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Urbanisation
in Scotland
From
the early creation of burghs as market centres in the twelfth
century urbanisation has figured prominently in Scottish population
history. By the sixteenth century burghs had greatly increased
in number and were growing - though the majority was still small
by the standards of other European towns and cities. Some of
this expansion could be attributed to the Reformation, which
released large areas of former church land in and around the
older burghs.
Various
seventeenth century poll and hearth tax returns suggest that there
were three tiers in the hierarchy of urban centres: first, the
largest burghs headed by Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee,
Perth and St Andrews; second, a middle rank of ten or so including
Stirling, Ayr, Dumfries, Haddington and Inverness; and last, many
small burghs like Culross on the Firth of Forth - an early industrial
centre based on coal and salt manufacture. Estimates of population
are difficult - possibly 30,000 for Edinburgh in 1690, compared
with London's 400,000 around the same time.
Towns
grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution and thereafter-urban
growth remained a significant social and economic factor, especially
in the Lowlands. There was a notable change in the rank order
of the larger towns and cities for the industrial centres like
Glasgow, Dundee and Paisley (among others) expanded rapidly during
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is not
to deny the growth of towns and villages everywhere - a clear
function of economic development - in agriculture as well as industry.
The numerous planned villages - though less grand than Edinburgh's
classical New Town - were an interesting exercise in urban development
during this era.
Glasgow provides a useful case study in urban, industrial growth
- with many of its associated social problems of overcrowding,
poverty and disease. During the Industrial Revolution the city
grew rapidly: its population trebled between 1755 and 1801 (from
23,000 to 77,000); and trebled again in the three subsequent decades
to 1831 (202,000 at the census of that year). Later expansion
was just as dramatic, with a massive influx by migration from
Ireland after the 1840s, so that Glasgow ultimately became the
Second City of the Empire and one of the great nineteenth-century
international urban centres.
Edinburgh's
earlier experience had created the elegant Georgian New Town away
from the squalor of the Old Town's ancient tenements. To the existing
city and the neighbouring port of Leith more was added, mainly
during the late nineteenth century building boom. There were some
interesting exercises in working-class co-operative housing, but
the most striking legacy of this era are the ordered tenement
suburbs that make the city seem as much a Victorian creation as
a Georgian one.
A
third city, Dundee, was in some senses a microcosm of the Glasgow
experience with its juxtaposition of jute mills, overcrowded tenement
housing and elegant middle-class suburbs by the banks of the Tay.
In many ways nineteenth-century Dundee was a telling indictment
of industrial capitalism at its worst - and a manifestation of
the acute social problems urbanisation brought in its wake.
The
twentieth century saw the relative decline of many small, rural
communities (especially beyond the Central Lowlands) partly
this was a function of migration to the larger towns and cities.
Suburban growth and the establishment of New Towns became major
exercises in planning to tackle the problems of congestion and
slum clearance in the older urban centres.
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to Scottish History
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