Georgian Towns

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Georgian Towns
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Urbanisation

• Urban growth
• Cultural responses
• Contribution to the economy
• Urban space
• London
• Towns miracles or monsters?

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Leading European Cities, 1550-1700
City 1550 1600 1650 1700
London 75,000 200,000 400,000 575,000
Paris 130,000 220,000 430,000 510,000
Venice 158,000 139,000 120,000 138,000
Amsterdam 30,000 65,000 175,000 200,000
Madrid 30,000 49,000 130,000 110,000
Lisbon 98,000 100,000 130,000 165,000
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Towns with a population over 2500 in 1700
Towns with a population over 2500 in 1750
Towns with a population over 2500 in 1801
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Largest English Provincial Towns
Population in 1700 Population in 1801
Norwich (30,000) Liverpool (82,000)
Bristol (21,000) Manchester (75,000)
Newcastle (16,000) Birmingham (71,000)
Exeter (14,000) Bristol (61,000)
York (12,000) Leeds (53,000)
Yarmouth (10,000) Sheffield (46,000)
Birmingham (8-9,000) Plymouth (40,000)
Chester (8-9,000) Norwich (36,000)
Colchester (8-9,000) Portsmouth (33,000)
Ipswich (8-9,000) Newcastle (33,000)
Manchester (8-9,000) Hull (33,000)
Plymouth (8-9,000) Nottingham (29,000)
Worcester (8-9,000) Sunderland (24,000)
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Urban Growth

• Borsay employs the term urban renaissance to
  explain urban transformation
• Colley economic growth was visibly a matter of
  here and now, marked out for all to see by an
  explosion of buildings, streets, shops, houses,
  taverns, inns and civic amenities, and by the
  stream of new immigrants arriving every day from
  the countryside.
• But as Wrigley has pointed out that the shake up
  of the urban system was underway long before the
  eighteenth century.
• The rise of Birmingham for example can be traced
  back into the 16th century and Manchester and
  Liverpool were experiencing dynamic growth in the
  17th century.
• Corfield argues a modern and pluralist system was
  emerging in which towns were defined in terms of
  their leading economic functions rather than
  their regional influence.

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William Shenstone (1714-63), poet and landscape
gardener No one will prefer the beauty of the
street to the beauty of a lawn or grove and
indeed the poets would have found no very
tempting an Elysium, had they made a town of it.
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John Armstrong (1708/9-1779), Doctor and Poet The
Art of Preserving Health Ye who amid this
feverish world would wear A body free of pain, of
cares a mind Fly the rank city, shun its turbid
air Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke And
volatile corruption, from the dead, The dying,
sickening, and the living world Exhaled, to sully
Heavens transparent dome With dim mortality. It
is not air That from a thousand lungs reeks back
to thine, Sated with exhalations rank and
fell, The spoil of dunghills, and the putrid
thaw Of nature when from shape and texture
she Relapses into fighting elements It is not
air, but floats a nauseous mass Of all obscene,
corrupt, offensive things.
Early Industrial Bradford (View by James Wilson
Anderson)
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Responses to urbanisation

• London Magazine of 1743 wrote of the city
  immersd in smoke, stunnd with perpetual
  noise.
• William Cowper God made the country and man
  made the town
• William Penn countryside was superior, for
  there we see the works of God but in cities,
  little else but the works of men.
• Literati vilified urban life, idealising nature
  and lamenting the loss of urban innocence in a
  movement culminating in Romanticism, an
  anti-urban movement.
• Blake and Wordsworth excoriated the city for
  corruption, decadence, estrangement, and
  inhumanity
• Wordsworth The most terrible feature of these
  faceless cities being the loss of individual
  dignity and identity. The city was monstrous on
  colour, motion, shape and sound.
• But this cult of the countryside was based upon
  false assumptions of rural life

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Enlightenment response

• Enlightenment thinkers viewed cities as the
  future.
• City now promised technological progress, profit,
  pleasure and the erosion of ignorance.
• City man was civilised man.
• Voltaire considered London the cradle of freedom
  and social mobility in contrast with the rigid
  hierarchy of the fields.
• Adam Smith contrasted his ideal natural
  industrial cities with those artificially
  created from a base of luxury and idleness,
  writing In this manner have grown up naturally,
  and as it were of their own accord, the
  manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield,
  Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Such manufactures
  are the offspring of agriculture. In the modern
  history of Europe, their extension and
  improvement have generally been posterior to
  those which were the offspring of foreign
  commerce

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Urban-rural connections

• Borsay argued that the development of a separate
  cultural identity of the city did not sharpen the
  divide between town and country.
• Economic historians put a far greater emphasis on
  the parallel growth in rural and urban areas,
  rather than privileging the emerging cities.
• Much early industrialisation took place in rural
  locations, the so-called proto-industrial phase
  tenter frames of the textile industry,
  blast-furnaces, mines and quarries characterised
  the rural hinterlands of urban industrial cities
  in the Midlands and North.

