¹ The definition of a town inevitably changed over this period making direct comparisons problematic, but rapid urbanization was an unequivocal secular trend.

² Industrial output grew three to four times during the eighteenth century, whilst urban population roughly doubled. Daunton, M., ‘Towns and economic growth in eighteenth century England’, in Adams, P. and Wrigley, E. A. (eds), Towns in Societies (Cambridge, 1978), 249–50.Google Scholar

³ The profound changes in the urban hierarchy seen in the eighteenth century and the emergence of many centres of ‘new growth’ are highlighted by inter alia, Daunton, , ‘Towns and economic growth’; Corfield, P., The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar, and Clark, P., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600–1800 (London, 1984).Google Scholar

⁴ Daunton, , ‘Towns and economic growth’, 246–8.Google Scholar

⁵ Wrigley, E. A., ‘Urban growth and agricultural change’, reproduced in Borsay, P. (ed.), The Eighteenth Century Town, 1688–1820 (London, 1990), 49.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., 43.

⁷ This point is particularly emphasized by Clark. See, inter alia, Clark, P., Country Towns in Pre-industrial England (London, 1981).Google Scholar

⁸ Lawton, R. and Pooley, C., Britain, 1740–1950: An Historical Geography (London, 1992), 92.Google Scholar

⁹ Corfield, , English Towns, 11.Google Scholar

¹⁰ See, inter alia, the introductions to Borsay, , The Eighteenth Century TownGoogle Scholar; Clark, , English Provincial TownsGoogle Scholar; and Corfield, , English Towns.Google Scholar

¹¹ Wrigley, , ‘Urban growth’ and De Vries, J., European Urbanisation, 1500–1800 (London, 1984)Google Scholar attempt to quantify and systematize the changes highlighted by many urban historians.

¹² De Vries, , European Urbanisation, 270–8.Google Scholar

¹³ Everitt emphasized the important links between towns and their surrounding areas in the eighteenth century – Everitt, A., ‘Country, county and town’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29 (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ Defoe comments famously on the contrast between the nature of the country either side of the Ribble – Defoe, D., A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26; Penguin edition, London, 1971), 548.Google Scholar However, Preston is included here because of its clear links with the industrial economy of central and eastern Lancashire – its omission would exclude an important part of the urban system of this developing region.

¹⁵ For discussion of the definition of towns in this period, see Clark, P. and Slack, P., English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Patten, J., English Towns, 1500–1700 (Folkestone, 1978)Google Scholar; and Corfield, , English Towns.Google Scholar Population thresholds are used by Corfield, Wrigley and de Vries (amongst many oilers) in their surveys of urban population growth.

¹⁶ Blome, R., Britannia (London, 1673)Google Scholar; Adams, J., Index Villaris (London, 1690)Google Scholar; Cox, T., Magna Britannia et Hibemia (London, 1731)Google Scholar, and Lysons, D. and Lysons, S., Magna Britannia (London, 1810)Google Scholar are used here to identify market towns.

¹⁷ Ashton-under-Lyne and Oldham were both large rural townships and St Helens grew on the boundary of several townships; before they were identified as towns and populations given for them as such, the corresponding townships bear little resemblance to the boundaries of the subsequent urban area.

¹⁸ Corfield, , English Towns, 7Google Scholar, and Robson, B., Urban Growth: An Approach (London, 1973), 131–213.Google Scholar

¹⁹ 14 Car II C.10, in Arkell, T., ‘A student's guide to the Hearth Tax’, in Alldridge, N., The Hearth Tax: Problems and Possibilities (Hull, 1983), 24.Google Scholar Certain individuals and bodies were exempt from the tax: those who paid neither Church nor Poor Rates; people whose property had a value not exceeding twenty shillings per annum or who were worth less than £10; industrial hearths, and hearths and stoves within hospitals and alms houses with endowments of less than £100 per annum.

²⁰ Meekings, C., ‘Surrey Hearth Tax 1664’, Surrey Records Society XLI–XLII XVII (1940), cxxxv.Google Scholar

²¹ Meekings, C., Dorset Hearth Tax Assessments 1662–1664 (Dorchester, 1951), introduction.Google Scholar

²² Arkell, , ‘Guide to the Hearth Tax’, 32.Google Scholar

²³ Gloverstone was added to the total for Chester, but elsewhere suburbs were excluded to ensure that only the populations of the towns themselves (incorporating as little as possible from the surrounding countryside) are considered. Exceptions were made for Knutsford (Higher and Lower Knutsford) and Leigh (Westleigh and Pennington) because no single township corresponded with the town in question, and Northwich (Northwich and Castle Northwich) because the former was clearly too small (13 acres) to constitute the entire town. Rochdale appeared as a separate entry in the Hearth Tax Assessments, but did not correspond to any particular township, being split between the townships of Spotland, Wardleworth and Castleton.

²⁴ Patten, J., ‘The Hearth Taxes 1662–1689’, Local Population Studies, 7 (1971), 22–4.Google Scholar

²⁵ Langton, J., Geographical Change and Industrial Revolution: Coalmining in South West Lancashire 1590–1799 (Cambridge, 1979), 47–8Google Scholar; Walton, J., Lancashire: A Social History, 1558–1945 (Manchester, 1987), 25Google Scholar, and Blackwood, B. G., ‘The Lancashire gentry and the Great Rebellion’, Chetham Society, 10 (1978), 7–8.Google Scholar

²⁶ Wall, R., ‘Mean household size in England from printed sources’, in Laslett, P. and Wall, R. (eds), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972), 192.Google Scholar Given that these are national figures, their accuracy for the north-west must be open to question; moreover, as urban households tended to be larger than rural ones, this uniform measure will tend to depress urban totals slightly. However, Wall's estimates provide the only calculated totals available.

