While the history and the functioning of ports has attracted considerable attention from geographers, economic historians and sociologists, the area of interest has tended either to focus very narrowly on the immediate connections between land and water, such as facilities for shipping or waterfront working conditions, or to be concerned with broad perspectives, such as the value of trade and competitive position. There has been, metaphorically speaking, an inclination to look out to sea rather than inland, or to allow the dock wall to define the limits of investigation. As a result, with the exception of Martin Daunton’s study of Cardiff, ports have rarely been treated as urban entities.

This is not to say that the connection between water-based activity on a shoreline or river bank and the growth of permanent settlement has not been a very familiar and well-worked theme. But not every landing place for cargo became a town, still less a city. In 1870 the official returns identify 110 foreign trade ports in the UK. A hundred years later the oil terminals of Milford Haven, Sullom Vo and Orkney ranked high among British ports; reminders that the nature of trade and the state of cargo-handling technology are factors linking, or separating, transhipment needs and populations. Furthermore, for anyone studying ports in a maturing industrialised economy, the enhanced ability to shape the built environment (to dredge, to put up barriers against the sea, readily to take goods into the interior) necessarily shifts the analysis away from a concentration on natural features towards recognition of the human contribution; ‘in the beginning the harbour made the trade; but soon the trade began to make the harbour’.