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5 - Industry, Commerce and the Urban Landscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2019

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Summary

Whereas the two previous chapters looked at the housing of the people of Victorian Bristol, this chapter moves on to consider how they made their living, where and in what kinds of buildings or other workplaces. The key questions addressed here are, how did changes in industry and commerce affect the urban landscape and the quality of the urban environment? The poor state of public health in the 1840s was attributed to population increase and deficiencies in sanitation and water supply, not to the impact of industry; but what happened later, as manufacturing and industrial processing grew in importance in the local economy? Economic and business historians of nineteenth-century Bristol have paid little attention to these topics, concerning themselves instead with a debate about Bristol's faltering economic performance relative to the more vibrant industrial towns and cities of the Midlands and the north of England. In doing so they ‘have generally taken an unadmiring view of the city's declining economic standing’, but they say next to nothing about the kind of city that resulted from this economic performance. Passing references can be found to firms building new factories or moving to new locations, but the implications for the evolving fabric of the city are not followed up. Architectural histories of the period are no more helpful, concentrating, as they invariably do, on stylistic features of the facades of individual buildings.

This neglect of the urban landscape and environmental quality represents an important gap in the literature because during the Victorian period new kinds of industrial and commercial buildings added variety to a stock of buildings hitherto consisting overwhelmingly of houses. The numerous paintings of Bristol street scenes in the 1820s suggest that the majority of buildings were still three- or four-storey houses, often of timber-frame construction with high gabled roofs. ‘During the Industrial Revolution much manufacturing, office and retail activity was conducted in buildings which were partly occupied for residential purposes, and had often been originally built as dwelling houses. Shopkeepers lived above their shops, offices were located in the homes of professional men and warehouses formed part of merchants’ residences. However, during the nineteenth century a long-run trend towards increasing functional and geographical specialisation of non-residential property emerged …

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2019

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