Urban Historical Geography, or Scholars and Social Scientists

Author(s): J. W. R. Whitehand
Source: Area, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1974), pp. 254-256
Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
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Urban historical geography, or scholars
and social scientists
Report of the conference of theHistorical Geography Research Group held at Cumberland
Lodge, Windsor Great Park, 29-31 May, 1974.

Many of the IBG Study Groups have now been in existence long enough to have
developed their own ethos. In spite of the urban theme, this country-house gathering,
organized by J. H. C. Patten and E. J. Pawson (Oxford), could not by any stretch of
the imagination be confused with a meeting of the Urban Geography Group and
even less of the Quantitative Methods Group. The historical geographers are unmis
takeably right of centre on the radical-conservative dimension, although Imanaged to
resist the temptation to try passing off the Eysenck Social Attitude Inventory as an
after-dinner party game. Surrogates such as dress, hair-style, mode of address, venue
and use of English, all pointed in the same direction.
Discussion was gentlemanly, as befitted the drawing room at Cumberland Lodge,
and almost unpunctuated by obscure first-name familiarities. It was good to know who
was speaking, what was being spoken about (albeit at a small cost in formality) and
to whom reference was being made; even better to have papers that had a beginning,
a middle and an end, rather than that well-known variety that stops inmid-air when
the time alloted (including that for discussion) has been exhausted. And there was
plenty of time to intersperse paper sessions with croquet and walks in impeccably-kept
landscape gardens.
The programme offered to the fifty or so participants was, from my point of view, a
nice balance of scholarship and social science, although the conference as a whole
took this distinction in its stride rather than made it the object of sharply-focused
attention. Perhaps appropriately in a Group with a predominantly scholarly tradition
and in the presence of several distinguished scholars (including H. C. Darby and
M. R. G. Conzen), the scholars provided the wide-ranging opening movement and
finale while the social scientists sought more restricted and quantifiable foci for the
core of the programme.
D. W. Meinig (Syracuse) in his after-dinner guest lecture on the first evening focused
on the importance of the macro-scale (both temporal and spatial) and gave us cause
to wonder whether we have our noses so close to the ground that we are missing
concepts relating to events of major geographical consequence. Where are the heirs
of Carl Sauer? This theme clearly rang a chord for many in the audience, not least
those who found themselves struggling to communicate 'the historical geography of
civilization in ten lectures ' and facing a dearth of geographical contributions to which
their students might refer. Other disciplines appear to have cornered the market and
historical rather than geographical perspectives prevail. This thesis provoked a lengthy
and vigorous discussion inwhich almost inevitably attention was drawn to operational
problems, especially in regard to evidence, in carrying out research at continental
and world scales and covering lengthy periods of time. This introductory discourse
reverberated in varying strengths in several subsequent papers and discussions and
thus provided an admirable preface to the proceedings.
Although by comparison his areal scale could be regarded as no more than meso,
in attempting comparative studies of the effects of park landscaping on towns over the
whole of Britain, T. R. Slater (Birmingham) was working at a large scale by the stan
dards customary inBritish urban morphology. Windsor Great Park was an ideal setting
for a presentation in which emparked-castle towns formed the basis for a schema of
sequential development. In its emphasis on the general rather than the particular this
work still stands apart from most historical and geographical studies that use the

254

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Urban historical geography 255

