^{page 30 note 1} The question of the definition of an urban area is one in which a variety of criteria could be employed. Population in itself is not always a satisfactory guide, for a Census figure may relate to a group of scattered communities within a limited area rather than to one coherent town, while a place of only moderate size might perform commercial, administrative or social functions which appear characteristically urban. An extended discussion of this problem of terminology would be out of place here. There will always be communities whose urban nature is debatable, but in this paper we have tried to concentrate our discussion on communities which can be considered towns by most criteria, including size and function.

^{page 31 note 1} House, J. W., North-Eastern England: Population Movements and the landscape since the early 19th century [University of Durham, King's College, Dept of Geography, Research Series, No 1] (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1954), p. 56, Table 2.Google Scholar

^{page 32 note 1} Young, A., A Six Months Tour Through the North of England, III (1770), pp. 50–58.Google Scholar

^{page 33 note 1} Royal Commission on the Employment of Children [1842], Appendix to First Report of Commissioners, Mines, Pt I, p. 143.

^{page 32 note 2} Capper, B. P., A Topographical Dictionary of the United Kingdom (1808).Google Scholar

^{page 34 note 1} Sunderland, N., A History of Darlington (Darlington, 1968), pp. 61, 67.Google Scholar

^{page 35 note 1} SirHead, G., A Home Tour Through the Manufacturing Districts of England in the Summer of 1835 (1836), pp. 298–306, described some of these developments.Google Scholar

^{page 35 note 2} Wood, R., West Hartlepool (West Hartlepool, 1967), p. 13.Google Scholar

^{page 36 note 1} Quoted in Wood, op. cit., pp. 116, 115. In six years between 1878 and 1900 Grays had the largest output of any British shipbuilding yard. The construction of wooden houses, which also occurred in a number of colliery villages, always appears to have been a reaction to a very rapid increase in population, which had outrun the usual resources of the building industry.

^{page 37 note 1} Quoted in Spring, D., “English Landowners and Nineteenth-Century Industrialism”, in: Land and Industry, ed. by Ward, J. T. and Wilson, R. G. (1971), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

^{page 38 note 1} The Censuses record a growth for Ashington itself from 345 to 6,284. But the rapid growth of mining in the 1890's saw the extension of the urban area into the parish of Hirst, what was to be known in Ashington as living at “the Hirst end”. Here population rose from 57 in 1891 to 7,672 in 1901.

^{page 40 note 1} Parson, W. and White, W., History, Directory and Gazetteer of the Counties of Durham and Northumberland, etc., II (1828), p. 265.Google Scholar

^{page 40 note 2} Ibid., p. 213.

^{page 40 note 3} Barber, B., “The Concept of the Railway Town and the Growth of Darlington 1801–1911: A Note”, in: Transport History, III (1970), pp. 283–92;Google ScholarWarren, K., The Geography of British Heavy Industry since 1800 (1976), pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

^{page 41 note 1} Parson and White, op. cit., pp. 374–75.

^{page 41 note 2} See Bell, I. L., “On the Manufacture of Iron in connection with the Northumberland and Durham Coal-field”, in: British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of 23rd Meeting held at Newcastle upon Tyne, 1863 (1864), pp. 730–64Google Scholar; Hoskison, T. M., “Northumberland blast furnace plants in the nineteenth century”, in: Transactions of the Newcomen Society, XXV (1945–1947)Google Scholar; and Tylecote, R. F., “Recent Research on Nineteenth Century Northumbrian Blast Furnace Sites”, in: Industrial Archaeology, VIII (1971).Google Scholar

^{page 42 note 1} On the basis of constant 1801 boundaries the population of the town rose from 28,294 in 1801 to 42,760 in 1831, 49,860 in 1841, and 57,763 in 1851. For the same dates the figures for the post 1835 boundaries were 32,976; 53,613; 70,337; and 87,784.

^{page 43 note 1} Historical Sketch of the Forth Banks Engine Works (Newcastle, 1887) gives in Appendix I (p. 14) a table of the growth of the work force from 1817 to 1874.

