To what extent did the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witness a ‘flight to the city’?

By Rachael Clapham, Second Year History Student

This essay argues that while the nineteenth century may have witnessed a ‘flight’, or large-scale migration, to the city in Britain, the twentieth century largely did not. Rather, the twentieth century largely, along with the nineteenth century to some extent, witnessed more of a flight away from the city, and to the towns and suburbs.

Urban history emerged among a growth of historical sub-specialisms in the 1960s and is closely identified with the work of Harold James Dyos. The study of Victorian cities began to flourish in Britain, but earlier historians focused primarily on London and then the large provincial centres. There was much less attention paid to small cities, towns, or suburbs, with a grand narrative arguing a sharp urbanisation due to industrialisation and linked to a model of modernisation. This may have created a distorted picture of the popularity of and ‘flight’ to cities in the past, and led to detail being missed over the history of towns and suburbs, which this essay argues were the real receivers of a ‘flight’ to them in this period. However, by present day available scholarly materials have become quite comprehensive, allowing this essay to reach its conclusions.

The first section, on rural depopulation, suggests a limited ‘flight to the city’ in the 19th century, with doubt placed upon it due to a number of issues. The second highlights that alongside this limited ‘flight to the city’, the 19th century also witnessed a flight to the towns. The third section focuses on the Garden Cities and New Towns movements, to demonstrate how these attracted more of a flight to them in the 20th century, rather than the city. Finally, the fourth section on suburbanisation reveals that the suburbs also attracted a flight of migration to them in the 20th century, primarily away from the city. Therefore, together these sections consolidate the idea that overall, the nineteenth and twentieth century did not witness a ‘flight to the city’, as much as a trend of people leaving the city and partaking in a flight to towns and suburbs instead.

During the nineteenth century, there may have been a ‘flight to the city’ from large numbers of people migrating out of the countryside in what is described as the rural exodus. However, this trend did not continue into the twentieth century. Rural depopulation happened as people left the countryside in search of better employment opportunities and higher wages in urban areas, due to the poor prospects in rural ones. There is an issue in that most studies focus on the change between those living in urban and rural areas, as opposed to those living in cities or ‘other’, making it harder to draw conclusions about a ‘flight to the city’. While data on parallel expansion of the cities suggests a flight from the countryside to the cities, historians must be careful not to assume this is the case, without controlling for factors such as population growth and migration to cities from other cities, which would create a distorted picture. Another issue is that county-level birthplace data is only available from 1851, making it difficult to statistically analyse internal migration trends before then. Looking at London, John Langton suggests that it grew relatively slowly before 1841, but accelerated thereafter, in what may be perceived as a ‘flight to the city’. John Saville found that across the South and East of England, London attracted 70-90 per cent of rural migrants This suggests the rural exodus did result in a ‘flight to the city’, rather than to anywhere else. In addition, the 1881 census found that a third of London’s population stated they had been born elsewhere in England and Wales. However, this is limited by not including Ireland and does not mean they grew up where they were born as opposed to in London, or that they weren’t born in another city, so cannot definitively support a ‘flight to the city’. Moreover, caution should be taken when looking at evidence from London, as it is by far the largest city in Britain and the capital, so cannot be interpreted as typifying a trend. However, a ‘flight’ may have also been witnessed to other cities. For example, Edinburgh was 6 times bigger in 1841 than 1801 and Manchester saw a doubling of its population between 1801 and the 1820s and again between then and 1851. Furthermore, Everton in Liverpool saw Welsh migration to such an extent that James Picton described it in his 1873 Memorials of Liverpool as ‘the Goshen of the Cambrian race’, observing Welsh newspapers in shop windows. Colin Pooley recognised this trend, but emphasised how by mid-nineteenth century many Welsh in English cities had moved out to the suburbs and that towards the end of the century the volume of migration from Wales decreased, linking to the following sections. There are multiple issues in concluding that even the nineteenth century witnessed a ‘flight to the city’ from the data. For example, Banks’ finding that certain age groups were overrepresented in rural migration or Schurer and Day’s identifying of male dominated pockets of migration. Also, Jason Long found those from the lower classes were underrepresented in rural to urban migration in 1851, while the middle classes were overrepresented. He concluded that urban migrants were the ‘cream of the rural labour market crop’. This limits the extent to which a general ‘flight to the city’ can be concluded, due to the limited involvement of large strata of the population. Therefore, though urbanisation was certainly seen, the evidence only leads to the conclusion that a partial and incomplete ‘flight to the city’ was witnessed in the nineteenth century. Moreover, this trend of city growth due to migration was not always seen. Exeter had a population of less than 40,000 mid-century and failed to reach 50,000 by 1900, so there was evidently not a ‘flight’ to all British cities. - Therefore, though a ‘flight to the city’ can sometimes be seen in the nineteenth century, this is to a limited extent.

Alongside rural migration to the cities, rural migration to the towns was also seen. Therefore, this supports my argument that a ‘flight to the towns’ better describes what was witnessed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather than a ‘flight to the city’. As industrialisation took hold, many towns grew due to industries like fishing, coal-exporting, and capital goods. For example, Robert Morris found that the resource-based St Helens and Burnley grew at over 10 per cent per year in the first half of the nineteenth century – a huge expansion. Furthermore, Colin Pooley found that towns along the Welsh borders, and those with particular employment opportunities attracted the largest volume of Welsh migrants, as opposed to cities. Finally, A 1913 liberal enquiry into the land concluded that ‘all the best blood… leave for the towns’, further suggesting that a large amount of migration to towns was occurring. Therefore, it is clear that simultaneous to any ‘flight to the city’, a ‘flight to the towns’ was also happening to some extent during the nineteenth century, though more so in the twentieth. As a result, Thomas Freeman observed that the Victorians created a new civilisation ‘so thoroughly of the town’ that it has been said to be the first of its kind in human history.