landscape as amajor source of inference, but at the same timemaintains the high standards
of exposition characteristic of the best work in this genre. In respect of research method
(though not perhaps in purpose) this paper was in sharp contrast to that by J. W. R.
Whitehand (Birmingham) who drew attention to the almost insuperable problems
facing those seeking to interrelate existing studies in urban morphology and suggested
some of the advantages that might accrue from employing a deductive strategy. This
was illustrated from attempts to construct a theory of urban form relating intensity
of land use to spatial and temporal variations in land values. A model of an aspect of
the theory was tested using data relating to the development of the London suburb
of Kensington during the 19th century.
This commitment to theory was scarcely apparent at all in the ensuing social
geography papers which were primarily in the nature of progress reports on data
processing. Each of these papers considered a sizeable urban area during the data-rich
19th century and it would seem that interest in this period among geographers and
historians is now reaching boom proportions on this side of the Atlantic. None of
these papers was especially concerned with techniques, although that of R. S. Holmes
(Kent) was perhaps more so than those of R. Dennis (Sheffield) and G. C. Pooley
(Liverpool), and the comparative lack of questions on statistical procedures suggested
that the bulk of the audience, like the speakers themselves, had little stomach for this
type of discou'rse. Holmes described a procedure for combining rate books and census
returns and demonstrated for Ramsgate a correlation between rateable values and a
number of important census variables. Dennis set out to examine changes in social
interaction as cities underwent industrialization, but it was disappointing that the
theoretical basis for this interesting work and the justification for the experimental
design were given such cursory treatment. The analysis of mid-19th century marriage
registers for Huddersfield suggested, perhaps surprisingly, a tendency for the intensifi
cation of interaction over time in working-class communities, although there were
difficulties in interpreting the results. Finally, Pooley reported on migration toMersey
side and the formation of residential areas in Liverpool: an interim paper on two
aspects of a broader study of 19th-century Merseyside. This was based largely on
Census data and brief comparisons were drawn with work on ethnic segregation in
America.
The concluding papers brought the conference closest to the traditionally major
historico-geographical issues in the shape of two contrasting studies of urban origins.
A recurrent theme in historical, archaeological and geographical literature on settle
ments has been the revival of urban life in Europe north of the Alps in the medieval
period. In recent years some weight has been added to the argument in favour of proto
urban settlements of some kind prior to the 11th century in some quite remote areas
such as England and the Slav lands of Eastern Europe. In the light of this Conzen's
commendation of comparative work was especially appropriate and left us in no doubt
as to the wider significance of the paper by R. A. Butlin (Q.M.C.) who skilfully mas
saged diverse evidence for town-like settlements in Ireland before the Norman Con
quest. D. J. B. Shaw (Birmingham) was similarly conscious of the importance of
comparison with other regions in his study of urban colonization in Southern Russia
in the 17th and 18th centuries, drawing qualified parallels both with other parts of
Eurasia and the New World. Such wide-ranging comparisons were to the liking of
Meinig although clearly caution was essential. However, in this case, given much
greater archival evidence than Butlin, it was possible to focus on the functional basis
of settlement and to describe the transformation of a 17th-century system of military
control of the urban frontier to an 18th-century market economy. This was a most
fitting closure to the formal proceedings and, perhaps some would argue, brought us
to the threshold of Meinig's macro historical geography.
The last day involved a field excursion in central Reading led by D. C. Large and
S. Blake (Reading), a visit to the Museum of English Rural Life and, for many of us,
reflections on the proceedings as a whole. As is often the case, I found the discussions

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256 Urban historical geography

at this conference were in several respects revealing in their omissions. In terms of my

own predilections it was interesting, though not surprising, that the role of a deductive
strategy was not pursued in spite of a specific attempt to direct attention to this. The
audience, like most gatherings of English-speaking geographers and historians, had
little taste for theory. Yet the problems faced in the 19th-century studies described at
this conference served to confirm my own view that a thorough discussion of the
theoretical issues involved would provide a much-needed basis for navigation. In this
regard it is noteworthy that the scholars took the honours for purposefulness as well
as the accolade for the unity and polish of their presentations, to which they are
more accustomed. Even if, in the very nature of things, they lacked definitive answers
to the questions they posed, their themes were never in doubt.
The conference was widely judged a success. As a relative outsider I was impressed
by the way in which the Group embraced diversities of tradition, method and scale
with equanimity. While the locale undoubtedly played its part, the catholicity of
viewpoints and interests was reassuring at a time of rapid development of specialized
foci in the Institute as a whole.
J. W. R. Whitehand
University of Birmingham

Geographical urban history, or history

and space

Report of the annual meeting of the Urban History Group of the Economic History
Society, held at the University of Bristol, 4-5 April, 1974.

There was no explicit theme to this year's Urban History Group meeting at Bristol.
But at least one seemed to emerge which linked each of the sessions, and which might
be attributed not only to the presence of a number of geographers playing an active
part in debate, as in earlier years, but also for the first time their giving some of the
papers. And the emerging theme was; what exactly do spatial patterns and spatial
variation actually mean for historians? Are they simply a background-giving useful
descriptions of distributions? Or, are they in themselves dynamic, having their own
role in the interplay of forces moulding urban change and growth?
The meeting was divided into three sessions. The first was a lecture by Prof. Lawton
and Mr Laxton (both of theDepartment of Geography, Liverpool) on The geographical
dimension in the urban history of Modern Industrial Cities; it was followed by two
seminars which were led by the authors of pre-circulated papers. One was on Victorian
Seaside Resorts, and the speakers were Prof. Perkin (Lancaster), Mr Myerscough
(Sussex) and Mr Walton (Hockerill). The other examined The provisioning of Towns
through the papers of Prof. Everitt (Leicester), Miss Blackman (Hull), Mr Scola (Kent)
and Mr Shaw (Department of Geography, Hull). This, too, concentrated on the 19th
century. It is indeed to be expected that in the study of 19th century towns English
Urban Historians and Geographers (whether Historical Geographers, or not) will
find much of common interest. This was certainly apparent during the last annual
meeting at Leicester (Area 5 (1973), 3, 229-30) where the constraints of often ' cross
sectional ' 19th century sources were apparent to both.
The lecture by Lawton and Laxton provided, then, one 'keynote' theme for the
meeting in their demonstration of those geographical factors that can not only aid
the study of modern urbanism, but also act as dynamic forces in their own right; in

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