Intelligent Town

Intelligent Town

$85.00

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$85.00

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This is the first full-length study of Swansea’s urban development from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century. It tells the little known story of how Swansea gained an unrivalled position of influence as an urban centre, which led it briefly to claim to be the “metropolis of Wales,” and how it then lost this status in the face of rapid urban development elsewhere in Wales.
 
The history of Swansea’s early nineteenth-century coming-of-age is traced through its participant individuals and institutions. From wealthy industrialist employers to gentlemen scientists and from banking establishments to assembly rooms and libraries, Swansea’s growing reputation as a prosperous, flourishing and “intelligent” town is explored. With its combined functions as a metal smelting town, bathing resort, port and cultural centre its urban character was arguably unique, but in its experience of urbanization it shared much in common with towns and cities the length and breadth of Britain. The question of how to maintain health, order and safety in an environment undergoing demographic and industrial growth while, at the same time, providing the facilities and institutions befitting a place of growing importance was the key preoccupation of leading townsmen in Swansea and elsewhere in the 1780-1855 period. These all important decades in Swansea’s urban history, long obscured from view by the legacy of copper smoke and post-industrial dereliction, provide an important new perspective on the history of modern Wales in which, traditionally, Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil and even Bristol have been better know as towns of influence in Welsh urban life.
Louise Miskell is lecturer in history at Swansea University.
Preface
List of Illustrations
List of Tables and Figures
List of Abbreviations
I. Introduction
II. ‘Prejudicial to our ancient rights and privileges’: Urban governance, c.1780-1800
III. ‘Many advantages not to be found in any other part of wales’: Improvement and identity, c.1800-1820
IV. ‘A degree of commercial and manufacturing importance’: Industrialization and regional status
V. ‘The content and comfort of the workmen’: The Swansea populace and social relations
VI. ‘Cutting each other’s throats by our unhappy divisions’: Local government in the post-reform era
VII. ‘There is a spirit of intelligence abroad’: Urban elites and urban culture
VIII. Conclusion
Biographical Appendix
Bibliography
“This is a marvellous book, lucid, lively and well written which shifts the focus of Welsh history in the early nineteenth-century away from the well-ploughed path to Merthyr and engages with a civic place in which science and learning were valued. It asks new questions not simply about Swansea but also about the whole industrial and urban experience of Wales in the early nineteenth century.” –Neil Evans, Coleg Harlech
“…a consistently absorbing account of Swansea’s own mini-Enlightenment. It is a groundbreaking and challenging model for the further analysis of the formative influence of such elites elsewhere in Wales.”—Nigel Jenkins, Planet, Issue 181

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Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in