1
The Socio-Spatial Structure of Belfast in 1837: evidence from the First
Valuation
Stephen A. Royle
School ofGeosciences,
The Queen's University of Belfast
ABSTRACT
As with many other cities, upon the full impact of industrialisation Belfast's once preindustrial socio-spatial structure inverted and it developed a recognisably Burgess/Hoyt
style industrial city structure by the end of the 19th century. This paper considers Belfast's
position by 1837, using the records of the First Val uation, and finds elements of a 'mercantile
city' transitional phase.
Key Index Words: Belfast, nineteenth century, socio-spatial structure, valuations,
mercantile city.
Introduction
The socio-spatial structure of many cities of northern Europe (and in other areas such as North America
and Australia whose urban forms took on northern
European characteristics) was transformed during the
industrialising period. In essence, they progressed from
a pattern akin to that of Sjoberg's (1960) pre-industrial
city, with its high status residential centre and poorer
outskirts, to a pattern akin to Burgess's (1925) industrial city. In the latter the status groups had inverted
their position by comparison with the pre-industrial
situation, producing a non-residential core surrounded
by an area of poor status with the wealthier citizens
tending to live further from the city.
The basic cause for this transformation was usually
industrialisation. The development of factories and all
that accompanied them in close proximity to the old
town centres, together with the development of greater
commercial uses of this area, helped to push the high
status residents away. Intra-urban transport developments enabled them to maintain easy contact with the
centre for work or other purposes. Private and speculative building in the suburbs (or perhaps along a transIrish Geography 24 (1) (1991) 1-9, 0075-0078/91/$03.50
© Geographical Society of Ireland, Dublin.
port corridor if a high status wedge (Hoyt, 1939)
developed, as it often did) provided homes for those
who moved and for the many new middle class households that were being formed at this time.
Engels (1845) was able to describe what appears to
be a city nearing the end of this transformation in his
piece on Manchester in 1845 which revealed that this
city's socio-spatial structure resembled what could be,
generations later, recognised as a perfect Burgess pattern. It should be noted that Ward (1980) found such
'descriptions of early Victorian towns as dichotomous
socio-geographic arrangements of rich and poor or
middle class and working class [to be] somewhat
misleading'because of their aggregation of the considerable majority of urban society into a single [lower]
social group. Further, he claimed that at least for his
study area of Leeds, the late Victorian city 'did not
emerge from a gradual increase in the complexity of
early Victorian patterns'. However, several commentators have been able to describe cities progressing
along a path basically similar to the very generalised
transformation described above, with some variation
allowing for local circumstances. See, for example,
studies of Wolverhampton (Shaw, 1977); Cardiff
(Lewis, 1979), Stirling (Fox, 1979) and Toronto
(Goheen, 1970) and also Schnore's (1965) discussion
of the North American situation.
Royle
2
For some cities, an earlier short distance outwards
movement of high status groups from the core has also
been recognised. This took place as the core began to
commercialise. Pressures of commercial development
could lead some cities ' central residents to leave if new,
good quality housing could be provided up to a few
hundred metres distant. This would give them a less
frenetic area in which to live whilst leaving them within
easy reach of the city centre. Those without the need for
regular access to the centre might move further out.
This phenomenon, associated with a northern European
'mercantile city' phase and type of urban economic
development (Vance, 1977) was recognised as having
taken place for Bristol by 1794 (Tunbridge, 1977) and
for Ireland can be picked out for Cork (Fahy, 1984). In
the case of the latter, analysis of data from 1787 shows
that whilst Cork city centre itself was becoming the
resort of craftsmen, the area to the east of the city
became the residence and workplace of the merchants
and professionals 'with elegant houses of recent construction' and with the west of the city becoming a
r
ashionable, but not commercial area. Later on, developments in intra-urban transport systems would
inable such people, and those of like status left behind
n the city centres, to suburbanise more completely by
noving further out. A 'trend towards the suburbanisation
)f the middle classes, and the accompanying decline of
he status of the city centre as a residential area' was
loted for Cork by the 1860s (Fahy, 1986).
Belfast 1837
For the case of Belfast, it is known that in the late
ighteenth/early nineteenth century the town, then of
bout 20,000 inhabitants, displayed, in general terms, a
re-industrial type socio-spatial structure, but that this
ad become completely inverted in the great industrial
ity of 350,000 that entered the twentieth century. The
'ork of Heatley (1983) can be cited for the earlier
eriod:
'he living arrangements of its [Belfast's] people were typical
f those of any small town of the time [1800s]. The lower
asses had their dwellings in the back streets or lived in the
:llars or garrets of their employers; the middle or business
asses resided above their shops in the main thoroughfares.'
