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The I.B.G. Historical Geography Research Group, Spring Conference, 1974
Journul of Hisforical Geography, 1, 1 (1975) 13 1-132
Conference report The I.B.G. Historical Geography Research Group, Spring Conference, 1974
The vigorous state of historical geography in Britain was demonstrated at the I.B.G. Historical Geography Research Group Spring Conference, which was held at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park from 29th May to 31st May 1974. More than 40 geographers gathered to discuss a series of papers on the general theme of “urban historical geography”. By way of introduction, Professor Donald Meinig (Syracuse) stimulated the conference with his plea for more macro-studies in historical geography, concerned with great themes in human history like the spread of imperialism or the diffusion of agricultural techniques. The absence of such studies, he claimed, caused gaps in the literature of historical geography not only at the regional scale but also at national and transoceanic scales. It would have been too much to have expected a Pauline conversion among his audience, but many agreed in discussion that they felt the need to paint a broader canvas than had normally been attempted in recent decades, but that, at the same time, this ambition was difficult to reconcile with the rigorous sifting of primary documents. This was a theme which recurred in various ways in the discussion of many of the other papers. Attention then turned to the main focus of the conference. Two papers indicated that studies of the urban landscape are still alive and well, but that they are changing their mode of presentation. For example, T. R. Slater (Birmingham) examined the effects of landscape parks on the morphology of 400 British market-towns. In sympathy with modern fashion his attempts at generalisation were structured in terms of two “models” of urban development, which sought to isolate those features of landscape parks and other elements in urban morphology which were most closely associated. A fundamental reorientation of morphological studies was embodied in J. W. R. Whitehand’s (Birmingham) ambitiously-entitled paper “Towards a historico-geographical theory of urban form”, which in fact was concerned with a section of west London in the nineteenth century. Whitehand attempted to relate plot size to land values, and although in discussion there was some concern about the significance of the plot as a morphological unit and about the validity of the data on land values, the paper was generally welcomed for providing an economic geographical framework within which morphological details could take on wider meaning. In its second session the conference heard a group of three papers which examined internal population contrasts within British cities. These contributions were particularly interesting in that they emphasised some of the technical problems of research in historical geography. R. S. Holmes (Kent) in “Ratebooks and census linkage: problems and applications” showed how, by bringing together two distinct sources, it was possible to give great precision to analyses of spatial distributions within nineteenth-century British cities. The use of rate books and manuscript census data allowed the identification of individual properties and enabled them to be linked with the socio-economic characteristics of their occupiers. Holmes applied his technique to Ramsgate in 1851 and, among other things, was able to show that there was a convincing association between rateable values and various distinctive social and demographic features of the population. The
132
CONFERENCE
REPORT
unique features of Ramsgate and the effort involved in applying this method to other larger settlements would appear to inhibit the easy development of more generalised statements. I?. J. Dennis (then Sheffield, now U.C.L.) reported on similar methods which he has been using to link marriage registers with the manuscript census returns for the Huddersfield Registration District at various dates in the nineteenth century. Methods of statistical analysis were applied to this marriage data to reveal the nature of community structure in various parts of the city, based on the assumption that the degree of intermarriage in a local area provides an acceptable surrogate for general community interaction. Dennis argued that there was an intensification of community structure between 1850 and 1880 and explained this characteristic by the growing scale of residential segregation, with inner city areas becoming more solidly working-class. He concluded that these observations indicated that the development of the industrial city was not always in the direction of anonymity and an aspatial life-style. In a third paper on intraurban population features G. K. Pooley (Liverpool) discussed the influence of migration on the formation of residential areas in nineteenth-century Liverpool, again using manuscript census data as a primary source. Segregation of immigrant Welsh, Scottish and Irish settlers was considerable, but not total, and each group displayed very different social characteristics. This led Pooley to the conclusion that ethnic segregation in nineteenth-century British cities was not so simple as some American examples would suggest, although it might be argued that this Transatlantic simplicity is more apparent than real. At a final session two papers studied urban conditions outside Britain and were concerned with cities as entities, rather than with their internal geography. R. A. Butlin (Q.M.C.) drew the conference’s attention to the quite long-standing debate about the presence or absence of urban life in pre-Norman times. He discounted the received doctrine that a Norman origin was responsible for the earliest substantial development of urban life in Ireland, prefaced by a few Viking urban settlements. Butlin indicated that the pre-Norman settlement history of Ireland is extremely complex and that various features of earlier political and economic organisation survived into Norman times, but without a clear definition of what urbanism involves, operationalised in terms of observable archaeological features, the solution of this particular problem seems difficult to achieve. Finally D. J. Shaw (Birmingham) turned to urban development in southern Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where towns played a primary role in the process of colonisation. Later a secondary network of central places grew up, better able to serve the local population than many of the older military towns. The discussion that followed attempted, necesssrily somewhat unsatisfactorily, to resolve whether the experience of southern Russia was characteristic of other frontier areas. The participants in the conference returned home with an increased awareness of how dependent historical geography is upon the current intellectual concepts of other systematic branches of human geography. They were also more clearly aware of the frequent dependence of historical geographers on surrogate measures of the phenomena in which they are actually interested. Paradoxically this constraint provides one of the subject’s strongest appeals since it imposes the intellectual challenge of making valid deductions from whatever clues come to hand, in order to offset the erosion of information which results from the passage of time. Before dispersing, those delegates with the necessary stamina escaped on the final day from the lecture room to visit the Museum of English Rural Life of the University of Reading under the guidance of E. J. Collins and A. Jewell, and to study the history and morphology of Reading with the help of D. c‘. Large. University
of Lancaster
JAMES
H.
