Mapping the cultural divides of England and Wales: Did the geographies of ‘Belonging’ act as a brake on British Urbanisation, 1851–1911?

Abstract

Although both the analysis of regional culture and urbanisation are long-standing preoccupations in geography, few studies have considered the relationship between the two, the former traditionally being a topic in cultural geography, while the latter is usually interpreted and analysed as a process in economic geography. Taking evidence from the 1851–1911 censuses of England and Wales, this article analyses individual migration paths to identify stable regions of human interaction by applying a sophisticated community-detection algorithm. By accurately mapping the regions within which the majority of migration occurred between 1851 and 1911 and arguing that the stability of these geographies is evidence of more than just mutable communities but rather of persistent regional cultures, this article responds to previous studies that have sought to identify the cultural provinces of England and Wales. Indeed, by demonstrating that the regions bear a striking resemblance to those that have long been hypothesised as being distinct cultural provinces of England and Wales, this article empirically corroborates their existence. In order to further demonstrate that the regions constitute cultural provinces, this paper incorporates these boundaries into a spatial interaction model (SIM). The results of the SIM not only shows that the boundaries between the regions limited the number of migrants that crossed them–over and above that explained by control variables–and therefore represented the boundaries of cultural provinces, demarcating discrete regions of human interaction–but that such boundaries disproportionately restricted rural-urban migrants, thereby slowing the pace at which England and Wales urbanised. This paper therefore demonstrates that urbanisation should not only be interpreted as only an economic phenomenon, but a cultural one also, and that if urbanisation is to be fully understood, individuals’ attachment to place as a component of their identity, ought to be formally incorporated into models of migration.