in
Bristol’.
46
G. Phillips and N. Whiteside, Casual Labour (Oxford, ), p. .
47
Lawton, ‘Port of Liverpool’, p. .
48
Corlett, ‘Share’, pp. –; D. E. Baines, ‘Merseyside in the British economy: the s and the
Second World War’, in R. Lawton and C. M. Cunningham, eds., Merseyside (London, ), pp.
–.
49
Lawton, ‘Port of Liverpool’, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
particular enjoyed a brief remission from decline, handling up to one third of all
UK dry cargo), though the extent of physical destruction resulting from enemy
attacks posed a need for future investment in reconstruction in all major ports.
50
Even so, the post-war revival of trade provided for some a welcome contrast to
the difficulties of the interwar years, and the s saw traffic increasing at both
London and Liverpool.
51
There was no salvation for ports specialising in the coal
trade, but the rapid development of bulk cargo transportation, particularly of
iron ore and oil, advantaged those ports able to invest in deep water specialised
facilities to serve these needs.
52
In consequence, Southampton, despite compe-
tition from air transport which presaged its demise as an oceanic passenger port,
found compensation in oil importing and refining.
53
Southampton, in common
with the Channel and east coast ports, was increasingly to benefit from facing
towards Europe. Indeed, Hull’s prospects, which had diminished with the
oceanic emphasis of trade following the war, were transformed by Britain’s entry
to the European Economic Community (EEC).
54
In the s the spread of new
handling methods, including containerisation, were to advantage those ports
with waterfront storage space and good road transport connections, as well as to
reduce the need for on-site labour.
55
Where docks and quays were hemmed in
by urban development, as at London and Liverpool, the effect was to complete
the separation between city and port, and between port and employment. From
now on ports were gateways, entry and exit points; the port city as the nine-
teenth century understood it had ceased to exist.
56
That understanding was not a matter of trade statistics or the amount invested
in docks and quays, but involved a perception of a port as possessing special char-
acteristics as a place. Literary evocations of ports are almost a commonplace of
Victorian literature, with Charles Dickens, Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad
among those attracted by the juxtaposition of shipping and quayside, the exotic
and the ordinary. The works of social commentators from Henry Mayhew
onwards also testify to other paradoxes including the contrast between valuable
cargoes and the poverty of those handling them and the openness to external
Sarah Palmer
50
Hallett and Randall, Maritime Industry, p. .
51
Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, pp. –; S. Palmer, ‘From London to Tilbury – the Port of
London since ’, in P. Holm and J. Edwards, eds., North Sea Ports and Harbours – Adaptations
to Change (Esbjerg, ), pp. –.
52
PP cmnd , Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Major Ports of Great Britain
(Rochdale Committee), pp. –.
53
M. E. Witherick, ‘Port developments, port-city linkages and prospects for maritime industry: a
case study of Southampton’, in Hoyle and Pinder, eds., Cityport, pp. –.
54
Jackson, ‘Shipowners and private dock companies’, p. .
55
See R. E. Takel, ‘The spatial demands of ports and related industry and their relationships with
the community’, in Hoyle and Pinder, eds., Cityport, pp. –.
56
This conclusion draws on B. Hoyle, ‘Development dynamics at the port–city interface’, in Hoyle,
Pinder and Husain, eds., Revitalising.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
influences, as exemplified by the presence of foreigners, coexisting with a culture
of exclusion, as exemplified by the importance of family connection in deter-
mining who got waterfront work. It is important to be aware that these concerns
or, at a popular level, generalised impressions derived from them have to some
extent distorted the picture of what it meant to be a port town or city. Thus we
have more awareness of the conditions of port labourers than the characteristics
of port elites; the pervasive orderliness of Southampton is less familiar than the
squalor of Wapping.
Although port-related employment could extend well beyond the waterfront,
the existence of a waterfront maritime quarter, bereft of wealthier occupants, can
be seen as one central distinguishing feature of the use of space in the nineteenth-
century port city. Not all ports had ‘sailortowns’ as diverse and wild in reputation
as those in London and Liverpool described by Stan Hugill in a well-known
popular study but the need for accommodation, not only for seafarers, but also for
port labourers, provided the basis for settlement in the surrounding streets, as well
as for the provision of services.
57
While sailortown is readily recognisable world-
wide as a generic category, the type of seafaring employment influenced its extent
and character. In coasting trades, or where voyages were not terminating, crews
usually stayed on board so demand for lodgings was less. Liners provided a settled
source of employment for ‘working men who got wet’, who lived locally and were
part of wider working-class shore society. Southampton lacked its sailortown
because there was no need for one.
