Urban Morphology and Residential Differentiation across Great Britain, 1881–1901

Tian Lan,Paul A Longley

doi:10.1080/24694452.2020.1859982

Tian Lan, Paul A Longley

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1859982

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Abstract

The nineteenth century saw rapid urbanization and dramatic social change in Great Britain, some of which can now be viewed at national scales for the first time through linkage of georeferenced digital historical data to contemporary and historical framework data. Here, we attempt to georeference every individual address record from the 1881, 1891, and 1901 censuses for Great Britain and to define the fast-growing historical street networks and residential geographies of every urban settlement. We next devise a scale-free historical geodemographic classification using variables common to these three censuses and assign cluster group characteristics to every urban street segment. We also link the evolution of the urban street morphology with changes in residential differentiation and the geodemographic assignments over the twenty-year study period. The results of this intensive data processing make it possible to chart the development of urban residential areas across Great Britain and bring focus to the changing social structures of the cities. We examine these changes with examples drawn from the entire British urban settlement system. Our conclusions discuss the implications of this extensive analysis for improved understanding of the evolution of Great Britain’s urban system.

Highlights

The nineteenth century saw rapid urbanization and dramatic social change in Great Britain, some of which can be viewed at national scales for the first time through linkage of georeferenced digital historical data to contemporary and historical framework data
The history of intraurban geography can be thought of as intertwined with the development of geodemographics, the field has never itself taken a historical perspective on the evolution of settlement systems or individual settlements within them
The painstaking geographical analysis reported here has established a framework for understanding the geotemporal dynamics of changes in morphology and residential structure in all towns and cities in Great Britain over the last twenty years of the Victorian period, viewed in the context of their changed relative sizes and the functions performed by their residents

Summary

Introduction

The nineteenth century saw rapid urbanization and dramatic social change in Great Britain, some of which can be viewed at national scales for the first time through linkage of georeferenced digital historical data to contemporary and historical framework data. We link the evolution of the urban street morphology with changes in residential differentiation and the geodemographic assignments over the twentyyear study period The results of this intensive data processing make it possible to chart the development of urban residential areas across Great Britain and bring focus to the changing social structures of the cities. This is vitally important because cities are economic and social engines for development and change, yet intraurban quantitative geography has not addressed how they shape social and spatial mobility at disaggregate scales of measurement (but see Swinney and Thomas [2015] for more aggregate analysis) Our response to this challenge develops a highly innovative geodemographic analysis of the forms and residential functioning of the Great Britain settlement system built using 100 million individual records from the 1881, 1891, and 1901 Censuses of Victorian Britain, available through the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) Project (Higgs and Sch€urer 2019).

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