Romola Davenport

In 2007 the United Nations announced an historic milestone: the world had become decisively urban, with half the global population living in towns and cities. This represented a dramatic reversal of historic norms, when 80-90 percent of people worked and lived in the countryside. And this unprecedented shift from rural to urban areas shows no sign of abating – indeed, the UN predicts that all future population growth will be urban.  

While most of the global shift to towns has occurred very recently, the process started much earlier in Britain, and Britain was the first society to become predominantly urban, with over half the population living in towns or cities by 1851. This was the case in Scotland as well as in England and Wales, however our evidence for Scotland is less precise before 1800.   

Figure 1 below shows the population of England over the last roughly 500 years, divided into its rural and urban components. After 1750 the population began to grow rapidly as death rates fell and, in the case of England at least, the birth rate rose. This phenomenon is known as the Demographic Transition, and it occurred at roughly the same time in other European countries, although population growth rates varied, being much slower for example in France.  

Why farmhouses in France are so cheap  

As Figure 1 indicates, in Britain rapid population growth after 1750 coincided with rapid urbanization. This meant that almost all of the population growth that occurred after about 1750 occurred in towns and cities.  

The consequence of this precocious urbanization was that the rural population of England barely grew after 1750, when the national population was only about 6 million, and actually began shrinking after about 1850 in a process of rural depopulation that has continued to the present. In France, by contrast, the national population was already 30 million in 1800, and perhaps 20 percent lived in towns and cities of 2,000 inhabitants or more. The French population grew much more slowly than that of her traditional rival, and by 1951 the populations of England and France were similar at roughly 40 million each.  

These differences in the timing of population growth and urbanisation in France and England have meant that the rural population of France was always much larger than in England. So when rural depopulation set in in France in the mid-19th century, it left a much larger stock of attractive farmhouses, barns and mills available for conversion to second homes and retirement homes. Obviously, France has other attractions for British retirees, but the relative prices of rural properties is an important factor.  

The precocity of urbanization in Britain has also meant that very few Britons have retained a connection to a rural area, in contrast to much of Europe where many urban residents still have access to family homes and land in rural areas. 

From laggard to leader

While Britain was the first society to become decisively urban, it was not in fact a precocious developer. In 1600 Britain was sparsely populated and rural, on the geographical and economic fringes of Europe. By comparison, France and Italy boasted some of the largest cities in the world (Paris and Naples had populations of perhaps 245,000 and 225,000 respectively), as well as a range of smaller but substantial towns and cities with populations over 10,000 inhabitants. Istanbul, with as many as 700,000 inhabitants, rivalled Beijing for the status of the world’s largest city. The Dutch Republic was exceptionally precocious, with perhaps 30 percent of the population living in towns of 2,5000 inhabitants or more (peaking at 40 percent by 1700), as a consequence of its unique position at the centre of an extensive trading network that brought in both wealth and imported food, fuel and other agricultural products.  

Only London could compare with the great continental cities, and it towered over any other town in Britain in a way that was rare elsewhere in Europe. London’s current dominance of British economic, political and cultural life is a very ancient pattern.  

In 1600 London’s population was perhaps 180,000, and it accounted for around five percent of the English population. London then grew rapidly over the next century, reaching around 600,000 inhabitants by 1700 and accounting for more than 1 in 10 of the whole population of England, at a time when no other city in England exceeded 30,000. In Scotland, Edinburgh had around 50,000 inhabitants in 1700, trailed by Glasgow at around 12,000. 

Lists of the largest English cities in the 16th and 17th centuries make curious reading for 21st century Britons. Norwich was the second largest city in England across the period 1520 – 1700, increasing from around 12,000 to perhaps 30,000 in that period. Other cities in the top ten included the important ports of Bristol and Newcastle, the administrative and ecclesiastical centre of northern England at York, as well as towns that are quite modest today, such as Salisbury, Exeter, Colchester, Ipswich, and Great Yarmouth.  

When urbanisation really took off in England in the 18th century, it was not these older cities that grew. Indeed, it was not even led by London. London did continue to grow, but it simply kept pace with the rapidly growing national population, and so continued to house about a tenth of the English population.  

Instead there was radical transformation of the urban pattern across the 18th century, led by towns many of whom had been very modest in preceding centuries, including Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield. Manchester, for example, had a population of less than 10,000 in 1700 and didn’t even have the legal status of a town, prompting Daniel Defoe to describe it in the 1720s as ‘the greatest mere village in the whole of England’.  

Coal and urban growth

What the rapidly growing towns had in common was proximity to coalfields. As map 1 below indicates, the ‘new’ towns of the Industrial Revolution, and the port cities that served them, were located on or near areas with shallow and accessible coal deposits, and these were mainly in northern England and the west midlands. Coal provided cheap, abundant fuel for both industrial and domestic uses, and it drove the transformation of the British and then the global economy from an organic system dependent on sun and soil to our modern fossil fuel-based system.  

