ABSTRACT
By the end of the nineteenth century the English people had visibly become a nation of city and town dwellers. Significantly, the expression 'the man in the street' now came into general use; so also did the verb 'to urbanize' in the sense of to make a town rather than in the old sense of to render urbane. 1 The American A. F. Weber in his pioneering survey of The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899) declared that the tendency towards urban concentration was 'all but universal in the Western world', 'the most remarkable phenomenon of the present century'. In other Western countries, however, it was still a tendency, whereas in England it was already a preponderant reality. In 1801 little more than one-third of the population of England and Wales had lived in an urban environment, but by mid-century this had risen to one-half of a doubled population. Then by 1901 it had passed three-quarters of a population which had nearly doubled again: 2
Population |
|||
---|---|---|---|
Total |
Urban |
Urban percentage |
|
1801 |
8,900,000 |
3,100,000 |
34.8 |
1851 |
17,900,000 |
9,000,000 |
50.2 |
1881 |
26,000,000 |
17,600,000 |
67.9 |
1901 |
32,500,000 |
25,100,000 |
77.0 |
Population of conurbations |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Greater London |
South-east Lancashire |
West Midlands |
West Yorkshire |
Merseyside |
Tyneside |
|
1871 |
3,890,000 |
1,386,000 |
969,000 |
1,064,000 |
690,000 |
346,000 |
1881 |
4,770,000 |
1,685,000 |
1,134,000 |
1,269,000 |
824,000 |
426,000 |
1901 |
6,586,000 |
2,117,000 |
1,483,000 |
1,524,000 |
1,030,000 |
678,000 |