²⁷ Law, C. M. ‘Some notes on the urban population of eighteenth century England’, The Local Historian, 10 (1972), 14.Google Scholar

²⁸ Thacker, A. T., ‘The diocese of Chester’, in Victoria History of the County of Chester, vol. III (Oxford, 1987), 47–53.Google Scholar

²⁹ The vicar of Middleton wrote that counting households was ‘rather difficult and a work of time’ and gave no figure. Neither did the curate at Ardwick, who stated that the number was ‘impossible to ascertain’; Bishop's Visitation (1778)Google Scholar, Cheshire Record Office, EDV/7.

³⁰ Populations for Blackburn, Rochdale and Wigan are taken from Walton, Lancashire, 65 and 77; that for Haslingden comes from Moffit, L. W., England on the Eve of the industrial Revolution (London, 1963), 142Google Scholar; the remainder are from local censuses or the Bishop's Visitation.

³¹ The proportion of the parish population made up by the urban township in 1664 was calculated; this figure was assumed to remain constant and the 1778 urban populations were calculated by taking the same percentage of the 1778 estimate for the whole parish. This assumes that rural and urban growth rates were identical throughout the eighteenth century, which they clearly were not, making the resultant population totals approximate minimum values.

³² Wall is very clear about the distinction between the two, with family constituting a group of related people, whereas household includes lodgers, servants and so on; Wall, , ‘Mean household size in England’.Google Scholar

³³ Walton, , Lancashire, 77.Google Scholar

³⁴ Wall, , ‘Mean household size in England’, 193Google Scholar; again, of course, reservations remain about the use of national figùres in a regional survey – see note 26.

³⁵ Percival, T., ‘Observations on the state of population in Manchester’, in Benjamin, B. (ed.), Population and Disease in Early Industrial England (London, 1973), 2 and 9.Google Scholar

³⁶ Iceland had a census in 1703, as did Sweden from 1748, Austria after 1754 and Norway in 1769 – Morgan, M., Historical Sources in Geography (London, 1979), 98.Google Scholar

³⁷ For summaries of these arguments, see Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R., The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London, 1981), 122.Google Scholar

³⁸ Ibid., 123.

³⁹ Butterworth, E., A Statistical Sketch of the County Palatine of Lancaster (London, 1841), 119.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Deane, P. and Cole, W., British Economic Growth 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1967), 103Google Scholar, present two estimates for populations in 1781; these put the combined population of Lancashire and Cheshire between 576, 607 and 584, 374. For 1664, Walton, , Lancashire, 25Google Scholar, calculates that Lonsdale and Amounderness hundreds accounted for 25 per cent of Lancashire's population or about 20 per cent of that of Lancashire and Cheshire combined, but in the 1801 census they made less than 10 per cent of the overall population. For the 1770s, therefore, an intermediate figure of 15 per cent is taken. This gives the overall population of the region as 490–500,000.

⁴¹ If Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham and St Helens were included, the rate of growth would be still more dramatic: the 1801 urban population would be 329, 310 (41 per cent).

⁴² Wadsworth, A. P. and de L. Mann, J., The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester, 1931), 311.Google Scholar

⁴³ Historians of industrial development in the north-west all emphasize rural industrialization, but also stress the links between town and country: Wadsworth, and Mann, , The Cotton TradeGoogle Scholar; Walton, , LancashireGoogle Scholar; and Langton, , Geographical Change.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ The usefulness of these graphs in the analysis of urban systems is, of course, the subject of some considerable debate – see, inter alia, Berry, B. and Garrison, W., ‘Alternate explanations of urban rank-size relationships’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 48 (1958).CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, they do provide some insight into the changing structure of such systems.

⁴⁵ Johnson, G., ‘Rank size convexity and system integration’, Economic Geography, 56 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ Chester and Northwich expanded at similarly modest rates during this period (145 per cent and 163 per cent respectively – see Table 2), but, whilst in Chester this meant an additional 11,000 inhabitants, in Northwich it amounted to a mere 1,000. Conversely, Blackburn also grew by 11,000, but in doing so experienced a percentage growth of more than 1,000 and so is classed as a strong growth centre.

⁴⁷ In the 1801 census, a figure is given for the parish but not the town of Ashton-under-Lyne. The figure here is based on the assumption that the town comprised the same proportion of the parish population as it did in 1821, when a separate entry does appear. The ranks given here account for the additional three towns.

⁴⁸ Bolton, Blackburn, Manchester, Stockport, Preston and Macclesfield all contained significant levels of textiles production – fustian then cotton in the first two, linen then cotton in the next three and silk in Macclesfield. Wadsworth, and Mann, , Cotton Trade.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Baines, E., A History, Directory and Gazetteer of the County Palatine of Lancaster, vol. 2 (Newton Abbott, 1825), 547.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ In the case of Nantwich and Middlewich, this probably reflected genuine decline as the salt industry drifted northwards. In Northwich, the lack of growth in the town itself probably related to suburban development, notably in Witton and Wincham.

⁵¹ For a detailed discussion of Christaller's work, see Beavon, K. S. O., Central Place Theory: A Reinterpretation (London, 1977)Google Scholar; for more details on urban systems theory, see Simmons, J. W., ‘The organization of the urban system’, in Bourne, L. and Simmons, J. W., Systems of Cities (New York, 1978).Google Scholar