From ‘Feudal’ Lords to Figureheads

Abstract

The importance of landowners' influence on the timing, scale and type of development in many large nineteenth-century towns is a platitude of urban history. But the power which it gave a large, aristocratic, urban landowner to influence local affairs – political, cultural, religious and philanthropic – has received much less attention. Most historians would agree with Ralph Nevill that during the nineteenth century ‘the political influence of the English land-owning class must in any case have disappeared with the development of the great towns and the increase in population’. But while that change has been described and investigated as it occurred at Westminster and in the country-side, the actual shift in the balance of power in the towns – from those who owned and managed urban estates to those who lived on them as leasehold tenants – has received much less attention. The purpose of this article is to review the literature at present available on the subject, and to offer some suggestions as to the directions in which future research might proceed.