ABSTRACT
Urban improvement in the old corporate boroughs and market towns, many situated far away from the expanding northern industrial regions, appears somewhat anachronistic and remote from the new currents of the age. Improvement can be seen well before the classic period of industrial expansion, and in many of the nonmanufacturing towns continued well into the Industrial Revolution. Such urban improvement immediately suggests three points. First, it represents a theme of continuity in urban economic history across the gulf of the Industrial Revolution and to this extent suggests the need for a model of economic change that focuses on gradual and widely diffused elements. Second is the point that wealth and prosperity were widely dispersed in early eighteenth-century England, and were to be found in numerous urban centers. A third point worth emphasis is the social implication of urban improvement before 1780. Urban amenities connected with better building and street improvement developed to a significant extent before the Industrial Revolution.