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Plan of Leeds, surveyed by John Cossins, c.1730
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Tenter frames in the foreground, Leeds in the
background
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Urban Space

• Urban space changed dramatically
• Declining impact of vernacular buildings and
  replacement by classical architecture
• Streets became broader and straighter
• Town planning created integrated and impressive
  urban landscape
• Impressive public edifices, such as concert
  halls, assembly rooms and civic buildings
  symbolised prosperity, humanity and prestige of
  the whole community
• In twelve major towns of the West Riding of
  Yorkshire, the number of public buildings grew
  dramatically during the eighteenth century there
  were around ninety in 1700 and two hundred and
  forty by 1800

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Interior of the Upper St James Street Arcade,
Bristol designed by James Foster
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Georgian Bath designed by John Wood (1704-1754)
He eschewed the fashionable sources of ancient
Greece and Rome for his architecture using the
aesthetic of neo-classicism as a means to express
an architecture, the full origins of which could
be traced from biblical times rather than the
heathens of classical antiquity. The dimensions
of the Circus in Bath are the same as those of
Stonehenge. Royal Crescent was designed by John
Wood the Elder and built by his son between
1767-74.
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Pulteney Bridge, Bath (1779), based on Ponte
Vecchio, Florence and the Rialto Bridge, Venice.
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Urban Landscapes

• Growing trade in production of maps, prospects,
  topographies, trade directories and town
  histories suggesting new awareness of the urban
  landscape.
• Peter Clark estimated that the number of town
  histories published grew from around eight in the
  first twenty years of the century to fifty one in
  the last twenty years.
• Fostered more positive vision of the urban
  community, towns are portrayed as centres of a
  new-style civilisation, confident, reformed, free
  of the old superstitions of the past, dynamos of
  commercial and industrial expansion.
• William Hutton produced his important study of
  Birmingham in 1781, there were at least two works
  published on Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool
  and others on Halifax, Derby, Nottingham and
  Leicester.
• Outstanding example was James Bissets A Poetic
  Survey Round Birmingham accompanied by a
  magnificent directory, which was published in
  1799. Bisset countered impressions of Birmingham
  as a dirty, black manufacturing town. He
  portrayed the civic amenities of the new town,
  the spacious squares and streets, the well
  appointed shops and spectacular technological
  achievements. The engravings and illustrations
  were complemented by poetry and prose celebrating
  the toyshop of the world.

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Brass Founders with a view of the Brass House in
Broad Street (from Bissets directory) Birmingham
was the most important centre for brass making
in Britain. Engraving shows the Brass House, the
canal and a collection of business cards.
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Matthew Boultons Soho Manufactory and Royal Mint
Offices in Handsworth near Birmingham. Built
between 1762 and 1764. The mint for producing
coins is shown to the right of the works. Soho
was located in a rural setting when Boulton
bought the lease for his Handsworth site in 1761.
By the time of Boultons death in 1809, Soho was
effectively part of Birmingham.
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Leisure

• Leisure pursuits enjoyed by both town and country
  elites. In Leeds, for example, the local gentry
  were attracted to the town by cock-fighting,
  horse racing on Chapel Town Moor, theatre going,
  dancing and card assemblies. New assembly rooms
  attached to the re-built White Cloth Hall were
  opened in June 1777 with a regular programme of
  concerts and assemblies. There was a musical
  festival established in 1780s and Leeds
  circulating library was opened in 1810.
• Amanda Vickerys study of the elite in Lancashire
  describes a world occupied by men and women of
  mercantile and landed backgrounds and John
  Smails analysis of the origins of middle-class
  culture in Halifax noted the unclear boundaries
  between the commercial and professional elites
  and landed society.
• In contrast, Dror Wahrman argues that the late
  eighteenth century witnesses the emergence of two
  opposing elite cultures, one provincial and one
  cosmopolitan, neither particularly associated
  with either land or trade.

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Leeds Music. First known public concert took
place in the 400 seat Assembly rooms in the White
Cloth Hall in 1726. Leeds Music Festival of 1784
featured music by Handel. Paganini at the Leeds
Music Hall in 1832.
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London

• After ravages of Fire of London in 1666, London
  emerged to become not only an important economic,
  commercial and political centre but somewhere
  fashionable to live a leisured life.
• Defoe noted that there were new squares and new
  streets rising up every day to such a prodigy of
  buildings that nothing in the world does or ever
  did equal it, except old Rome in Trajans time.
• Foreign tourists flocked to see London and it
  became famed for its difference from European
  cities for its innovation in urban living.
• There was a renaissance in the erection of public
  buildings, St Pauls Cathedral was completed in
  1710 and there were other dramatic public
  buildings including the new Bethlem lunatic
  asylum designed by Robert Hooke, the Lord Mayors
  Mansion House in 1734, and George Sampsons
  palladian style Bank of England in the 1730s.
• City expanded its boundaries to accommodate the
  vast increase in population.

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Londons growth

• Port handling 80 of the countrys imports, 69
  of its exports and 86 of its re-exports, notably
  tobacco, sugar, silks and spices.
• Internal trade, for example the quantity of coal
  brought from Newcastle doubled between 1650 and
  1750 to around 650,000 tons.
• Industries ranged from distilling and
  sugar-refining near the docks, to quality trades
  including the making of cutlery, clocks and
  watches, silk weaving, porcelain making and
  cabinet building. Eg Thomas Chippendale who
  opened in Long Acre in 1745.
• Retailing eg William Fortnum and Hugh Mason
  opened their grocery store in mid-century, in
  1797 John Hatchard opened a booksellers and
  publishers in Picadilly, in 1760 William Hamley
  founded a toy shop and in 1766 James Christie an
  auction house.
• Financial centre London Stock Exchange. Baltic
  Exchange founded in 1744 at the Virginia and
  Baltick Coffee House in Threadneedle Street.
  Banks doubled from around 40 in 1760 to 80 in
  1800. 1694 Bank of England founded.

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Conclusion

• Eighteenth-century witnesses highpoint of urban
  life
• Towns viewed as centres of culture, economics and
  progress

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J M W Turner, watercolour of Leeds (1816)
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William Wordsworth, Upon Westminster
Bridge   Earth has not anything to show more
fair Dull would he be of soul who could pass
by A sight so touching in its majesty This City
now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the
morning silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes,
theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields,
and to the sky All bright and glittering in the
smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully
steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or
hill Neer saw I, never felt, a calm so
deep! The river glideth at his own sweet
will Dear God! the very houses seem asleep And
all that might heart is lying still!