Bus Services as an Index to Changing Urban Hinterlands with Particular Reference to Somerset

Abstract

of the most important questions in any town planning investigation is to discover what functions the town fulfils for the area beyond its boundaries. Consideration of this matter should remind us that, although in any highly developed civilisation urban centres exist as focal points of a territory, social regions of one sort or another are a much earlier and more fundamental development than the centres themselves. The tribal territories of primitive communities such as can still be found today among the aboriginals of northern Australia are not so very different from the territories found among many bird and animal communities. Like the latter they have certain focal points for different functions the water holes for drinking, the hills as lookout points and so on but no permanent habitations. More advanced groups of pastoralists may even trade with their neighbours without having any market other than periodical tented bazaars such as the suqs of North Africa. These considerations should not be ignored by those who, with the concept in mind of a large East Anglian village, try, for example, to force the pace of nucleated settlement among the dispersed habitations of Celtic Wales. It is true nevertheless that in modern European civilisation, as in most other well developed cultures, it was early found that several communal or specialist tasks could conveniently be performed at one centre. The case of a permanent market growing up round a church or cathedral was as well known in medieval times as the groupings of shops and places of entertainment near an important railway junction has been in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A number of valuable studies have been made on classification of towns