The twentieth century also saw a ‘flight to the towns’ rather than a ‘flight to the city’, to a larger extent, due to the Garden City and New Towns projects. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard started the popular Garden Cities movement, which emphasised the downsides of living in cities and the advantages of moving to a town designated for healthy living. The success led to the development of just 2 of these towns in 1903 and 1920 - Letchworth and Welwyn, where many new residents relocated from London. The movement is significant as it is largely credited with inspiring large-scale migration out of cities and into towns and leading to the New Towns Development. The New Towns movement saw overspill or satellite towns outside of the cities being designed for the growing city populations to migrate into. They alleviated housing shortages in London, Durham, Manchester, and Liverpool, encouraging flight out of these cities and into the 28 New Towns and other towns expanded under the 1946 New Towns Act. The minutes of the 1946 Reith Commission for New Towns state that each New Town development should have a population of at least 50,000. For example, one of the larger New Towns, Milton Keynes, was initially designed in 1965 for a population of 250,000, mainly drawn from London. Therefore, this demonstrates the huge scale of this city to town migration, constituting it as a ‘flight to the towns’, opposing the idea of a ‘flight to the city’. The popularity of the movement is reinforced by Peter Hall’s interpretation that people after World War Two were ‘ready to leave the overgrown metropolis’ for a new home in the suburbs or a New Town. This is confirmed by evidence from the Regions Nineteenth Report of 2002, revealing that about 2 million people were housed in the New Towns. In comparison to the limitations of generalising the nineteenth century’s restricted ‘flight to the city’, this ‘flight to the towns’ intentionally involved the re-housing of all social classes, with this being a principle of the Act. Though ethnicity was not covered, Lewis Silkin, the Labour Minister for Town and Country Planning stated in the House of Commons in 1946 that ‘groups living in the towns will not be segregated’. This emphasises the intentions of a diverse and widespread ‘flight’. Therefore, this section demonstrates a distinct and general ‘flight to the towns’ in the twentieth century which purposely drew people away from the cities, so opposes any notion of a ‘flight to the city’. Howard’s work has also been credited with inspiring the development of ‘garden suburbs’, linking to the following section on suburbanisation. Moreover, Osborn has argued a limitation for the impact of New Towns, claiming suburbs were prioritised over them after World War Two. Despite this, the next section reveals how the development of suburbs also supports the argument that a ‘flight to the city’ was limited.

The twentieth century saw further new ideals, such as rural nostalgia, driving people out of cities and into the suburbs. This presents a trend which can be described more as a ‘flight to the suburbs’ and away from the city, rather than a ‘flight to the city’. There is debate among scholars in various fields over the extent to which a suburb is integrated in or separate to a city. The conclusion for this essay is that, though they vary substantially, suburbs are widely recognised in historical writing as a mid-point between town and country, not part of a city. This viewpoint has been adopted by historians such as David Thorns and Roger Silverstone. Therefore, the suburbanisation trend supports a flight out of the city, rather than to it. During the 1930s, over 4 million new suburban houses were built, in what Matthew Hollow has described as the 'suburban revolution'. The use of the word revolution supports the idea of this as a largescale migration, or ‘flight’. Particularly in the inter-war period, London’s suburbs were expanded out of the county of London into the neighbouring counties of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, and Surrey. At the same time, London's population declined steadily, suggesting people were moving out of the city and into the suburbs. Its population dropped from an estimated 8.6 million in 1939 to around 6.8 million in the 1980s, a significant impact. Though other factors like World War Two must be considered, this trend of urban decay was seen in many of Britain’s cities around this time. This is exemplified in popular culture such as by The Specials' 1981 hit single ‘Ghost Town’. Though it is not definite that people were moving into suburbs rather than to other cities, it is highly probable due to the evident expansion of suburbs in this period. Moreover, the flight to the suburbs is further supported by a 1943 study by the Society of Women Housing Managers on housing aspirations. It found the ‘overwhelming majority’ desired to live in a suburban house. Dion Georgiou has endorsed this, stating a rapidly growing number of Londoners elected to live in suburbs. He also highlights how this trend began in the late Victorian era, around 1880. Georgiou addresses the debate over the extent to which suburbanisation is a purely middle-class phenomenon, which questions the generalisability of my conclusions. He recognises that working-class en masse migration to the suburbs did happen, just to a lesser extent. This is supported by Mark Clapson’s argument that suburbanisation was in fact a diverse phenomenon, it is only seen as the opposite due to most histories ignoring minority ethnic group and working-class suburbanisation. Therefore, this section reveals that rather than a ‘flight to the city’, the twentieth century saw a widespread flight away from the city and to the suburbs instead.

This essay has demonstrated the extremely limited extent to which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed any ‘flight to the city’. Rather, the evidence suggests that a flight to the towns and suburbs was the trend more generally experienced at this time, in fact drawing people away from, rather than to, the city. This trend has been linked to the paradigm shift away from Victorian laissez-faire governance to new liberalism, with the government playing a large role in encouraging the flight away from the city, and to towns and suburbs.

Cover Image Credit: Sonance on unsplash