58
In contrast, ports such as Cardiff, dominated
by tramp shipping, were frequented by seamen tied into systems of payment where
credit was a necessity, who looked to the port district to provide them with lodg-
ings, entertainment, clothing and, eventually, an outward berth. The disrepu-
table character of such areas, combined with a view of the sailor as footloose,
ignorant, gullible and in need of protection, brought the attention of central and,
in the case of Liverpool, municipal government, as also of philanthropists and
religious organisations, with the consequence that Board of Trade shipping
offices, sailors’ homes and seamen’s missions became a feature of all ports with an
itinerant seafaring population. These institutions failed to alter the behaviour
when ashore of other than a minority of seafarers and, by their more permanent,
official or semi-official character than lodging houses or slopshops, if anything
served to reinforce the seafaring connection with particular districts.
59
The pres-
ence of large numbers of sailors gave such areas a particular cultural texture,
Ports
57
See S. Hugill, Sailortown (London, ); Hilling, ‘Socio-economic change’; E. L. Taplin,
Liverpool Dockers and Seamen, – (Hull, ).
58
See Burton, ‘Work and home life of seafarers’, p. .
59
See A. Kennerley, ‘British seamen’s missions and sailors’ homes –: voluntary welfare pro-
vision for serving seafarers’ (PhD thesis, Polytechnic South-West, ); M. J. Daunton, ‘Jack
ashore: seamen in Cardiff before ’, Welsh History Review, (); S. Palmer, ‘Seamen ashore
in late nineteenth-century London: protection from the crimps’, in P. Adam, ed., Seamen in Society
(Paris, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
providing a reminder of a wider world which was to persist in the form of racially
and nationally mixed port communities.
Already by the late nineteenth century, however, the demand for sailortown
services was no longer expanding commensurately with port business. Not only
the greater regularity of employment associated with liner business but also fewer
short-term engagements, shorter voyages and the discharge of bulk cargoes away
from urban areas progressively reduced the need for shore facilities. Even so,
despite a weakening of the force of economic motives, sailors who were not
compelled to do so because foreign, still tended to continue to prefer to congre-
gate in port districts. Recent sociologically oriented research has suggested that
the occupational characteristics of seafaring (involving periods of living within
a highly disciplined work environment, separated from family and social respon-
sibilities, but interspaced with periods of leisure on shore with money to spend)
were so different from most other groups that they had the effect of alienating
the sailor from society ashore, and encouraged him to seek the company of those
with experience of the sea and fewer expectations of a conventional mode of
life.
60
Nevertheless, irrespective of such considerations, no sailortown could ulti-
mately survive the decline of the port which had given it life. Cardiff’s Tiger
Bay, for example, which had a span of just one hundred years, already by
had seen a dramatic fall in the number of seamen’s boarding houses and the con-
tinued decline of the coal trade ensured its drift into dereliction in the post-war
decades.
61
If seafaring can be seen as engendering attitudes and values which set the sailor
apart, a similar claim has frequently been made for the waterside itself.
62
Here
the intermittent nature of the work, fundamentally a result of the variety of
cargoes and seasonality but accentuated short term by siting of ports on tidal
rivers which further militated against regular shifts, was reflected in a casual
labour system. Irregularity of employment gave such port workers a freedom to
take time off and encouraged a life style based on short-term calculation. In the
later nineteenth century it was as much the oversupply of manual labour
involved as the irregularity of employment which concerned social reformers
but, while port work was the paradigm of casual employment, such a labour
market was by no means exceptional among urban workers, nor was the poverty
with which it was associated. Other factors were therefore also responsible for
creating a distinctive work culture among dock workers.
Sarah Palmer
60
Kennerley, ‘Seamen’s missions’, pp. –; C. J. Forsyth and W. B. Bankston, ‘The social and
psychological consequences of a life at sea’, Maritime Policy and Management, ().
61
Hilling, ‘Socio-economic change’.
62
See S. A. Andersen, ‘Docker’s culture in three north European port cities’, in Holm and Edwards,
eds., North Sea Ports, pp. –, for a discussion of the literature. See also S. Hill, The Dockers
(London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
There seems no doubt that ports were associated with a less skilled, low-paid
workforce. In Liverpool and Hull, where, as already noted, port-related indus-
try was primarily basic processing, this characteristic extended beyond port
operations, affecting the entire urban employment mix. Nevertheless, as a
number of studies have demonstrated, the popular picture of an undifferentiated
port workforce is misleading; real or constructed occupational distinctions,
claims to particular work territories, were a central feature in all ports handling
a variety of cargoes.
63
With mechanisation limited, teamwork in lifting and
moving cargo using manual labour was essential and even where employment
was regular, as in some railway ports, typically workers operated in gangs.
