Town Life

Edwardian Englishmen were a town generation, the first to predominate within any large state. In 1901, 25,100,000 (77 per cent) out of 32,500,000 people in England and Wales lived in a more or less urban environment: ten years later the figures were 28,200,000 (78.1 per cent) out of 36 million. ¹ The conurbations were continuing to grow both in population and in area:

	Greater London	South-East Lancashire	West Midlands	West Yorkshire	Merseyside	Tyneside
1901	6,586,000	2,117,000	1,483,000	1,524,000	1,030,000	678,000
1911	7,256,000	2,328,000	1,634,000	1,590,000	1,157,000	816,000

Cities with over 100,000 inhabitants absorbed 15,800,000 people in 1911. This was 1,600,000 more than in 1901, but it constituted a slightly smaller percentage of the total urban population. More and more Edwardians were moving from within the formal big city boundaries to outlying suburbs and to captured commuter towns. John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, remarked when introducing the Housing and Town Planning Bill (12.5.1908) how every two-and-a-half years there was 'a county of London converted into urban life from rural conditions'.