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Urbanization and the Growth of Industrial Cities

The growth of the new industrial cities was one of the most dramatic social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Millions of people moved from the countryside to the new industrial cities, and the cities grew at unprecedented rates. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield in Britain, and Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit in the United States, all grew from small market towns into major industrial cities in the space of a few decades.

The Growth of the Industrial Cities

The growth of the new industrial cities was one of the most rapid demographic changes in human history. The cities grew at rates that are difficult to comprehend in retrospect, often doubling or tripling in size in a single generation, and they attracted migrants from a wide range of sources. In Britain, the population of Manchester grew from about 25,000 in 1772 to about 142,000 in 1831 to over 300,000 in 1851. The population of Birmingham grew from about 23,000 in 1750 to about 233,000 in 1851. In the United States, the growth was equally dramatic. The population of New York City grew from about 33,000 in 1790 to over 500,000 in 1850. The population of Chicago grew from a few hundred in 1830 to over 100,000 in 1860.

The Conditions in the Industrial Cities

The conditions in the new industrial cities were often terrible. The cities grew so rapidly that housing, sanitation, and public services could not keep up, and the result was overcrowding, pollution, and disease. The article on industrial cities describes the conditions in the new urban centers in more detail. The most visible problem in the industrial cities was the lack of adequate housing. The rapid growth of the cities led to a housing shortage, and the new housing that was built was often of poor quality, with overcrowding, inadequate ventilation, and limited sanitation. The article on housing conditions describes the conditions in which the new urban working class lived.

The Social Structure of the Industrial Cities

The industrial cities had a distinctive social structure, with a small upper class of factory owners and merchants, a growing middle class of professionals and skilled workers, and a large working class of unskilled laborers. The different classes lived in different parts of the cities, with the upper class in the suburbs and the working class in the inner-city slums.

The Cultural Life of the Industrial Cities

The industrial cities were also centers of culture. The new industrial cities developed their own distinctive cultures, with their own newspapers, theaters, music halls, and other cultural institutions. The Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821, became one of the leading newspapers in Britain, and the Manchester Athenaeum, founded in 1836, was a major center of intellectual and cultural activity.

The Decline of the Industrial Cities

The growth of the industrial cities slowed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the rate of natural increase in the cities fell and the migration from the countryside tapered off. The industrial cities of the late nineteenth century faced new problems, including competition from newer industrial cities, the growth of suburbs, and the decline of the older industries.

Migration and the Demographic Transition

The growth of the industrial cities was fed by three principal sources: natural increase (the excess of births over deaths), rural-urban migration, and international migration. The first source, natural increase, was the most important in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and it was itself a consequence of the falling death rate in the cities: the 1841 Census recorded a mean age at death of 24 years in Manchester, 23 in Leeds, and 22 in Liverpool, compared with 38 to 45 in the rural districts. The second source, rural-urban migration, became important from the 1820s onward, when the enclosure of the common lands, the agricultural depression, and the Irish Famine (1845-1852) drove rural workers into the cities. The Irish Famine alone produced a migration of perhaps 1.5 million people to the British industrial cities, with Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and the mining towns of Wales and the Northeast receiving the largest numbers. The third source, international migration, was particularly important in the United States, where the immigrant population grew from 2.2 million in 1850 to 14 million in 1910, with the German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Russian Jewish immigrants concentrated in the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. The demographic transition is the subject of E. A. Wrigley’s The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (1981) and of Simon Kuznets’s Population, Capital and Growth (1973).

Housing and the Back-to-Back Street

The most visible problem of the new industrial cities was the housing. The rapid growth of the cities outran the supply of adequate housing, and the result was the development of the back-to-back street, the cellar dwelling, and the tenement. In Manchester, the 1841 census recorded 13,000 cellars occupied by 40,000 people; in Liverpool, the proportion of the population living in cellars was 18 percent in 1841 and 12 percent in 1851. The back-to-back street, a row of houses sharing a common back wall and with no through ventilation, was the dominant building type in the British industrial cities of the 1830s and 1840s. The first public health legislation, the Liverpool Sanatory Act of 1846 and the Public Health Act of 1848, was in part a response to the housing crisis, but the problem was not effectively addressed until the housing reforms of the 1870s and 1880s, which were driven by the Torrens Act of 1868 and the Cross Act of 1875. The history of working-class housing is the subject of John Burnett’s A Social History of Housing, 1815-1970 (1978) and of M. J. Daunton’s House and Home in the Victorian City (1983).

