Expanding towns

Only one person in ten lived in a town in England in 1500. The towns were all small. Even London's population was only 50,000. And no other town had more than 20,000 people. Many of England’s 700 'market towns' were just big villages.

Things changed between 1500 and 1750. Many thousands of men and women moved from the country to the towns. By 1750, more than 500,000 people lived in London. After 1700, ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, and industrial towns like Birmingham and Leeds grew fast. Even so, no town apart from London had more than 50,000 inhabitants in 1750. The great mass of people still lived in villages or on farms.

All towns were dirty and unhealthy. Houses were packed together in narrow lanes, and families were packed into the houses. (Ten to a room was common.) There were no proper sewers or water supplies. Refuse was thrown into the streets and left to rot. Disease ran riot.

Towns were violent places. The hungry poor easily turned to crime. And since there was no proper police, they often got away with it. Mobs sometimes ran through the streets, looting and burning. Gentlemen in London complained that they were beaten and robbed by drunken roughs outside their own homes.

Walter Robson: Crown, Parliament and People; Oxford University Press, 1992/2002, page 9