Welsh Journals

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between the major Welsh towns is recorded, and from this a functional classification of the towns into ten groups is developed, based upon their chief activities. In addition, each town provides a whole range of services for its surrounding communities, and variety here is generalized into a set of town 'grades', through which the status of a town in the urban hierarchy is expressed. Although it would be possible to raise theoretical objections to this classification, based as it is upon the number of wholesale establishments to be found in each town-and Mr. Carter would be the first to raise them-it offers a useful working criterion in the Welsh case. The variable geographical extent of these service activities-the spheres of influence of the towns-is shown by an examination of a number of sample communities at different levels of the hierarchy. In the third and longest part of the book, the author turns to a descrip- tion of the form of urban development in Wales; of the three major components-the ground plan, the architectural style, and the distribu- tion of functions within a town-Mr. Carter elects to single out the ground plan for closest attention. He approaches his discussion of morphology on an historical-functional basis. He looks, in turn, at the castle town (for instance, Aberystwyth); indigenous urban settlements (e.g. Tregaron); the planned towns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (e.g. Milford Haven), but strangely not at those of the twentieth; at industrial towns (e.g. Tonypandy); and at ports and resorts (e.g. Barry). Thereby, something of the variety of townscapes in Wales is more than adequately revealed. The book ends with a summary discussion on town classification and a rather formal and insipid statement about Cardiff as the Welsh capital. The strength of the book lies in the application of established modes of enquiry and description to the Welsh scene. The references which the author makes to the relevance of the more theoretical writings in urban geography to an understanding of urban development in an area as small and physiographically varied as Wales, are useful by-products. Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects of this volume is its geographical eclecticism. Each of the three parts, devoted to the evolution, functions and forms of Welsh towns, in large measure owes its rationale to a different school of geographical thought. The first part of the book represents essentially the ecological approach to geographical studies, the attempt to see order in the inter-relationships between man and his physical environment. The second part, in contrast, leans heavily upon the locational school, interested primarily in spatial distributions, in the geometry of phenomena on the earth's surface. The third part of the book raises questions most closely associated with the landscape school, concerned primarily with a description of the general appearance of things on the earth's surface. These distinctions cannot be pressed too far, of course, for in the first section the hierarchy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settlements is usefully reconstructed; and in the third there is some discussion of the