industrial towns in the early nineteenth century were seen as sources of social and economic problems. ‘Degeneracy’, wrote Richard Ayton in Swansea in 1813, ‘results from the increase of manufactories, and the consequent attraction of a larger population to one point’. The expansion of manufactures was perceived during the debate on the ‘Condition of England’ question in the early 1840s to be responsible for many social ills, some of which were urban. The town of the mid-nineteenth century has come to be represented by a series of pessimistic images, like the view of the cotton mills alongside the Rochdale Canal at Ancoats, Manchester, published by George Pyne in 1829, and by several much-quoted descriptions: Engels and de Tocqueville on Little Ireland in Manchester, or Reach on the east end of Leeds. Peter Gaskell summarised a popular perception when he observed that ‘the universal application of steam-power … separates families; and … lessens the demand for human strength, reducing man to a mere watcher or feeder of his mighty assistant’.

Contemporaries were nevertheless aware that the development of manufactures was not synonymous with urban growth, that the factory system needed to be understood in rural as well as in urban contexts, at Egerton and Styal as well as in Manchester and Leeds. None of the industries which most conspicuously expanded in the century before 1840 – coal mining, textiles, the mining and processing of non-ferrous metals, ironmaking, hardware, glassmaking, ceramics – was essentially urban. Towns were significant in these industries, but they encompassed much activity outside urban limits.