JOHNSON
Conference report The I.B.G. Historical Geography Research Group, Spring Conference, 1974
The vigorous state of historical geography in Britain was demonstrated at the I.B.G. Historical Geography Research Group Spring Conference, which was held at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park from 29th May to 31st May 1974. More than 40 geographers gathered to discuss a series of papers on the general theme of “urban historical geography”. By way of introduction, Professor Donald Meinig (Syracuse) stimulated the conference with his plea for more macro-studies in historical geography, concerned with great themes in human history like the spread of imperialism or the diffusion of agricultural techniques. The absence of such studies, he claimed, caused gaps in the literature of historical geography not only at the regional scale but also at national and transoceanic scales. It would have been too much to have expected a Pauline conversion among his audience, but many agreed in discussion that they felt the need to paint a broader canvas than had normally been attempted in recent decades, but that, at the same time, this ambition was difficult to reconcile with the rigorous sifting of primary documents. This was a theme which recurred in various ways in the discussion of many of the other papers. Attention then turned to the main focus of the conference. Two papers indicated that studies of the urban landscape are still alive and well, but that they are changing their mode of presentation. For example, T. R. Slater (Birmingham) examined the effects of landscape parks on the morphology of 400 British market-towns. In sympathy with modern fashion his attempts at generalisation were structured in terms of two “models” of urban development, which sought to isolate those features of landscape parks and other elements in urban morphology which were most closely associated. A fundamental reorientation of morphological studies was embodied in J. W. R. Whitehand’s (Birmingham) ambitiously-entitled paper “Towards a historico-geographical theory of urban form”, which in fact was concerned with a section of west London in the nineteenth century. Whitehand attempted to relate plot size to land values, and although in discussion there was some concern about the significance of the plot as a morphological unit and about the validity of the data on land values, the paper was generally welcomed for providing an economic geographical framework within which morphological details could take on wider meaning. In its second session the conference heard a group of three papers which examined internal population contrasts within British cities. These contributions were particularly interesting in that they emphasised some of the technical problems of research in historical geography. R. S. Holmes (Kent) in “Ratebooks and census linkage: problems and applications” showed how, by bringing together two distinct sources, it was possible to give great precision to analyses of spatial distributions within nineteenth-century British cities. The use of rate books and manuscript census data allowed the identification of individual properties and enabled them to be linked with the socio-economic characteristics of their occupiers. Holmes applied his technique to Ramsgate in 1851 and, among other things, was able to show that there was a convincing association between rateable values and various distinctive social and demographic features of the population. The
132
CONFERENCE
REPORT
unique features of Ramsgate and the effort involved in applying this method to other larger settlements would appear to inhibit the easy development of more generalised statements. I?. J. Dennis (then Sheffield, now U.C.L.) reported on similar methods which he has been using to link marriage registers with the manuscript census returns for the Huddersfield Registration District at various dates in the nineteenth century. Methods of statistical analysis were applied to this marriage data to reveal the nature of community structure in various parts of the city, based on the assumption that the degree of intermarriage in a local area provides an acceptable surrogate for general community interaction. Dennis argued that there was an intensification of community structure between 1850 and 1880 and explained this characteristic by the growing scale of residential segregation, with inner city areas becoming more solidly working-class. He concluded that these observations indicated that the development of the industrial city was not always in the direction of anonymity and an aspatial life-style. In a third paper on intraurban population features G. K. Pooley (Liverpool) discussed the influence of migration on the formation of residential areas in nineteenth-century Liverpool, again using manuscript census data as a primary source. Segregation of immigrant Welsh, Scottish and Irish settlers was considerable, but not total, and each group displayed very different social characteristics. This led Pooley to the conclusion that ethnic segregation in nineteenth-century British cities was not so simple as some American examples would suggest, although it might be argued that this Transatlantic simplicity is more apparent than real. At a final session two papers studied urban conditions outside Britain and were concerned with cities as entities, rather than with their internal geography. R. A. Butlin (Q.M.C.) drew the conference’s attention to the quite long-standing debate about the presence or absence of urban life in pre-Norman times. He discounted the received doctrine that a Norman origin was responsible for the earliest substantial development of urban life in Ireland, prefaced by a few Viking urban settlements. Butlin indicated that the pre-Norman settlement history of Ireland is extremely complex and that various features of earlier political and economic organisation survived into Norman times, but without a clear definition of what urbanism involves, operationalised in terms of observable archaeological features, the solution of this particular problem seems difficult to achieve. Finally D. J. Shaw (Birmingham) turned to urban development in southern Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where towns played a primary role in the process of colonisation. Later a secondary network of central places grew up, better able to serve the local population than many of the older military towns. The discussion that followed attempted, necesssrily somewhat unsatisfactorily, to resolve whether the experience of southern Russia was characteristic of other frontier areas. The participants in the conference returned home with an increased awareness of how dependent historical geography is upon the current intellectual concepts of other systematic branches of human geography. They were also more clearly aware of the frequent dependence of historical geographers on surrogate measures of the phenomena in which they are actually interested. Paradoxically this constraint provides one of the subject’s strongest appeals since it imposes the intellectual challenge of making valid deductions from whatever clues come to hand, in order to offset the erosion of information which results from the passage of time. Before dispersing, those delegates with the necessary stamina escaped on the final day from the lecture room to visit the Museum of English Rural Life of the University of Reading under the guidance of E. J. Collins and A. Jewell, and to study the history and morphology of Reading with the help of D. c‘. Large. University
of Lancaster
JAMES
H.
JOHNSON