The Management of Change

Abstract

Even if nothing else had happened, the changes in the number and distribution of people would have made the late nineteenth century different from what had gone before. The population doubled. Where every second English person was an urban dweller in 1851, four out of five persons lived in towns and cities in 1911. Through advances in science and technology, town and country were reshaped in both their physical appearance and social structure (Newsome 1997). Most growth occurred within and around existing industrial centres on, or near, the Pennine flanks, in the North-East of England, the West Midlands, and around the coasts of the British Isles. London was by far the largest centre, attaining a growth rate of 170 per cent in the 60-year period, 1851–1911. London was both a ‘world city’ in the sense of being so large (Briggs 1968), and ‘an imperial city’ — the capital of a formally constituted and governed empire that extended to every continent and ocean, except Antarctica. The imperial metropolis was at the heart of the largest empire the planet had ever known (Schneer 1999).