ABSTRACT
The merely physical growth of urban regions cannot be easily distinguished from the relationship of such growth to changes in social structure. In the rural parishes of Walcot and Bathwick, even in the parish of St James, landowners and changes in landownership destroyed a peasant society based on lifehold tenancies, and developers and builders replaced them with physical structures housing the wealthy and powerful. Urbanisation had made of Bath a place very different in terms of its social structure from the countryside as a whole. From 1800 to 1820 Bath's population continued to grow, much more slowly than in the eighteenth century, but at a rate equal to that of the country as a whole.