Collins (1983) describes the later, inverted, pattern:
The] roots [of the pattern of housing of Edwardian Belfast]
ere in the early industrial development of the city and the
subsequent exodus of the middle and professional classes
from their Donegall Square town houses, whose grandeur had
declined as the smoky industrial chimneys increased, to the
more spacious and airy suburbs'.
Later, she notes that: 'transport to and from the suburbs
was provided by the Belfast Street Tramways Company'.
What this paper attempts is to consider the sociospatial structure of Belfast for a time between these two
descriptions, in fact to see ho w far the city had progressed
by 1837. This sort of analysis is more difficult for
settlements in Ireland than for those in Great Britain
because the data sources usually employed for such
work there, namely the 19th century Census Enumerators' Books (cf Shaw, 1977 and Lewis, 1979), have not
survived for any Irish urban area (Royle, 1978) except
Navan for 1821 (Connell, 1978). Irish analyses have
usually had to be more reliant on maps and directories.
However, a more comprehensive source does exist in
the urban valuation records. Such sources were used in
Fox's ( 1979) study of Stirling, by Holmes (1973) in his
work on Ramsgate and also by Gordon (1979) in his
study of Edinburgh.
Belfast's 1837 Valuations
Valuations were official surveys made of land and
property as part of a process of raising finance, in effect
a rates system. The First Valuation of Ireland, with
which this paper deals, took place in the 1830s. Its
surviving Field Books have not been widely used by
geographers, though Proudfoot (1989) did make reference to them in his study of estate towns in southeast
Ireland.
For Belfast the Field Books comprise of handwritten
completions of printed pro formas, listing each property, including any outbuildings etc., with their dimensions, together with the occupier's name, the
property's function, and a 'quality letter', a classification
of its quality. The dimensions of each separate structure
were translated into a 'number of measures' figure
which, when multiplied by a 'rate per measure' (a sum
of money which varied according to the 'quality letter')
gave the valuation of each building. The amounts for
the different buildings in each holding were summed to
give the final notional valuation for the property. Occasionally a figure for what the property costed to rent
is given; more rarely the occupation of the occupier
and/or a description of the property is appended. Table
1, a good example of quite a complex property, shows
Belfast 1837
3
how the records are set out. Properties of such poor
quality and low value that they were not subject to taxes
were not listed separately but the number of such
properties omitted was always recorded, together with
a weekly or quarterly estimate of what they cost to rent
and this could be extrapolated to provided an estimate
of a valuation figure, using as a guide other entries
which gave both rental costs and valuation.
For Belfast, the data is arranged by street and bound
into books covering different areas of the town. The
survey was carried out over a number of months in
1837, and a complete cover seems to have survived,
some 37 volumes of information giving information for
almost 9900 individual properties. (The records are
held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
(PRONI), VAL IB 71A-VAL IB 719A).
The one precise piece of information that was
available or could be estimated for each Belfast property was the final valuation, and it is this figure which
forms the basis for the subsequent analysis. Extracts
from the Field Books, including the valuation, were
transcribed and then, since it was neither possible nor
necessary to work at the scale or precision of individual
properties, mean valuations of residential property on
each street were calculated. Institutional, commercial
and industrial property were left out of this analysis.
The mean valuations of each of the 493 streets were
then grouped into five categories; the class intervals
chosen to balance around a substantial middle category,
whilst keeping the interval thresholds at reasonable
round numbers. The five categories of streets were then
mapped (Figure 1). Inevitably, the map's appearance
tends to overemphasize the amount of high value
property for, as will be described below, the major
streets of the town had high valued property thereon,
with many of the poor streets being tiny courts and
alleys crowded together off the main streets, occupying
much smaller areas.