64
A
sense of solidarity and interdependence within groups of workers resulted,
which encouraged confrontation with those seen as opponents, whether
employers or other groups of workers. Unionisation, virtually completed by
, failed to subdue the autonomy and individualism of dock workers, and the
control of the trade union leadership over the membership frequently proved
tenuous. Labour militancy, surfacing in ‘wildcat strikes’, was a permanent feature
in many ports in the twentieth century, though most pronounced after the
Second World War. The survival of casual engagement until the s, and the
hostility that the introduction in of the trade union sponsored compulsory
national register aroused, in part reflect the strength of established workplace tra-
ditions in the workforce.
In their definitive investigation of casual labour, Gordon Phillips and Noel
Whiteside warn against seeing dockside inhabitants as a race apart. Nevertheless,
developments in the twentieth century tended to enhance differences between
waterfront and other types of labour. The survival of casual employment, as also
its association with a strongly unionised workforce, was itself unusual, as was a
patriarchal family structure, in which recruitment went from father to son, and
an older than average age profile for the industry. A factor here was the intro-
duction of labour registers in many ports in the interwar years, which had the
effect of encouraging exclusivity by defining the workforce. With fewer jobs
available, employment became restricted to a more permanent core of workers
– a contrast with the previous century when it had been possible for migrant
workers, particularly the Irish, to enter the industry.
65
The residential segrega-
tion in dock communities evident in the nineteenth century persisted in the
twentieth century, though rehousing following on bomb damage made it less
marked after the Second World War.
66
Even so, a study of the Port of
Ports
63
See R. Brown, Waterfront Organization in Hull, – (Hull, ); J. Lovell, Stevedores and
Dockers (London, ); Taplin, Liverpool Dockers.
64
See J. Hovey, A Tale of Two Ports (London, ), for discussion of differing labour practices
between ports.
65
Phillips and Whiteside, Casual Labour, pp. , .
66
National Dock Labour Board, Welfare among Dock Workers (London, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Manchester found per cent of port workers living, apparently by choice rather
than necessity, within a mile of the dock gates.
67
Indeed, even in the mid-s British port towns and cities continued to
display many of the physical, social and economic features evident at the begin-
ning of the century. There had been no technological revolution in shipping
similar to the nineteenth-century transition from sail to steam which would have
had an effect of forcing change in the siting or nature of port facilities. On the
quayside, cargo handling continued to be a predominantly manual process,
though fork lift trucks now supplemented cranes as mechanical aids to dock
labour. Altogether there was a settled character to port operations, and likewise
to their urban features.
Within little over a decade all was to change. Containerisation and new modes
of discharging high volume bulk cargoes would rapidly render much of existing
port provision, together with its associated workforce, redundant. In this late
twentieth-century world of maritime transport, the connection between city
and port was to be finally severed – only to be rediscovered, or reinvented, as an
aspect of urban heritage.
Sarah Palmer
67
Liverpool University, Department of Social Science, The Dock Worker:An Analysis of Conditions of
Employment in the Port of Manchester (Liverpool, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
·
·
The development of small towns in Britain
.
A
of the traditional rural town of the mid-nineteenth
century may be found in Anthony Trollope’s description of his English
West Country county of ‘Barsetshire’ in Dr Thorne:
There are towns in it, of course; depots from which are bought seeds and grocer-
ies, ribbons and fire shovels; in which markets are held and country balls carried
on; which return members to parliament, generally – in spite of reform bills, past,
present and coming – in accordance with the dictates of some neighbouring land
magnate: from whence emanate the country postman, and where is located the
supply of post horses necessary for county visitings. But these towns add nothing
to the importance of the county; they consist, with the exception of the assize-
town, of dull, all but death-like single streets. Each possesses two pumps, three
hotels, ten shops, fifteen beer-houses, a beadle and a market-place.
1
This chapter will trace the evolution of such small urban places over the fol-
lowing century; developments that built upon an already quick pace of change.
Peter Borsay concluded that the period from to had been ‘for towns
years of transformation’.
2
‘Transformation’ had also been used by Peter Clark to
sum up changes experienced by English provincial towns from to .
3
Clark’s research on small towns for this period, not least in his chapter in Volume
II of this series, identifies a number of economic trends causing such transfor-
mation. These included nascent industrialisation and commercial expansion,
transportation evolution and also more localised developments, such as the
building of spas and leisure resorts. These developments were minor compared
to those to come in the nineteenth century as the full flowering of Clark’s
nascent trends recast the geography of the British urban scene with regard to
1
A. Trollope, Dr Thorne, new edn (London, ), pp. –.
2
P. Borsay, ‘Introduction’, in P. Borsay, ed., The Eighteenth-Century Town (London, ), pp. –.
3
P. Clark, ‘Introduction’, in P. Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, –
(London, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
settlement networks and hierarchies, functions and the layout of the urban places
themselves. Much of this development was focused on the Victorian industrial
cities but the small towns to be studied in this chapter were also affected. This
chapter will consider the spatial pattern of urban development as it affected the
small town sector and will deal with the functions and internal geographical
structure of the small towns themselves for the period from c. to .
