ABSTRACT

The variations in the distribution of the population over the towns, districts and regions of England and Wales are due, in part at least, to inequalities in the distribution of industrial facilities. People settle where there are opportunities for earning a living, and where new opportunities are created in an area (as they have been in modern times) there will be changes in the geographical distribution of population. 1 There can be no doubt that in the past 160 years internal migration within England and Wales has been intimately connected with changes in opportunities for employment. Until the middle of the eighteenth century we were predominantly an agriculturally employed population, and as the facilities for agriculture were more or less evenly spread over the whole country there was no necessity for very uneven concentrations of population. The development of industries which had of necessity to be localized in certain areas (e.g. coal mining), and of those which either by accident or design became localized in a particular area (e.g. the cotton industry) led to concentrations of population in relatively small portions of the available land area, and hence to the unequal distribution of population.