While coal provided invaluable energy, it was heavy and difficult to transport. Most coalfields were not close to large navigable rivers which constituted the main means of transporting bulky goods before the development of canals in the 18th century and railways in the 19th century.  This made it necessary for industries that depended on coal to locate as close as possible to the coalfields. Since the coalfields were often located in relatively inaccessible inland and upland areas, the growth of these areas spurred what has been called the ‘transport revolution’ – the rapid development of canals and road networks to connect the coalfields with the rest of the country, and especially to London.     

The exploitation of coal fundamentally changed the population geography of England. The older medieval cities were located on large navigable rivers, that connected these cities to their agricultural hinterlands and to the rest of the world. And the population was densest in the richer agricultural land of the south and east where arable farming predominated. The upland areas of the west and north–west were better suited to pastoral agriculture and were more sparsely populated.  

The Industrial Revolution changed this ancient pattern and reoriented population growth towards the coalfields and the ‘new’ industrial and manufacturing towns in the midlands and the north of England, the Scottish central belt, and the Welsh coalfields.  

‘There’s no altering geography, and some of our towns just aren’t in the right place any more.’ 

(Tim Leunig, in a Guardian article in 2008 arguing that residents of northern towns should be helped to move south.)

However, the reversal of traditional population geography wrought by the Industrial Revolution was not to last. The transport revolution that made coal-based industrialization possible also led to the decline of the importance of coalfields for the location of industry. The locational advantages of the ‘new’ Industrial Revolution cities on the coalfields depended on the high costs of transporting coal away from those coalfields. But the coming of railways (which themselves depended on coal–powered steam engines) undermined this relationship. Railways made it possible to distribute coal far and wide at low cost, and this reduced the comparative advantages of towns on the coalfields.   

Since the advent of railways in the 1830s, the older urban geography of England has to some extent reasserted itself. The centre of population gravity has swung back to the southeast, and London has resumed its position of overweening dominance.  

London’s share of the English population soared across the 19th century, from 10 percent in 1801 to a peak in 1901 when over a fifth (21.6 percent) of the whole population of England lived in London. This numerical predominance has since waned, and London’s population even shrank between the 1950s and the 1980s as motor transport made the suburbs ever more accessible and attractive, and inner-city areas were abandoned.  

Why did Britain urbanise so early? 

Urbanisation is linked to economic growth, and the rapid urbanization that occurred in Britain reflects the timing and location of the Industrial Revolution and the transition from an organic to a fossil fuel economy. 

Urbanisation was also limited by several basic constraints in the past. The first is the productivity of agriculture. Where agriculture required very high labour inputs and produced relatively low yields per person, then a high proportion of the population was necessarily constrained to live and work in rural areas. The improvements in agricultural productivity that occurred in England and that contributed to the early escape from famine were also a key pre-condition for high rates of urbanization. As Tony Wrigley pointed out, urbanisation could itself drive agricultural improvements in a kind of virtuous cycle, by providing a growing market for commercial production, encouraging investments in agriculture, and driving agricultural specialization and trade.   

A second constraint on urbanization levels in the past was urban death rates. The four centuries between the Black Death of the 1340s and the 1740s have been dubbed the ‘Urban Graveyard’ period in Europe. Historically, towns and cities were highly dependent on migration not only for growth but even to maintain their populations. In London, for example, the bubonic plague of 1665 carried off around 100,000 victims, over 20 percent of the population. Yet this shortfall was replaced within 2 years, as young migrants flooded in to seize the opportunities created by these deaths. 

In London, the sources of evidence that we have on migration before the official census began collecting data on birthplace in 1851 suggest that over three-quarters of adults in London were migrants born outside the city. And as is the case now, many of the mainly young adults who came to London only spent a portion of their adult lives there. Tony Wrigley famously estimated that perhaps 1 in 6 of all inhabitants of England had spent time in London in the 17th century, a dramatic indicator of the influence of the capital on cultural and economic life.  

Plague disappeared from Britain after the 1670s, and urban death rates began to fall after about 1750. By the late 18th century baptisms began to outstrip burials in towns and cities, and cities became capable of self-generated growth. By 1851 only just over half of the adult population of London was born outside the metropolis, and the same was true for mature cities of the Industrial Revolution including Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow.  

Urban populations now generally enjoy higher life expectancies than their rural counterparts, and are capable of self-sustaining growth. While we often think of modern cities as characterized by abysmal levels of pollution, poor quality housing and precarious labour, urban life has always exercised a strong pull for especially young adults, and it is now a much safer and more rewarding option than in any other historical period.  

Further reading

• Davenport, R. J., ‘Mortality, migration and epidemiological change in English cities, 1600-1870’, International Journal of Paleopathology 34 (2021), 37-49.  
• Wrigley, E. A., ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy 1650-1750’, Past & Present 37 (1967), 44–70. 
• Wrigley, E. A., ‘Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the continent in the early modern period’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15:4 (1985), 683–728. https://doi.org/10.2307/204276 

Tags: agricultural revolution, coal, fossil fuels, industrial revolution, migration, plague, towns and cities, urbanisation

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