Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

In the nineteenth century Alcester, with more than its share of shopkeepers,
sweeps, saddlers, flaxdressers and milliners, maintained a modest role as a service and
retail centre for its hinterland. In common with much of England, Alcester’s tertiary
sector was now very different from that of earlier periods with increasing use of
professionals and middlemen. The town was now adequately served by coaches and
road-carriers, but its development was retarded by its distance from waterways. Nor did
this situation improve in the railway age, when the town was bypassed by main lines and
only connected by branch lines in the 1860s. In this era the needle industry was the
town’s biggest employer, but Alcester was never the centre of this trade.
Over two centuries Alcester had adapted and changed its priorities, floundering as
the tide of modern commercial pressures engulfed it. Alcester’s up and down economic
fortunes were reflected by its uneven population growth. Smith noted that her
Nottinghamshire towns grew most rapidly when they embraced manufactures with a
national and international market. 339
This also applied to Alcester, as it became more
heavily involved in needlemaking from the end of the eighteenth century. However, as
we leave it in 1840, it was on its way down as a market centre, overshadowed by bright
new manufacturing towns such as Redditch, which was the focal point of the needle trade
and now outgrowing Alcester in both size and influence.
339 C. Smith, ‘Population growth and economic change in some Nottinghamshire market towns’, pp. 31-34.
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