ABSTRACT
By 1900 the town was at the locus of very well-developed road, rail and water communications. Edwardian Doncaster was one of the largest railway junctions in England with excellent connections to all the regions of the country.? The importance of the railway and coal industries to Doncaster in the first half of the
1 Fogarty, M.P., Prospects o/the Industrial Areas o/Great Britain, (London, 1945), p. 28, provides the 1938 estimate, showing a rise of nearly 11 per cent between 1931 and 1938 for Doncaster, far higher than for the rest of Yorkshire. 2 Coates, B.E. and Malcolm Lewis, G., The Doncaster Area: British Landscapes through Maps, (Sheffield, 1966), p. 16: Doncaster Directory and Yearbook, (1921), (Doncaster, 1922), p. 4. 3 Doncaster Directory and Yearbook, (1921), p. 4. 4 Reclus, E., The British Isles, (1887), p. 249, quoted in Pelling, H. Social Geography 0/ British Elections, 1885-19/0, (Aldershot, 1994), p. 236. 5 Bagwell, P.S., Doncaster, Town o/Trainmakers 1853-1990, (Doncaster, 1991), p. 7. 6 Freeman, T.W., The Conurbations o/Great Britain, (Manchester, 1959), p. 230. 7 Abercrombie, P. and Johnson, T.H., The Doncaster Regional Planning Schemes: The Report Prepared/or the Joint Committee, (London, 1922), p. 7.
