German, Frank Clifford; (2018) Migration, work and housing in Northampton, 1841-71. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis studies the growth and development of Northampton, a mid-sized market town with a substantial boot and shoe-making industry, employing almost half the working population. The trade was initially carried on by craftsmen and their families working from home, and moved only gradually from 1859 onwards into newly-built factories where components were assembled by machinists, including many female and juvenile workers. Source materials include four successive censuses from 1841 to 1871 and a comprehensive run of rate books recording the tenants, owners and rateable values of newly-built and existing residential and commercial properties over the period, as well as trade directories listing the principal commercial, industrial and service activities. Together they track and analyse the physical growth of the town, the number and value of new properties built each year, the impact of rating changes, the pattern of ownership, and rateable values per head of the population and turnover rates for tenants and owners, as well as the structure and distribution of the population by age, gender, occupations and birthplaces, street by street, over thirty years. It has been possible to construct age, gender and birthplace pyramids for a representative sample of streets containing over 20 per cent of the population, to calculate migration quotients linking inflows from and contraflows to over 300 parishes within a catchment area roughly 30 miles across, and establish a pattern of movements to and from parishes of differing sizes, distances and population dynamics; and to analyse inflows from contiguous and more distant counties and large cities, and from London, Scotland and Ireland. The results support a detailed commentary on the original laws of migration first propounded by Ravenstein and combine into a study of the principal processes at work in Northampton, the patterns that emerged on the ground and the links between them.

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