Welsh Journals

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE URBAN MORPHOLOGY OF CENTRAL BANGOR, GWYNEDD, IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY THE landscape of Britain was transformed in the nineteenth century as a result of the growth and re-distribution of the nation's population. Population grew from 10. 5 million in 1801 to 37. 2 million in 1901 and the urban share of the population increased from c. 34% to 78% in the same period. Some existing towns and many created by the industrial revolution became cities of several hundred thousand people. It was not until the second half of the present century, however, that historians and geographers really began to take an interest in this extraordinary phenomenon and the historical geography of the urban scene has since become a distinctive field of study and research. While the historico-geographical approach has displayed a variety of routes and employed a range of research methodologies, two broad strands of develop- ment can be recognised. The greater effort in terms of published works has undoubtedly focused on the human component of urban growth and in particular on the determination of the axes of residential segregation and the identification of discrete social areas. Social area analysis had its genesis in North America where Shevky and Williams (1949) analysed socio-spatial variations within the city of Los Angeles.1 Similar studies of cities in both the developed and developing world followed in fairly rapid succession by research workers who drew upon contemporary census data, embraced emerging statistical techniques evolved by factorial ecologists and principal components analysts and employed high speed electronic data processing equipment. Before long, similar techniques were being applied by historical geographers to social and demographic data extracted from the Enumerators' Schedules of the 1851 and subsequent British censuses e.g. Armstrong (1966 and 1967), Warnes (1973), Lawton and Pooley (1976), Pooley (1977 and 1982), Shaw (1977, 1979 and 1980), Cowlard (1979) and Cannadine (1982).2 Mid-nineteenth-century census data have been employed to distinguish and delimit nascent class-based social areas in several Welsh towns, e.g. Bangor, (Jones, 1973), Aberystwyth (Carter, 1977) Neath and Merthyr (Carter and Wheatley, 1978), Cardiff (Lewis, 1979) and Merthyr Tydfil (Carter and Wheatley, 1982).3 The other strand in the analysis of nineteenth-century towns and cities and the one to which this paper makes a contribution is morphological in character; it focuses on the physical form of the urban landscape and on the processes which have given rise to the differences which appear between the varied residential environments constituting the urban scene.