English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography

So what was it like in the early years of the Industrial Revolution? Dennis looks not at London, which has already been exhaustively studied for this period, but at other British cities. Especially Liverpool and Manchester. The cities are analysed according to how their urban structure developed. Like the types of affordable housing for newly urbanised masses migrating from the countryside. Then there were issues of how the workers got to and from their workplaces. Giving rise in part to the proliferation of public transport. Remember too that during those years, there were few templates for city planners, to the extent that they existed, to draw on. Hence we see comments by contemporaries about the chaotic nature of some cities. But the book looks deeper, and describes a dynamic logic to the layouts.