ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the development of railway centres in the nineteenth century had a profound effect on settlement through the development of communities of railway workers. In the nineteenth century, the building of streets in the suburb of Holgate coincided with the arrival of the railway, and some came to be occupied almost entirely by railway families. Employment on the railways was an attractive proposition for working men of Victorian England. The Holgate area of York experienced considerable upheaval during the nineteenth century that transformed a rural backwater just outside the city walls into a railway community. Railway workers migrated rapidly into York in the 1840s, when the city was connected to a host of new lines and became an important railway junction. An index was used to provide a means of assessing whether a community could have harboured a relatively large or small number of kinship families.
