Town Life

By the end of the nineteenth century the English people had visibly become a nation of city and town dwellers. Significantly, the expression 'the man in the street' now came into general use; so also did the verb 'to urbanize' in the sense of to make a town rather than in the old sense of to render urbane. ¹ The American A. F. Weber in his pioneering survey of The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899) declared that the tendency towards urban concentration was 'all but universal in the Western world', 'the most remarkable phenomenon of the present century'. In other Western countries, however, it was still a tendency, whereas in England it was already a preponderant reality. In 1801 little more than one-third of the population of England and Wales had lived in an urban environment, but by mid-century this had risen to one-half of a doubled population. Then by 1901 it had passed three-quarters of a population which had nearly doubled again: ²

	Population
	Total	Urban	Urban percentage
1801	8,900,000	3,100,000	34.8
1851	17,900,000	9,000,000	50.2
1881	26,000,000	17,600,000	67.9
1901	32,500,000	25,100,000	77.0

Between 1871 and 1901 the number of towns in England and Wales with more than 50,000 inhabitants rose from 37 to 75. In 1901,14,200,000 people - well over half the urban population - lived in cities with populations greater than 100,000. These cities formed the cores of six large urban areas which were so extensively and intensively urban as to require a new word to describe them. This word 'conurbation' - was duly coined by Patrick Geddes, the pioneering town planner, in his book Cities in Evolution (1915):

Population of conurbations
	Greater London	South-east Lancashire	West Midlands	West Yorkshire	Merseyside	Tyneside
1871	3,890,000	1,386,000	969,000	1,064,000	690,000	346,000
1881	4,770,000	1,685,000	1,134,000	1,269,000	824,000	426,000
1901	6,586,000	2,117,000	1,483,000	1,524,000	1,030,000	678,000

Greater London formed much the biggest conurbation. By 1901 it contained one-fifth of the entire population of England and Wales, and during the preceding decade it absorbed (from reproduction or immigration) one-quarter of all population increase. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century while the provincial cities were losing some of their attractiveness as social and political centres - London was becoming a world city, the hub of an empire of unprecedented size. ³