Nineteenth-century British urbanisation

Assembled from 13 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, England became the first country in the world where most people lived in towns — the 1851 census is conventionally cited as the first count in which the urban share passed half. The mechanism was not that towns grew from within. Urban death rates exceeded urban birth rates for much of the period, so cities grew by continuous in-migration from the countryside and from Ireland, and would have shrunk without it. This is the "urban penalty": a person who moved to Manchester or Liverpool for higher wages took on a measurably shorter life expectancy in exchange, and the trade was made anyway because the rural alternative had been closing. What the towns lacked was not money but authority — sewers, water supply, burial grounds and building regulation all required powers that most industrial towns did not possess until the public health legislation of the 1840s and after. The demographic penalty began to close only once that machinery existed.
3. Knowledge
4. Nineteenth-century British urbanisation
5. Connections
6. Parliamentary enclosure
7. Manchester
8. The peak of parliamentary enclosure
9. Chadwick reports on the sanitary condition of the labouring population
10. The census records an urban majority
11. Evidence
12. Supports urban and municipal population growth and the conventional dating of the urban majority to the 1851 count. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted. No population figure is quoted anywhere in this pack, because township, borough and conurbation boundaries differ and the distinction cannot be made responsibly without the returns.
13. Supports the class-and-place comparison of average age at death, and the report's role in founding British public health legislation. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; the specific mortality figures in Chadwick's tables are therefore not quoted in this pack.