ABSTRACT
The first task, in an investigation of the relationship between environment and society, is to establish what kind of environment had evolved in the late Victorian city, in this instance, the city of Bristol. Nineteenth-century Bristol was not a typical product of the Industrial Revolution; and both the city’s economic structure and population growth remained largely atypical of the national trends for large cities. In the first half of the century this was particularly the case, as the city lived through the losing battle with Liverpool to be the major port on the west coast. Its size in 1851, of 137,328 inhabitants, which made Bristol the sixth largest town in England, was due to its former importance as a port and the lead it had built up, particularly in the late eighteenth century, over other provincial towns. In the second half of the century the city remained amongst the top ten largest cities, running seventh in 1901. Now, however, Bristol was no longer the very atypical large city that it had been, as gradually, it began to experience economic and social changes of a nature broadly similar to other large towns. Some of these changes will be outlined below.
