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Urbanisation and urban growth

Edward Higgs

The nineteenth-century censuses, and the establishment of the civil system for registering births, marriages and deaths in 1836, took place at a time when the population of Great Britain was undergoing rapid expansion. The population of England and Wales was 8,892,536 in 1801 and 32,527, 843 in 1901, an almost four-fold increase in a century. This was a far faster growth than in former periods – in the eighteenth century the population of England had only increased by about 70 per cent; and by 23 per cent in the previous century (Wrigley and Schofield, 208–9). Moreover, this population increase was not spread evenly over the whole country, with some areas having stagnant population, and others growing rapidly. This growth was concentrated in the industrial cities of the North and in London, rather than in the countryside where agriculture was in decline. This process of urbanisation was a general phenomenon of the Western world in the nineteenth century but happened first, and most strikingly, in England, Scotland and Wales (Lampard).

This process of population growth, and especially its uneven spatial distribution, caused administrative problems generally, and for the General Register Office (GRO), which was responsible for census taking and administering the civil registration system, in particular. Local government in the early-modern period had been based on amateur administrators in parishes, boroughs and counties, but these arrangements were no longer suitable when parishes might find themselves forming parts of vast urban conglomerates, and when cities might stretch far beyond the boundaries of the old boroughs. The scale of sanitary, health and policing problems was simply too vast for the old structures. The nineteenth century saw, therefore, a complex process of reform through which new types of administrative units were created.

The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act (4 & 5 Will. 4, c.76) allowed the amalgamation of parishes to form Poor Law Unions for welfare purposes. These in turn were adopted as registration districts for the purposes of civil registration under the 1836 Births and Deaths Registration Act (6 & 7 Will. 4, c.86). The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 (5 & 6 Will. 4, c.76) established boroughs with municipal powers, either by inclusion in the schedule to the Act or by later charter. Later, towns of exceptional importance were made county boroughs, either by inclusion in the original schedule of the 1888 Local Government Act (51 & 52 Vict., c.41) or by later charter. This status carried complete exemption from the jurisdiction of the surrounding or adjacent administrative county, also set up by the same act. Meanwhile, the Public Health Acts of 1874 and 1875 (37 & 38 Vict., c.93 and 38 & 39 Vict., c.55) created new authorities with responsibilities in public health. Urban areas, already included in municipal boroughs or other bodies such as towns with improvement commissioners, were to form urban sanitary districts, the number of which was gradually enlarged in succeeding years. The rest of the country was divided into rural sanitary districts that were co-terminus with Poor Law unions less the areas in urban sanitary districts. The system was abolished by the 1894 Local Government Act (56 & 57 Vict., c.73), which transformed urban and rural sanitary districts into general-purpose urban districts and rural districts within the framework of administrative counties.

The GRO had to record the populations of these various, often overlapping, units in the decennial censuses, or in the tables of births, marriages and deaths in its Annual reports. This was especially problematic when the censuses and civil registration were administered on the basis of the boundaries of the registration system but were used by other local administrators, such as local medical officers of health, whose responsibilities related to other types of administrative unit (Higgs, 1996, 421–5). In the case of the censuses, for example, the increasing number of different administrative entities into which a house could be placed can be seen from the headings at the top of the enumerator's book into which local census enumerators copied household schedules for dispatch to the GRO. In 1841 there were two headings, 'City or Borough' and 'Parish or Township', but by 1891 there were nine:

The process of converting civil registration data collected under one administrative system to give the numbers of people in another, say from registration districts to sanitary districts, was also very labour intensive. However, the introduction of machine tabulation of data in 1911 helped to facilitate this work (Higgs, 1996).

The GRO also had also to keep up with boundary changes consequent upon these administrative changes, and upon the revisions undertaken to equalise populations between individual units. This was necessary in order to ensure that the populations recorded in the Census reports or the Annual reports related to up to date districts. Thus, in the 1901 Census report the census commissioners noted that, 'Of the 14,900 civil parishes which appear in the present Census Tables, 883 were created between 1891 and 1901, while 1,308 underwent change of area'. Similarly, 164 urban districts were created between the censuses of 1891 and 1901, whilst 53 had been dissolved or merged with other urban districts, and the boundaries of 281 had been altered. Of the rural districts, in 1901 only a third had boundaries the same as in 1891 (Census of England and Wales, 1901, General report, 14). Keeping track of such revisions took up much of the time of the small Census Department within the GRO, and prevented it from planning extensive revisions to the decennial enumeration (Higgs, 2004, 109–13).

Such revisions also had to be made at a micro-level. Enumeration in the censuses was done on the basis of enumeration districts, notionally containing about 200 households each. This was to ensure that census enumerators would be able to hand out household schedules, and copy them into their enumerator's books for dispatch to the GRO, within a reasonable time frame. Increasing population densities meant that enumerations districts often had to be revised prior to the censuses, placing still more work for the local and central registration services (Higgs, 1989, 11–12).

Increasing urbanisation thus placed heavy burdens on the administration of both the census and civil registration, and increased the geographical complexity of the reports produced from them.

REFERENCES

Census of England and Wales, 1901, General report, with appendices, BPP 1904 CVIII. [View this document: General report, England and Wales, 1901]

Edward Higgs, Making sense of the census. The manuscript returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (London, 1989).

Edward Higgs, 'The statistical Big Bang of 1911: ideology, technological innovation and the production of medical statistics', Social History of Medicine, 9 (1996), 409–26.

Edward Higgs, Life, death and statistics: civil registration, censuses and the work of the General Register Office, 1837–1952 (Hatfield, 2004).

Eric E. Lampard, 'The urbanizing world', in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds, The Victorian city: images and realities, volume I (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).

E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981).