ABSTRACT
An awareness of residential differentiation in nineteenth-century British cities is not new. Contemporary observers were concerned with the rapid growth of towns in the nineteenth century and with the way in which different groups within society were becoming increasingly segregated into particular areas of the city. In North America, towns with a pre-industrial economy also began to show clear occupational groupings with the richer merchants, least tied by constraints of transport, moving out beyond the urban fringe. The development of an effective suburban transport network has been seen as a necessary precondition for large-scale residential differentiation. Most important are variations in the scale of spatial analysis and in the choice of variables. For a large industrial city such as Liverpool it is easy to demonstrate that, by the mid-Victorian period, particular migrant, occupational and social-status groups had become segregated into different portions of the city and that distinct residential areas had emerged.
