ABSTRACT
The mixing and separation of social status groups have long been a preoccupation of sociologists, legislators and town planners. Interest in this topic arose first perhaps when the functional intermixing of occupation groups in the village and town gave way to social segregation during the industrial revolution; the process was described in a report made by the Manchester Statistical Society on the Vital Statistics of Manchester in 1841 and quoted by T. S. Ashton: ‘Owing to the increasing annoyance of smoke, the noise and bustle of business, and perhaps also the growing value of building land, for shops and warehouses in the central parts, all the families of the comfortable class, whose avocations or circumstances permit a change of residence, have in the course of the last few years removed from the township of Manchester, and almost to an equal extent from that of Salford, to the outer townships; whereby large tracts of the town remain occupied solely by operatives. This change, though it may promote the health of the families of the opulent, is to be regarded as unfavourable to the town as a community, since it has drawn a broad line of separation as to residence between the employers and the employed, which in the issue must prove equally inimical to the well-being of both. But the increase of smoke threatens to extend the same evil until it may happen that the operatives in all are deserted by the superior class … in ten years hence it would seem far from improbable that most of the comfortable class will have withdrawn from the town (except perhaps the outer margins of three or four out of the eight townships), and consequently that a mass of operatives, falling little short of 300,000, will be left to dwell by themselves, subject to the various evils incident to a great community, the component parts of which are so ill-arranged and so unnaturally sundered and disjoined.’ 1 Because of the interest of this matter it was, therefore, decided to ask families if they had moved and, if they had, about the location in status areas of their former houses in Liverpool and where they would prefer to live if they had a choice, and to relate status reputation of the location of past, present and possible future homes.