For some towns, the First Valuation records come
complete with a map. This is the case for Ballymacarrett,
Co. Down (now the inner part of east Belfast but in
1837 administratively separate from Belfast, Co. Antrim) though it should be noted that the Ballymacarrett
map (PRONI VAL ID/3/1) and theFieldBooks (PRONI
Table 1 : Transcript of one property on Donegall Square East taken from the Field Book of the First Valuation of Belfast 1837
(PRONIVAL1B/74A)
Name and
Description
Bar 1st
Val Assist
Mrs.Henderson House
House
Return
House
Return
Basement
House
Basement
Return
Basement
Office
2nd
Quality
Letter
Length Breadth Height
Assist
a
a
la
24'0"
19'6"
37'0"
46'8"
2/11
6/16/6
a
a
la
19*6"
19'0"
31'0"
37'0"
2/11
5/7/11
b
b
lb
23'6
9'6"
19'9"
22'3"
l/4 3 / 4
1/11/1
a
a
a
24'0"
19'6"
7'0"
46'8"
8 '/2
1/13/2
b+
b+
b+
19'6"
19'0"
7'0"
37'0"
IX
1/3/10
b-
b-
fa-
23'6"
9'6"
7'0"
22'3"
3 %
6/6
Sundries
5/0
No. of
Measures
Rate per Amount
Measure
£
17/4/0
Yard 28 feet by 9 feet, small enclosed plot in front with basement occupied as flower plot
Sundries wall
Good entrance, Cellar badly lighted
4
VAL IB 721) do not quite coincide, making the map of
less utility than might have been expected. No map
seems to have survived for Belfast itself. It may be that
a master map was never prepared - there are sketch
plans drawn into the Belfast Field Books which may
have been sufficient for the purposes of the valuation
exercise. Occasionally these sketches give an accurate
depiction of an entire street, but they are usually just of
one or a couple of properties and are of little use in
identifying the location of the properties within the
town itself. Maps of Belfast prepared for other purposes for about the same time do exist, however, and it
is possible to build up a fairly accurate and detailed
picture of its pattern of streets for the time of the
Valuation. (Information from the First Valuation has
been incorporated, where appropriate, into the map of
Belfast in the 1830s being prepared for inclusion in the
Belfast fascicle of the Royal Irish Academy's Irish
Historic Towns Atlas (Royle, in preparation)). However,
it must be noted that while the precise location of all of
theseparate streets, especially some of the small courts,
that were listed in the First Valuation cannot now be
traced, the general area of Belfast in which they were
situated is known. At the scale of analysis used here,
which seeks to present an overall picture of the town at
a manageable size, the lack of knowledge of the precise
whereabouts of a few inconsiderable courts is not of
great significance.
Property valuations and Belfast's social geography
For this map to become a tool for the analysis of
Belfast's socio-spatial structure, rather than being simply a description of the pattern of residential valuations
across the city in 1837, a connection has to be established
between the values of the houses and the status of the
individuals/households occupying them. It cannot necessarily just be assumed that the highest status households occupied the largest and highest valued properties, especially in a Irish situation. In nineteenth century
Dublin, for example, some of the largest individual
houses, particularly the Georgian properties to the
north of the city centre, became subdivided into multiply occupied tenements inhabited by separate poor
households living in the different rooms. What was the
position in Belfast in 1837?
In the absence of Census Enumerators' Books, no
definite answer can be given to this question. However,
Royle
what evidence there is does suggest that, although
multiple occupance of dwellings was probably more
common in the 1830s than it became later in the century
when even Belfast's working classes were normally
accomodated in single family houses, the type of shared
households resulting then varied between the social
classes and, what is more, varied between the types of
houses, enabling the valuations to be used fairly confidently as a surrogate of social class.
In the 1830s:'poor labourers poured into Belfast
faster than work could be created for them'. Mulholland
told commissioners enquiring into the state of the poor
in 1833 that "persons will come 60-70 miles to be
employed" ' (Bardon, 1982). Such persons were not
well off and the living arrangements for them might be
exemplified from a contemporary quotation recorded
in McCracken's chapter on early Victorian Belfast:
'Brady's Row lies off Gratten Street and I can assure you that
the aspect and odour of this place will quickly put toflightall
mere sentimental benevolence. Here my companion and
myself fixed upon two houses as specimens of the whole. In
one of these we found that seven persons live and sleep in the
same room- their beds, if such they may be called, lying upon
thefloor.The desolation and wretchedness of this apartmentwithout windows and open in all directions- is utterly impossible to describe' (McCracken, 1967).
An analysis of persons per house in this and all
streets in Belfast for a slightly earlier period is possible
from data given in one of the appendices to Benn's
History of the Town of Belfast of 1823 in which he
recorded the number of houses and male and female
occupants of each street. Brady's Row had 19 houses
and 68 people, and, therefore, a mean of 5.7 persons per
house, (compared to a Belfast mean of 5.2) and large
enough, perhaps, to hint at the presence of lodgers.
Neighbouring courts and rows had even more people
per house, including Miller's Entry at 9.0 and Bairn's
Court at 9.5. These three streets had female:male ratios
of 1.0, 0.8 and 0.8 respectively (the overall Belfast
figure was 1.1), with the excess of males again, perhaps,
indicative of the presence of male lodgers. (The location of these streets is shown on Figure 1, although that
recorded for Miller's Entry is only an educated guess;
this is one of the small, ephemeral courts whose precise
location cannot now be established).
