ABSTRACT

In this and the next two chapters we shall discuss some of the most important manufacturing industries of the great manufacturing belt of inner London, the belt which dominated the economy of the metropolis in the mid-nineteenth century and has survived and enlarged itself up to the present day. In 1861 this belt, as defined in Chapter 3, contained 55.7 per cent of all the manufacturing workers of London. But it contained 55.4 per cent of the printers, 58 6 per cent of the clothes makers, 64-0 per cent of the workers in the precious metals and precision trades and 72-1 per cent of the furniture makers. Together these groups made up 62*1 per cent of the total manufacturing employment in the manufacturing belt, as compared with 57.7 per cent in Greater London as a whole. In 1951 the enlarged Victorian manufacturing belt contained 48-3 per cent of all the manufacturing workers of London. By then the precision group had largely migrated out of the belt, so that only 43-9 per cent of the London total was found there. But in furniture the Victorian belt had 69 -4 per cent of all the workers of Greater London; in printing 73.9 per cent; in clothing 83.8 per cent. Altogether the three groups made up in 1951 44-1 per cent of total employment in manufacturing in the belt, compared with 29.0 per cent in Greater London as a whole. Between 1861 and 1951 the relative degree of concentration of these trades in the belt, as measured by Local Location Quotients, had therefore increased.