Pollution and the Urban Environment

The industrial cities of the 1830s and 1840s were exceptionally dirty places. The principal pollutants were coal smoke, industrial effluents, and human waste. The coal smoke was a product of the universal use of coal for domestic and industrial heating, and it produced the dense, persistent fogs that became known as “pea-soupers” and that were the subject of the famous parliamentary discussions of the 1880s and 1890s. The 1848 Public Health Act gave local authorities the power to regulate smoke emissions, but the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act of 1926 was the first effective national legislation, and the Clean Air Act of 1956 was the first to require the use of smokeless fuel in designated “smoke control areas.” The industrial effluents — the acid fumes of the chemical works, the metal waste of the iron mills, the dye waste of the textile works — were even more toxic, and the pollution of the rivers of the industrial regions, particularly the Mersey, the Irwell, and the Thames, was a major public health problem. The pollution of the urban environment is the subject of Peter Brimblecombe’s The Big Smoke (1987) and of Bill Luckin’s Pollution and Control (1985).

The Social Geography of the Industrial City

The industrial city had a distinctive social geography, with the different classes living in different parts of the city. The most important distinction was between the inner-city slums, which housed the working class, and the suburbs, which housed the middle and upper classes. The development of the suburb was a feature of the late nineteenth century: the new railway and tramway systems made it possible to live outside the city center and to commute to work, and the new middle-class housing, often built on the model of the semi-detached villa and the bungalow, spread out along the transport corridors. The Greater London area grew from about 1 million people in 1800 to 6.5 million in 1900, and most of the growth was in the suburbs. The development of the social geography of the industrial city is the subject of H. J. Dyos and D. H. Aldcroft’s British Transport: An Economic Survey from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth (1969) and of David Ward’s Cities and Immigrants (1971).

The Cultural Life of the Industrial City

The industrial cities developed their own distinctive cultural institutions: the newspaper, the music hall, the public library, the museum, the trade union, the cooperative society, the friendly society, the Methodist chapel, the Catholic church, the Jewish synagogue, the football club, and the pub. The most influential of these were the newspapers. The Manchester Guardian (1821), the Leeds Mercury (1718), the Birmingham Daily Post (1857), and the Glasgow Herald (1783) were the leading provincial papers, and the London papers — The Times (1785), the Daily Telegraph (1855), the Daily Mail (1896) — were read in the industrial cities as well. The music hall, which developed from the tavern concert and the supper room, was the dominant form of working-class entertainment from the 1840s to the 1910s, and the stars of the music hall — Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno, Vesta Tilley — were among the most popular entertainers in Britain. The public library movement, led by the Public Libraries Act of 1850 and the Carnegie library program of the 1880s and 1890s, brought literacy and self-education to the working class. The cultural history of the industrial city is the subject of Hugh Cunningham’s The Challenge of Democracy (1980) and of Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1983), which argues that the working class of the industrial city was a distinct cultural formation, with its own values, its own language, and its own political consciousness.

The Decline of the Industrial City

The growth of the industrial cities slowed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many of the older industrial cities began to decline in the post-war period. The British population of inner London fell from 4.4 million in 1901 to 3.2 million in 1971, and the populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham all peaked in the 1930s and fell sharply in the 1960s. The decline was driven by a combination of factors: the loss of the older heavy industries, the suburbanization of the middle class, the rise of the new towns and the new service industries in the South, and the development of the modern transport system. The post-industrial city, with its service sector, its universities, its cultural institutions, and its diverse population, was a very different place from the industrial city of 1850. The decline is the subject of Andrew Shonfield’s Modern Capitalism (1965) and of Manuel Castells’s The Urban Question (1972), which argue that the post-industrial city is a distinct social and economic formation, with its own class structure, its own spatial form, and its own political dynamics.

The Post-Industrial City: A New Form of Urban Life

The 21st century has produced a new form of urban life that is, in many ways, the opposite of the industrial city. The post-industrial city is not a center of manufacturing but a center of services, finance, and information. The largest cities in the world in 2020 were Tokyo (37 million), Delhi (31 million), Shanghai (27 million), São Paulo (22 million), and Mexico City (22 million), and the trend is toward continued urbanization, with the United Nations projecting that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. The post-industrial city has its own distinctive problems: the informal economy of the developing-world megacity, the suburban sprawl of the American Sun Belt, the gentrification of the inner-city neighborhoods, and the digital divide of the post-industrial economy. The history of the industrial city, in the longer view, is the prehistory of the post-industrial city, and the patterns of work, housing, transportation, and social life established in the 19th century continue to shape the urban experience in the 21st. The contemporary debate about the future of cities, the subject of Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City (2011) and of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), is a direct descendant of the older debate about the industrial city.

