The Residential Segregation of Migrant Communities in Mid-Victorian Liverpool

Abstract

Mid-Victorian Liverpool contained large communities of Welsh, Scots and Irish migrants. Each group was residentially segregated both from each other and from the host population. It is suggested that three main factors affected the extent to which residential segregation occurred: first, the socio-economic structure of the migrant group: secondly, cultural cohesion within the migrant community; and, thirdly, the extent to which the migrant had previous experience of urban life. From an analysis of Liverpool in 1871 it is suggested that Irish areas conformed most closely to a 'ghetto' model of segregation and that socio-economic factors were particularly important in causing Irish residential segregation, though cultural factors should not be totally ignored. In contrast, Welsh (and to a lesser extent Scottish) residential areas were 'ethnic communities' where cultural similarity was the main cohesive force and a wider range of socio-economic groups were accom- modated within the migrant area. Finally, the interaction between socio-economic and cultural factors in causing ethnic segregation is explored and the typicality of mid-Victorian Liverpool is assessed. MIGRATION played a vital role in the growth of all nineteenth-century towns. Whilst inner-city rates of natural increase remained low, the movement of people from countryside to town, to- gether with moderate suburban rates of natural increase and a net out-movement from the inner city to new residential suburbs, maintained rapid rates of urban expansion and population growth throughout the nineteenth century.1 Table I summarizes such demographic trends for Liverpool which grew from a city of 77 653 population in S8oi to 746 421 in 1911 and where, in 1851, only 42-4 per cent of its total population and only 22-6 per cent of population aged 20 years and over had been born inside the borough boundary.2 Though many migrants were rapidly absorbed into urban life, others-especially those with a different culture and strong links to their area of origin-resisted assimilation and remained as identifiable cultural groups within the new urban society. In Liverpool, three such groups were important: the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots. Together with a less homogeneous group of overseas-born, these migrants accounted for 32-8 per cent of the population of Liverpool Borough in 1851. Because of its port function and geographical position-within easy reach of Wales, Ireland and Scotland-Liverpool had a more cosmopolitan population than most nineteenth-century British cities, though large numbers of migrants were to be found in many other large towns of the period (Table II).3 It has been demonstrated elsewhere that the rapidly growing city of the mid-Victorian period exhibited a high degree of residential differentiation: the main social dimensions of city structure had a clear spatial expression and were reflected in distinctive social areas.4 This paper examines the main migrant concentrations in Liverpool within the framework of such a spatially differentiated city. The extent to which migrant groups were residentially segregated is assessed; the reasons for such segregation are examined, focusing on both cultural and socio-economic factors; and an explanation of the varying degrees of segregation is proposed, taking into account both the processes through which migrant assimilation occurred and the way in which cultural identities were maintained.