Abstract
Cities have specialised in particular urban functions throughout history, with consequential implications for urban and regional patterns of economic and social change. This specialisation takes place within overall national city size distributions and is manifest in different but often similarly variegated residential structures. Here we develop a novel and consistent methodological approach for measuring macro-scale city size and micro-scale residential differentiation using individual digital census records for the period 1881–1901. The use of family names and neighbourhood classification of dominant economic and social roles makes it possible to relate the changing city size distribution in Great Britain to patterns of urban growth and residential differentiation within urban areas. Together, we provide an integrated and consistent methodology that links the classification of all major urban area growth in Great Britain to attendant intra-urban geodemographic changes in urban residential structures. We suggest ways in which this manifests social and economic change across the settlement system for both new and long-established residents.
Highlights
Changes within national city size distributions and specialisations in the economic functions of individual settlements have important indicators of the fortunes of city residents at local, regional and national scales
Rank size distributions enable convenient aggregate summaries of the evolution of settlement hierarchies, and our analysis has developed and utilised a consistent and essentially scale-free basis to the measurement of the changing extents of British towns and cities
We have used these novel historical ‘framework’ data to implement the use of surname counts as a means of establishing size and rank within the British settlement hierarchy, and have demonstrated their consistency with conventional measures. An advantage of this novel measure is that the underpinning data retain the large majority of household migration ‘events’ that underpin much of the evolution of the rank-size distribution, and that georeferencing of these individual occurrences enables complementary micro analysis of the changing geodemographic compositions and residential structures of individual settlements
Summary
Changes within national city size distributions and specialisations in the economic functions of individual settlements have important indicators of the fortunes of city residents at local, regional and national scales. This paper builds upon the existing literature on city size distributions, migration and geodemographics by: (a) consistently defining historical residential areas for 1881 and 1901 independent of administrative geographies as the basis of rank-size analysis; (b) establishing that surnames present an appropriate and valid means of representing the rank-size distribution and a useful bridge to micro-scale analysis; (c) charting changes in the numbers and socio-economic roles of new and established family groups in the 50 largest discrete settlements in 1881; and (d) relating these functional changes to the rank-size distribution over the period 1881–1901 This integrated and essentially scale-free analysis links macro-state changes in the rank-size distribution of settlements to the changing functions of urban populations as measured by geodemographics and local, regional and national migration histories.
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