The Victorian Era

Victorian Cities Beyond London

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Victorian cities beyond London were the great provincial centres of the period: industrial cities, port cities, and regional capitals whose growth, taken together, transformed Britain from a rural into an urban country. The 1901 census recorded 78 per cent of the population of England and Wales as living in towns, against 45 per cent in 1831; the change was driven by the great industrial cities of the Midlands, the North, South Wales, and central Scotland. The wider context of the urbanisation is set out in Victorian Cities, Transport, and Entertainment, and the parent overview of the era is The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

Manchester: Cotton, Free Trade, and the Ship Canal

Manchester was the commercial capital of the cotton industry and the home of the Manchester School of economics. The principal centre of the cotton trade is described in What was Victorian Manchester like?; its free-trade politics, expressed through the Anti-Corn Law League (founded 1838 by Richard Cobden and John Bright), shaped British policy in the 1840s. The Manchester Ship Canal, engineered by Edward Leader Williams and opened on 1 January 1894, made the city an inland port and brought ocean-going ships to Salford.

Birmingham: The City of a Thousand Trades

Birmingham was the principal metal-working city of the period and the centre of an extraordinary variety of small-scale skilled trades. The city is examined in How did Birmingham grow in the Victorian era?; its brass foundries, gun workshops in the Gun Quarter around Steelhouse Lane, jewellery workshops in Hockley, and the new pen-nib factory of Joseph Gillott in Graham Street were the model of the city’s industrial diversity. The Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA), founded in 1861, was the principal military and sporting gun-maker of the period, and the city’s electrical engineering firms — Chamberlain and Hookham, Ferranti, and the General Electric Company — were leading the new industry by the 1890s.

Liverpool: The Atlantic Port

Liverpool was the great Atlantic port of the British Empire. Its docks — the Albert Dock (1846), the Stanley Dock, the Canada Dock, the Brocklebank Dock — handled the cotton, tobacco, sugar, and passengers of the American trade, and the Cunard Line, the White Star Line, and the Inman Line all had their headquarters on the Mersey. Liverpool’s population rose from about 82,000 in 1801 to about 685,000 in 1901, and the city was the second largest in the British Empire at the end of the reign. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway of 1830, the first inter-city passenger railway in the world, opened the age of the steam railway from its Lime Street terminus.

Glasgow: Shipbuilding, Engineering, and Tobacco

Glasgow was the second city of the British Empire and the principal shipbuilding centre in the world. The Clyde shipyards of John Elder, John Brown, Fairfield, and Stephen built the great ocean liners of the period — the Great Eastern, the Lusitania, and the Aquitania among them — and the city was also a centre of heavy engineering, marine engineering, and tobacco. The Glasgow School of Art (Charles Rennie Mackintosh, opened 1909 but designed in the 1890s) and the work of the Glasgow Four established the city’s reputation in the decorative arts, and the University of Glasgow and the Royal College of Science and Technology made it a leading centre of scientific education.

Leeds and Bradford: The Woollen and Worsted Trades

Leeds was the principal centre of the woollen cloth trade, and its cloth halls — the Mixed Cloth Hall (1758), the White Cloth Hall (1771), and the Coloured Cloth Hall (1864) — were the markets in which the Yorkshire broadcloths were sold. By the 1860s the city was the leading centre of the ready-made clothing trade, supplying the mass markets of Britain and the Empire. Bradford, ten miles to the west, was the world capital of the worsted trade, importing merino wool from Australia and producing the mohairs and worsteds sold in the markets of the world.

Sheffield: Steel and Cutlery

Sheffield was the centre of the British steel and cutlery industry, an association that went back to the seventeenth century. The crucible steel process, developed in the 1740s by Benjamin Huntsman, was still the basis of the city’s fine-steel production in the Victorian period; the Sheffield plate of the silversmiths, the stainless steel of Harry Brearley (1913, just after the period), and the files, tools, and edge-tools of the Sheaf valley were sold across the world. The Sheffield School of Medicine and the Firth College (1879) — later the University of Sheffield — gave the city a strong scientific and educational base.

Newcastle and the North East: Coal and Shipping

Newcastle upon Tyne was the centre of the Tyne and Wear coalfield and of the great shipbuilding yards of the Tyne. The yards of Palmer, of Armstrong (at Elswick, just outside the city), and of Swan Hunter built warships and merchant ships for the world, and the coal of County Durham and Northumberland was shipped down the east coast and across the Atlantic from the Tyne and from Sunderland, the great coal port further down the coast. The Newcastle and Carlisle Railway of 1838 opened the coalfield to the south, and the Stephensons — George, Robert, and Robert’s son George — gave the region a leading place in the development of the steam locomotive.

The Smaller Cities

Beyond these principal centres, the Victorian period saw the growth of a long list of specialised towns. Stoke-on-Trent was the centre of the pottery and china trades, with the factories of Wedgwood, Minton, Doulton, and Spode. Coventry made watches, ribbons, and (in the 1890s) bicycles. Leicester and Nottingham specialised in hosiery and lace; Derby in silk, iron, and the new engineering; and Wolverhampton in locks, keys, and small ironware. South Wales was dominated by the coal and iron towns of Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil, and Swansea; Belfast by linen, shipbuilding, and tobacco; and the South Coast by the great ocean liner ports of Southampton and the cross-Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone. Each of these cities developed its own specialisation, its own civic pride, and its own great public buildings — town halls, exchanges, libraries, and museums — in the grand Victorian manner.