The World Urbanization Process

The British and American industrial cities of the 19th century were the prototype of a global process. The world’s urban population grew from about 30 million in 1800 (3 percent of the total) to 220 million in 1900 (14 percent), 740 million in 1950 (30 percent), and 4.4 billion in 2020 (56 percent), and the United Nations projects that the urban share will reach 68 percent by 2050. The first half of the 20th century saw the European and American cities reach their peak populations; the second half saw the rise of the developing-world megacity, with Mumbai, São Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos, Dhaka, Cairo, and Jakarta now among the largest urban agglomerations in the world. The urban transition is the subject of Kingsley Davis and Herbert Hertz’s essays in the 1950s, of John Friedmann’s The World City Hypothesis (1986), and of the UN-Habitat World Cities Reports. The 19th-century industrial city, in this longer view, is the early chapter of a longer and larger process of urban transformation that continues to shape the world in the 21st century. The history of the industrial city, in the words of the urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, is the history of the “production of space” by industrial capitalism, and the world’s cities of the 2020s are the latest expression of that long historical process.

Chicago: The American Manchester

The American counterpart to Manchester was Chicago, which grew from a frontier town of about 350 people in 1833 to 4,470 in 1840, 30,000 in 1850, 112,172 in 1860, 503,185 in 1880, 1,099,850 in 1890, and 1.7 million by 1900. The city’s growth was driven by its position as the center of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (completed 1848) and the Chicago Union Stock Yards (opened 1865), and by the 1856 railroad boom that made it the principal rail hub of the Midwest. The Chicago Board of Trade, founded in 1848, was the principal commodity market in the United States, and the Chicago Board of Trade Building of 1885 was the symbol of the new city. The 1871 Great Chicago Fire, which destroyed 17,450 buildings and left 100,000 people homeless, was the most important single event in the city’s history, and the post-fire reconstruction, with the Chicago School of architecture, the Hull House of Jane Addams, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, made Chicago the laboratory for the new American city. The history of Chicago is the subject of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), the most important single work on the American industrial city, and of Donald L. Miller’s City of the Century (1996).

Concluding Thoughts on the Industrial City

The industrial city of the 19th century was the most distinctive new form of human settlement of the modern era, and it has shaped the urban life of the 20th and 21st centuries. The 19th-century industrial city introduced the factory, the railroad, the telegraph, the mass-circulation newspaper, the public library, the public park, the museum, the music hall, the department store, the hotel, the tenement, the slum, the suburb, the bank, the insurance company, the stock exchange, the trade union, the cooperative, the political party, the public school, the public health authority, the police force, the fire department, and the modern system of municipal government. Many of these institutions were invented in the British industrial cities of the 1830s and 1840s, and the rest of the world has been imitating them ever since. The current debate about the future of cities, the subject of Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City (2011), is a continuation of the older debate about the industrial city, and the 19th-century experience is a useful starting point for thinking about the urban future.

Suggested Reading

The principal works on the industrial city include Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), the foundational text; J. H. Clapham’s An Economic History of Modern Britain (1930); and H. J. Dyos’s The Victorian City (1973). For Chicago, see William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991). For Manchester, see Alan Kidd’s Manchester: A History (2006). For the American city, see Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier (1985) and John Reps’s The Making of Urban America (1965). For the post-industrial city, see Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City (2011). The Urban History Association and the journal Journal of Urban History are the principal venues for new research.

Key Dates in Urbanization

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of urbanization:

  • 1772 — Manchester population about 25,000
  • 1800 — World urban population about 30 million (3 percent of total)
  • 1830 — Manchester population 142,526
  • 1850 — New York population 500,000
  • 1860 — Chicago population 100,000
  • 1870 — London population 3.2 million; first world city
  • 1883 — Standard time zones adopted in U.S.
  • 1894 — Manchester Ship Canal opens
  • 1900 — World urban population 220 million (14 percent of total)
  • 1950 — World urban population 740 million (30 percent of total)
  • 1956 — Federal-Aid Highway Act in U.S.
  • 2020 — World urban population 4.4 billion (56 percent of total)
  • 2050 — Projected world urban population 68 percent

See also

In this section

Housing Conditions in the Industrial Revolution The often terrible housing conditions in the industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution, and the long campaign for housing reform that eventually improved the lives of the urban working class. Industrial Cities The conditions in the new industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution, with a focus on the experience of urban life and the problems created by rapid urbanization.