^{page 43 note 2} Hodgson, G. B., The Borough of South Shields (Newcastle, 1907), pp. 157–59.Google Scholar

^{page 43 note 3} Manders, F. W. D., A History of Gateshead (Gateshead, 1973), pp. 162–63.Google Scholar

^{page 44 note 1} Rawlinson, R., Report to the General Board of Health on a Preliminary Inquiry into the […] Sanitary Condition […] of Alnwick and Canongate (1850), p. 76.Google Scholar The unsatisfactory evidence of the figures of numbers of persons per house from the Censuses, which suggests that country towns such as Hexham and Alnwick had overcrowding levels similar to the large industrial towns, is confirmed by later specific enquiries into overcrowding. In 1911 the proportion of the population of the County Borough of Newcastle upon Tyne living at a density of more than two persons per room was 31.6%; for Alnwick and Belford Rural Districts it was, respectively, 30.0% and 31.3%. In 1936, while Sunderland, with 20.6% of its working-class families living in overcrowded conditions, had the worst figure for urban areas, Norham and Islandshire in Northumberland, at 22.2%, was the worst of the rural districts. Newcastle upon Tyne and Alnwick Rural District remained similar, respectively at 10.7% and 10.8%.

^{page 45 note 1} Rawlinson, R., Report […] on a Preliminary Inquiry into […] the Borough of Gateshead (1850), p. 27,Google Scholar quoted in Manders, op. cit., p. 163. See also Reid, D. B., Report on the State of Newcastle upon Tyne and Other Towns (1845)Google Scholar; Report to the General Board of Health on Darlington, ed. by H. J. Smith (1850, reprinted by Durham County Local History Society, 1967); and Rogers, F. W. D., “Gateshead and the Public Health Act of 1848”, in: Archaeologia Aeliana, Fourth Series, XLIX (1971), pp. 153–86.Google Scholar

^{page 45 note 2} Manders, op. cit., pp. 182–83.

^{page 45 note 3} Reid, op. cit., p. 89.

^{page 45 note 4} The figures in the Censuses of Population for the number of houses and population of particular towns should provide adequate evidence on this topic. Unfortunately, the definition of a house varied considerably for some towns in the Censuses from 1801 to 1851. As a result it was possible for South Shields and Westoe jointly to be credited with 833, 1,514 and 3,018 houses in the 1811, 1821 and 1831 Census respectively, while population increased by only 20%, and less houses in 1851 than 1841 although population has increased by 25%. Despite these problems with the statistics there is general evidence to suggest that the number of persons per house increased between 1801 and 1851, with little likelihood that the average size of houses followed a similar pattern.

^{page 46 note 1} Reid, op. cit., p. 109.

^{page 47 note 1} Wood, P. A., “The Sunderland Poor Law Union, 1834–1930” (M.Litt. thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1976), p. 45.Google Scholar

^{page 48 note 1} Quoted in Lillie, W., The History of Middlesbrough (Middlesbrough, 1968), p. 47.Google Scholar

^{page 48 note 2} A reliable account of the gradual exploitation of the ores, first from the coast near Whitby, inland at Grosmont and finally from Eston, is given in Bell, loc. cit., pp. 734–36.

^{page 49 note 1} Briggs, A., Victorian Cities, (1963), p. 255.Google Scholar

^{page 49 note 2} Moorsom, N., The Birth and Growth of Modern Middlesbrough (Middlesbrough, 1967), p. 8.Google Scholar

^{page 49 note 3} Bell, Lady, At the Works (1907), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

^{page 50 note 1} When opening the park Prince Arthur remarked that Bolckow had stood by the iron cradle in which Middlesbrough was born and had watched over the growing child with care. “He knows what it wants, and what its interests are.” Briggs, op. cit., p. 259.

^{page 50 note 2} Ibid., p. 245.

^{page 50 note 3} Newcastle Chronicle, 11 October 1862.

^{page 51 note 1} Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Newcastle meeting 1925, Notices of Works Open to the Visits of Members, p. 14.

^{page 54 note 1} Manders, op. cit., pp. 164–71.

