Tag: industry
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Did Beeching Kill Your Town?
3,331 railway stations closed in Britain between 1955 and 1975, and 643 towns in England and Wales lost every one. Size for size, they are a little poorer and more car-bound today, but they did not fall off a cliff.
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From Domesday mills to modern mills
Domesday Book’s entries count 6,172 mills in 1086. Places that had one are 3.9 times as likely to have a mapped watermill within 1 km today, but no likelier to have a windmill, and the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution went somewhere else.
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Great Fires: Did the Towns That Burned Rebuild Bigger?
I read every fire in Wikipedia’s town articles and found 102 great town fires, 63% of them in the 1600s and 1700s. Three centuries on, the towns that burned are neither clearly bigger nor richer.
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Minted: were England’s mint towns still the big towns?
Around the year 1000, every English penny named the town that struck it. I followed the 68 mint towns of Æthelred II forward to 1377, 1801 and 2021. 8 of the 10 biggest were still among England’s largest towns in 1377; Lydford, Cadbury and Torksey are villages now.
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Canal Mania: Did the Canal Towns Boom, and Do They Still Lead?
England’s canal towns grew about 4.0 times over between 1801 and 1861. But they were rising before the canals came, and today they are bigger, not richer.