The first task is to draw up a list of which places were ‘small towns’, occupy-
ing that niche in the settlement hierarchy which was distinct functionally and in
size terms from both non-urban villages and more substantial large towns and
cities. One invaluable data set is Clark and Jean Hosking’s Population Estimates of
English Small Towns, –,
4
for, from the range of small English places, they
identify those which can be regarded as urban. For Wales, Harold Carter’s
seminal work on the urban geography of that country includes a comprehensive
list of towns, with the bonus of a functional classification for .
5
For Scotland,
the decision as to what can be regarded as urban can be left to the law; places
with the legal status of a ‘burgh’ were distinct territories whose authorities were
responsible for local government, economic policies, public works and services.
6
Burghs were separately identified in the Scottish censuses, that for usefully
listing the population of each from or .
The urban places listed in these sources were not all small towns, even in
England, for Clark and Hosking’s catalogue starting in the mid-sixteenth century
led to the inclusion by of such urban giants as Liverpool and Sunderland.
So, pruning had to be carried out to discard those places larger than the scale of
town to be considered here. The easiest procedure was to impose a population
ceiling and remove from this analysis towns that exceeded it. A population of
, has often been used as a benchmark in urban histories,
7
so it seemed
appropriate to apply this threshold. This accords with Adna Weber’s analysis, too,
for he differentiated between ‘towns’ and ‘cities’ at , (‘great cities’ started
at ,).
8
No lower threshold population was needed for inclusion here as
places in the three national sources have all been identified by scholars or by
authority as being functionally and/or legally towns or burghs, whatever their
size. This follows Robert Dickinson’s ruling that ‘the definition of an urban set-
tlement is fundamentally a question of function, not of population . . . the
“urban status” of a town depends on the character and variety of functions with
which it is endowed’.
9
Stephen A. Royle
4
P. Clark and J. Hosking, Population Estimates of English Small Towns –, Centre for Urban
History, University of Leicester, Working Paper, (Leicester, ).
5
H. Carter, The Towns of Wales (Cardiff, ).
6
G. Gordon and B. Dicks, ‘Prolegomena’, in G. Gordon and B. Dicks, eds., Scottish Urban History
(Aberdeen, ), pp. –.
7
J. de Vries, European Urbanisation – (London, ).
8
A. F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, ).
9
R. E Dickinson, ‘The distribution and functions of the smaller urban settlements of East Anglia’,
Geography, (), .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Those places identified as small towns in (plus thirty-five Scottish burghs
for which the census report did not record a population total before )
were then traced as a cohort through succeeding censuses to . If they
reached , during that period, they were excluded from the analysis from
the next census. The resultant data set for Great Britain consisted of small
towns in ( in with the additional burghs): in England, in
Wales and in Scotland ( in ), falling to by ( in England,
in Wales and in Scotland) as population growth took of the small
towns beyond the , threshold.
The list and its changes serve as the backbone for the chapter. The operation
and economies of the towns will be discussed. Some were mining centres, others
ports, resorts or industrial towns although most of them were traditional country
and market towns. This was true especially in , but during the study period
such places often became more diverse in their economies. In an associated
fashion, many towns whose raison d’être was, say, mining, assumed also market-
ing functions to serve their populations. The small towns’ society and social
geography will also be identified. Particular attention will be paid to the situa-
tion in , (the end of the Victorian era, which falls neatly in the middle
of the study period) and . This closing date was chosen for being the first
census year after the Second World War, while being prior to the technological,
industrial, transportational and social changes, including counterurbanisation,
which have had such massive impact on the small towns of Britain in the con-
temporary era. Material from England, Scotland and Wales will be used through-
out the chapter. The population details of the towns mentioned in the text are
listed in Table ..
(i) --
During the nineteenth century considerable change took place on the British
urban scene, the basic cause summed up as ‘steam’ by Weber;
10
more fully the
processes of industrialisation and modernisation and all that accompanied them.
The patterns on the ground in show some of the initial impact of ‘steam’
on small towns but whilst few places were not affected ultimately, at mid-century
there remained hundreds of towns performing traditional roles as agricultural
service centres and central places, part of the traditional symbiosis between town
and country.
Map . presents a distribution map of all small towns in (the thirty-
five Scottish burghs where populations are not given until are also
marked). In addition, Map . identifies the relationship between the number
of people living in small towns and the total population of their county. Three
The development of small towns in Britain
10
Weber, Cities, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008