ABSTRACT
The growth of towns over the previous half-century had involved the movement of vast numbers of people, not only from country to town but also from region to region. Late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century industrial processes were based on steam power and coal, and industrial towns therefore grew up on the coalfields of Wales, Northumberland and Durham, and on the flanks of the Pennines in Lancashire and Yorkshire. None of these areas had been very densely populated, or of great national or social importance, when the national economy and social structure was almost entirely grounded in agriculture. As industrialization progressed and the raw materials in these areas became more valuable, the population’s centre of gravity shifted away from the farming districts of central and southern England and moved north and west towards the coalfields. Throughout the nineteenth century only London, for centuries a large and ever-growing trading, manufacturing, administrative and financial centre, and always the largest city in the nation, provided a real counterweight in the south. New towns and cities sprang up on the coalfields as industrialization took hold, and by the middle of the nineteenth century England was the most urbanized nation in the world. Because England was the pace-setter and because there were no real precedents for such rapid and widespread urban development, there was little effective planning involved in the early expansion of the industrial towns which evolved haphazardly according to the dictates of geography and profit. The social consequences of unplanned city growth were unknown and, inevitably, no steps were taken to avoid or solve the many problems involved until the 1830s and 1840s, and only a very few improvements had been effected by the 1850s.
