Rural/urban definitions

Edward Higgs

The nineteenth-century censuses, and the establishment of the civil system for registering births, marriages and deaths in 1837, took place at a time when the population of Great Britain was undergoing rapid expansion. The population of England and Wales was 8,892,536 in 1801 and 32,527, 843 in 1901, an almost four-fold increase in a century. This was a far faster growth than in former periods – in the eighteenth century the population of England had only increased by about 70 per cent; and by 23 per cent in the previous century (Wrigley and Schofield, 208–9). Moreover, this population increase was not spread evenly over the whole country, with some areas having stagnant population, and others growing rapidly. This growth was concentrated in the industrial cities of the North and in London, rather than in the countryside where agriculture was in decline. This process of urbanisation was a general phenomenon of the Western world in the nineteenth century but happened first, and most strikingly, in England, Scotland and Wales (Lampard).

The General Register Office (GRO), the body responsible for organising both the censuses and civil registration in England and Wales from 1837 onwards, was acutely aware of these processes. The censuses showed the rise in the population, which in turn caused all sorts of problems for the organisation of the enumeration, since enumeration districts had to be constantly revised to make them of equal size. As the size of the population increased, so did the overall cost of the decennial enumeration. At the same time, the GRO's work on the mortality and cause of death data derived from the registration of deaths revealed that high mortality was a feature of the expanding towns and cities, rather than of the countryside. William Farr, the GRO's medical statistician from 1839 to 1879, developed the concept of the mortality of 'Healthy Districts', which responsible local authorities should try to match. This was based on a set of 63 registration districts, mostly rural, which made up 10 percent of the national population, and had a crude death rate below 17 per thousand (Eyler, 71–2; Szreter, 439). On the basis of this figure, areas with higher mortality, and these were usually towns, could be shamed into introducing sanitary reforms to prevent 'unnecessary' deaths.

Farr was also aware that mortality varied within urban areas, and worked towards understanding differences in mortality rates in terms of differences in population densities (Eyler, 132–3, 145–7). In the Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General for England and Wales Farr ranked the metropolitan districts by population density and female mortality rate, and found that mortality seemed to increase as the sixth roots of the densities. This seemed to work quite well for the ten healthiest and the ten least healthy districts. Such a result fitted in with his general belief that the higher the density of population, the greater the number of deaths due to pathogens, in line with the new understanding of aetiology in the period. Farr saw these pathogens in terms of 'atmospheric impurities, organic matter undergoing decomposition, and the contagious principles of zymotic diseases' found in the environment (Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General for England and Wales, 203–15).

The GRO was interested, therefore, in estimating the proportion of the population that lived in urban and rural areas. But how were these areas to be identified? John Rickman, the clerk of the Houses of Parliament who organised the censuses from 1801 to 1831, did not attempt to make such a distinction. All that seems to have been attempted in 1841 was the production of a table showing the changes in the populations of major cities and towns in Great Britain. It was not until the 1851 census that an estimate of the urban and rural population was given, a practice continued at every succeeding census (Law, 125).

In 1851 and 1861 the urban population was obtained by adding up the figures for municipal and parliamentary boroughs, together with the population of unincorporated towns, where greater than 2000, as estimated by the local registrars of births, marriages and deaths. But this mode of calculation was problematic – suburbs beyond boundaries were not included, as were some boroughs of doubtful urban character. The totals for urban areas were, therefore, probably underestimates. In 1871 the 'urban' population was made up of those living in municipal boroughs, and in those places that had either improvement commissioners or local sanitary boards. The urban population statistics of 1881 and 1891 consisted of figures for the urban sanitary districts established in 1872. From 1901 onwards they referred to the populations of county boroughs, municipal boroughs and urban districts (Law, 126). The successive Census reports showed an increasing predominance of the urban over the rural population. In 1851 just over half of the population of England and Wales lived in 'urban districts' but this had risen to 78 per cent by 1911 (Census of England and Wales, 1911, Areas, families or separate occupiers..., xvi).

As Law has noted, there were numerous problems in defining the urban population in terms of urban administrative districts created for administrative purposes. The boundaries of such units might not coincide with urban realities. Thus, in South Wales the mining settlements were designated as a series of urban districts although they were really collections of villages. The speed of urban designation also varied from place to place. As a consequence geographers have attempted to produce a number of differing definitions of the urban population. Law's own attempt was based on using three principles to define urban communities:

Minimum size — 2500 persons and above;
Density — one person per acre;
Nucleation — a continuous urban environment as derived form maps.

This was an attempt to define urbanisation in terms of the character of a place, rather than on boundaries (126–32).

REFERENCES

Census of England and Wales, 1911, Areas, families or separate occupiers, and population. Vol. I. Administrative areas. Counties, urban and rural districts, &c., BPP 1912–13 CXI. [View this document: Areas, families or separate occupiers, and population, England and Wales, Vol. I. Administrative areas, 1911]

John M. Eyler, Victorian social medicine. The ideas and methods of William Farr (London, 1979).

Fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1841) BPP 1843 XXI. (516) [View this document: Fifth annual report of the registrar-general]

Eric E. Lampard, 'The urbanizing world', in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds, The Victorian city: images and realities, volume I (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).

C. M. Law, 'The growth of urban population in England and Wales, 1801–1911', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41 (June 1947), 125–44.

E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981).