INTRODUCTION

While typologies of cities provide a useful framework for population studies, they present considerable problems. Most urban centres are multi-functional, definitions of dominant function usually being based on the most easily accessible criterion of census occupational data (Nelson, 1955; Laux, 1989). Other—perhaps more crucial—factors in demographic behaviour, such as social class, cultural characteristics (for example, ethnicity, religion, levels of education) and income are seldom easily available.

Moreover, the statistical bases of such classifications are usually very crude and the differences within a class in social, structural and demographic characteristics may be greater than those between different classes. Contrasts in demographic experience over time, in different regional settings, and in the wide differences (especially in the provision of non-basic industries and service activities) between small and large cities within particular types of town suggest that the advantages of such an approach to spatial demographic analysis may be greatly outweighed by the disadvantages. Nevertheless, demographic behaviour between particular socio-economic groups is different: coal-mining and heavy industrial communities have had, historically, high nuptiality and fertility (Haines, 1979); factory textile areas were generally characterized by low fertility; and large nineteenth-century cities had high mortality and substantially depended for growth on migration (Lawton, 1983). Such striking differences in demographic régimes are universally recognized. Contrasting demographic behaviour also produces distinctive population structures between particular sections of the community within individual towns and, at a broader scale, between different ‘types’ of town or region which also reflect environmental contrasts (at work and home) and differences in economic, social and individual behaviour. These are the very stuff of explanation in population studies.

In his comprehensive analysis of nineteenth-century urban growth in England and Wales, Brian Robson (1973, pp. 94, 127), while essentially concerned with growth rates over time and their effects on the ranking and distribution of towns, frequently alludes to the contrasts between different types of town in the temporal and spatial patterns of urban growth: for example, the early boom of the northern textile and metal-working areas and the much later growth of the towns within the South-East; or the impact of ‘different factor endowments’ on growth in specific areas of the ‘growth impulses’ in a sequence of growth industries—cotton, wool, iron and coal.