Suchergebnisse

This interdisciplinary study focuses on tenement (house) size, as recorded in the census in 1901, to explore demographic and social contrasts in Chepstow, an historic market town and river port in south-east Monmouthshire. For three contrasting enumeration districts, it contextualises this measure of housing status against the characteristics of the built environment, and applies the technique of house repopulation to derive spatial patterns of social difference and inequality from residents' age, household formation, net lifetime migration, and employment circumstances in the stagnating local economy. The study re-scales the investigative methods used by urban historians in city-wide studies of urban ecology and demonstrates how tenement size, a crude but under-utilised measure of housing stock, can support micro-scale studies of social differentiation in small but regionally significant towns. Equally as important, it provides an insight into the case-specific processes and particular outcomes of urbanisation during the nineteenth century in rural Monmouthshire.

This study blends evidence from historical archives with findings from a household survey to explore differences in the impact of developments in the railway industry on the physical growth and changing social profiles of three neighbouring villages in south east Monmouthshire during the period 1850–1965. Within the framework of the community studies tradition, and conceptualisation of the railway village, this article differentiates local outcomes in employment and social profile generated by the construction of the Severn Tunnel and placement of associated infrastructure. The scene is set by examining phases in the local development of the railway industry, housing provision and related population trends. A critical overview of the principal data sources follows. This leads to an evaluation of the concept of 'community', aspects of which are illustrated from village case histories predicated on the selected themes of social segregation, assimilation, community anchorage and household persistence.