Tenement Size and Social Structure: Reflections on Chepstow in 1901

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study focuses on tenement (house) size, as recorded in the census in 1901, to explore demographic and social contrasts in Chepstow, an historic market town and river port in south-east Monmouthshire. For three contrasting enumeration districts, it contextualises this measure of housing status against the characteristics of the built environment, and applies the technique of house repopulation to derive spatial patterns of social difference and inequality from residents' age, household formation, net lifetime migration, and employment circumstances in the stagnating local economy. The study re-scales the investigative methods used by urban historians in city-wide studies of urban ecology and demonstrates how tenement size, a crude but under-utilised measure of housing stock, can support micro-scale studies of social differentiation in small but regionally significant towns. Equally as important, it provides an insight into the case-specific processes and particular outcomes of urbanisation during the nineteenth century in rural Monmouthshire.