^{page 54 note 2} The same pattern, of outward pressure from the centre with the tenementing of earlier middle-class property and the building of new middle-class dwellings further away from the centre, was to be seen in other towns in the North-East. See, for example, Corfe, T., Sunderland: A short history (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1973), p. 95.Google Scholar There is a discussion of the pattern of urban development in Sunderland in Robson, B. T., “An ecological analysis of the evolution of residential areas in Sunderland”, in: Urban Studies, III (1966), pp. 120–42,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and id., Urban Analysis: A study of city structure with special reference to Sunderland (Cambridge, 1969).Google Scholar

^{page 56 note 1} Richardson, H. W. and Bass, J. M., “The profitability of Consett Iron Company before 1914”, in: Business History, VII (1965),Google Scholar and Wilson, A. S., “The Consett Iron Company Limited: A Case Study in Victorian Business History” (M.Ph. thesis, University of Durham, 1973).Google Scholar

^{page 56 note 2} “Within ten years of the foundation of the works the company owned approximately 1,300 cottages”, Wilson, A. S., “Consett: the development of a ‘model’ company town, 1840–1900”, in: North East Group for the Study of Labour History, Bulletin, No 8 (1974).Google Scholar This figure seems high, when compared with the 1851 Census figures for Conside (Consett) of 537 houses with a population of 2,777. The Company also had houses, although it is uncertain how many, at Benfieldside, where the number of houses rose from 181 in 1841 to 561 in 1851, and at Leadgate, where the number rose from 106 to 736. When the new Consett Iron Co. took over the business in 1864, there were “more than 1,000 freehold cottages” (Richardson and Bass, loc. cit., p. 84), and it is unlikely that any would have been built since 1857. In 1848 the Newcastle agent of the Bank of England was told that £40,000 had been spent in purchasing land and building houses for the workmen of the Derwent Iron Company. Bank of England Archives, Newcastle Branch Correspondence, 14 March 1848.

^{page 57 note 1} Seymour Tremenheere commented favourably, but probably in exaggerated terms, on housing at Consett, Report of the Government Mines Inspector, 1852. See also Wilson, “Consett”, loc. cit., and Seeley, J. Y. E., “Coal Mining Villages of Northumberland and Durham: a Study of Sanitary Conditions and Social Facilities, 1870–80” (M.A. thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1974).Google Scholar

^{page 57 note 2} Sunderland, op. cit., p. 102.

^{page 58 note 1} It is interesting that the very high levels of migration into the region in the 1850's and 1860's, and subsequent waves such as the migration into North Tyneside in the 1880's and the South-East Northumberland mining areas 1891– 1911, seem to have had little effect in raising standards of housing provision.

^{page 58 note 2} Kenwood, A. G., “Residential Building Activity in North Eastern England, 1853–1913”, in: Manchester School, XXXI (1963).Google Scholar

^{page 59 note 1} See Kenwood, loc. cit.

^{page 59 note 2} Manders, op. cit., p. 171.

^{page 60 note 1} Newcastle Council Proceedings 1890–1891, pp. 430–31, and Proceedings 1909– 1910, p. 620. These references are derived from J. Noddings, “Working Class Housing in Newcastle upon Tyne, 1890–1914” (dissertation for the degree of Bachelor of Architecture, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1974).

^{page 60 note 2} Lloyd, E., History of the Crook […] Co-operative […] Society Ltd. (Pelaw, 1916), p. 232.Google Scholar

^{page 60 note 3} Building Societies Association, Report of […] Annual Meeting (1906), p. 73.

^{page 60 note 4} Seeley, op. cit.

^{page 61 note 1} Manders, op. cit., p. 187.

^{page 62 note 1} North-East towns filled the first six places. Sunderland, at 20.6%, was the most overcrowded, while following Gateshead came South Shields (13.1%), Tyne-mouth (13.0%), West Hartlepool (10.9%) and Newcastle (10.7%). Ministry of Health, Report on the Overcrowding Survey in England and Wales (1936), p. xvii.

^{page 62 note 2} Corfe, op. cit., p. 122.

^{page 62 note 3} Lillie, op. cit., p.459. For the developments of the early period see The Social Background of a Plan: A Study of Middlesbrough, ed. by Ruth Glass (1948).

^{page 63 note 1} Quoted by Moorsom, op. cit., p. 46.