ABSTRACT
In 1992 Bill Bryson caught a bus from Manchester to Wigan as part of his nowfamous tour of Britain. During the journey he 'lurched and reeled through endless streets that never seemed to change character or gain any ... We went through Eccles and Worsley, then through a surprisingly posh bit, and on to Boothstown and Tyldesley and Atherton and Hindley and other such places of which I had never heard. The bus stopped frequently-every 20 feet in places, it seemed-and at nearly every stop there was a large exchange of people.' 1 This is an extreme case, but in the industrial belt that spreads over contiguous parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, towns and cities often lie so close together that boundaries between them seem imaginary. Urbanization has long been recognized by historians as central to the development of modem Britain, but little consideration is given to the possibility that this densely packed urban zone may have characteristics different from the simple pattern of 'centre and suburbs' or concentric rings seen so clearly in Greater London. 2 Most historians see all towns and cities as self-contained to a high degree, and comparable in structure and function to the capital, apart from being smaller and less developed. 3
The diversity of urban structures and systems
The neglect of complex functional relationships between towns in the UK may result from the fact that London has neither rivals nor partners in southern England: it is a true metropolis. The complex nature of many urban systems has long been recognized in other European settings, especially that of the early modern Dutch Republic, but it was only in the early 1950s that official recognition was accorded to five British conurbations outside London by
the Census authorities.4 The new county structure of 1974 effectively added Avon, Cleveland and Humberside to the list of urban clusters, though South Wales moved in the other direction with the break up of Glamorgan. This reorganization was also the first attempt to organize local government units in the UK according to an almost entirely economic logic, but the metropolitan counties were abolished after only a decade, and as the rest have now also been split up, we are left, for good or ill, with an urban system with less strategic co-ordination than before.
