ABSTRACT
This growth involved very few ‘new towns’ after the fashion of the planted medieval boroughs or the American frontier. In 1800, Britain was already well endowed with population centres and growth involved the development of those nuclei. The few new towns were related either to resource exploitation or were leisure resorts. Their nature revealed a great deal of the processes shaping nineteenth-century urbanization. Middlesbrough was laid out in 1830 as an extension of the better-known Stockton and Darlington coal-exporting system. By 1853 (22.8), the original town layout had been filled. It was a regular grid with a central market square that would have suited an Irish plantation town. This gave Middlesbrough a very different focus from the medieval borough centres like High Street, Glasgow or Briggate in Leeds. During the 1840s, Middlesbrough acquired a dock, an Improvement Act, a pottery, shipbuilding and ironfounding industries. There were several elements here characteristic of urban formation: local merchant enterprise, London capital and professional expertise, a local resource base, railways and the compelling efficiency of the grid in allocating land use. By 1891-3 (22.9), the railways had linked Cleveland iron ore to Durham coal, and Middlesbrough, ‘this infant Hercules, this youngest child of England’s enterprise’ (Gladstone) experienced explosive growth from 7431 people in 1851 to 75,532 in 1891. The resulting shape of the town revealed further aspects of British urban development. The logic of the grid despite several attempts to reassert itself had been disrupted by the railway and by the property boundaries of the old agricultural economy. Workingclass housing had spread west along the tracks. More spacious villa housing spread south towards a newly donated park. The town centre had jumped the tracks and reformed around new municipal buildings. The placing of the new industrial iron and steel establishments was most significant. The shepherd’s hut and Newport Marsh were replaced by the ironmasters district, whilst to the east was a series of works, each tied to its own settlement of working-class housing, such as Cargo Fleet (1852) and Ormesby (1854). The major industrial sites were placed around the periphery of the existing urban centre, seeking cheap land and access to the new transport system of rail and dredged river, little different in their logic from the modern industrial estate by the motorway. There was little tidy logic in British urban development. Britain lacked strong government direction in land allocation and rarely had a strong local unified landownership, so that the untidy logic of previous land boundaries, access to transport, and competition for desirable environments by a population with dramatically unequal incomes, produced these varied patterns even on the tabula rasa of the south bank of the Tees.
