Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Table 3.14 demonstrates the uneven growth in the different zones and compares
them with national growth. 57
Alcester was the zone which showed the least growth
before 1801 but then, as it embraced the needle industry, its growth rate was greater than
Zones B and C after 1801. As Zone D industrialised, its dramatic growth both before and
after 1801 is clear to see. Between 1676 and 1801 Zone D’s population grew at almost
three times the national average, while for the period 1801 to 1841 it grew at just above
the national average. The other (less industrial) zones grew at well below the national
average both before and after 1801.
Surveys by other historians suggest that rates of population change in different
places imply different economic paths, with the greatest growth occurring hand in hand
with industrial development. For example, in Smith’s survey of Nottinghamshire market
towns from 1680 to 1840, she remarks that the more rural parishes experienced less
demographic growth. 58
Smith also observes that towns demonstrated most rapid physical
growth when they had industries catering for national and international rather than purely
local markets. 59
The parishes in the Needle District here provide a case in point.
In addition to demographic growth, comparisons of population density at a given
point in time also imply the presence or absence of industrial development. Gowing
demonstrates this in his commentary on eighteenth century population in Gloucestershire
where population density hot-spots can be seen in mining and cloth areas as well as in the
towns. 60
57 Population growth is shown for each zone from 1676 which is near the start of the study period and for
which figures are available for every parish except tiny Billesley. The years 1730 and 1780 are not shown
in this table as data was incomplete for these years.
58 C. Smith, ‘Population growth and economic change in some Nottinghamshire market towns, 1680-1840’,
Local Population Studies, 65, (2000), p. 33.
59 Ibid., p. 35.
60 Gowing, ‘The population geography of Samuel Rudder’s Gloucestershire’, Trans. of Bristol and
Gloucestershire Arch. Soc., 101, (1983), p. 151.
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