A contrast would be Donegall Square East 'where
the houses are large and handsome, although most
invariably constructed of brick' (Hall and Hall, 1841).
Properties here, such as that in Table 1, had a mean
Belfast 1837
5
km
1 ROSEMARY ST
2 WARING ST
3 BANK LANE
4 CHAPEL LAME
illliliij 1 £ 5 a n d over
IJJ2 £2/10/- -£4/19/11
5 BRADY'S ROW
S BAIRN'S COURT
7 MILLER'S ENTRY
^ 1 3 £1/10/- -£2/9/11
^ 4
£1 - £1/9/11
Ü5
under £1
Figure 1: Mean Valuation of Residential Property per Street in Belfast 1837
6
persons per house figure of 8.8 in 1823, with the
neighbouring Wellington Place having 13.25 (the largest in the town) and Donegall Square North 7.6. These
mean persons per house figure seem too small for many
of these large houses (Table 1 shows the dimensions of
one of them) to have been subdivided, especially not
into single rooms for poor families on the Dublin
model. The Belfast Directory of 1839 confirms this; for
of the 46 separate properties listed for Donegall Square
and Wellington Place, only two medical doctors shared
a house with a person or persons of another surname. It
is true that the persons per household figures seem too
large for the properties just to have contained members
of nuclear families but the extra persons in these cases
were less likely to have been the male lodgers of the
working class areas than female servants, for the female to male ratios were considerably unbalanced at
1.9, 2.3 and 1.7 in Donegall Square East, North and
Wellington Place respectively.
So what data there is suggests that whilst both poor
and rich households might well have been swollen
beyond the nuclear family, those of the poor were
possibly inflated by migrant lodgers squeezing into
their small properties whilst those of the rich in the
town houses were inflated, perhaps, by resident female
domestics. One can have some confidence, therefore,
that the map of mean street valuations for Belfast in
1837 does directly reflect the socio-spatial structure of
the city at that time, with, indeed, the larger and highest
valued properties having been occupied by the richer
and highest status citizens.
The socio-spatial structure of Belfast in 1837
Figure 1 does not show the grand movements of the
later stages of the Victorian industrialising city. The
full commercialisation of the core and the departure of
the mass of the middle classes for the edge of the city
or its Hoy tian high status wedges (Jones, 1960) had not
yet taken place. The Malone high status sector was in
course of development; pockets of housing of high
quality were becoming dotted around the southern
extremities of Belfast- as in Donegall Pass, occupied
largely by military officers, civil servants and gentlemen according to the 1839 directory- but the sector was
not yet fully realised. For example, by 1837 Queen's
College (1849) had not yet been built and the high
status housing that was placed alongside the site in the
Royle
years following was also still for the future. But, with
hindsight, one can see the early stages of the high status
sector that was to develop in south Belfast.
What is clear for 1837 itself, is that Belfast then
demonstrated another example of the early 'mercantile' phase of limited peripheralisation of some of the
middle classes, similar to that identified in Bristol and
Cork. This can be seen by considering the two major
locations of the residences of highest valuation.
Firstly, some were still to be found fronting the
major streets that focused on the old city centre at the
Four Corners (where Waring Street, Bridge Street,
North Street and Rosemary Street met) and on High
Street. This was the major commercial heart of the
town:
'High Street is broad and spacious and reaches upwards from
the river and is terminated by the Northern Bank, a lofty brick
building occupying the further end. Donegall Street, Bridge
Street and Warren Street [sic, presumably Waring Street] are
well built and regular streets in the immediate neighbourhood
of the Commercial Buildings or Exchange' (Hall and Hall,
1841).
For example, of the 186 properties on North Street
in 1837,181 were shops, The directory of 1839 records
no fewer than 41 different trades and crafts represented
there dominated by grocers, publicans, bakers, chandlers and haberdashers- the low order goods of the
1830s. In each case in 1837 the shopkeeper still resided
within the same structure and obviously full commercialisation to the exclusion of residents had not then
taken place. There was little sharing of property. In
1839 only five were shared between businesses and, of
these, three of the second businesses were coach offices, presumably the shopkeeper acting as an agent
and working within his own shop. The actual houses in
this area - i.e. the purely residential properties used in
this analysis - were of high valuation.
Secondly, there was a newer area of very high
valuations to the south near the White Linen Hall
(which had been started in 1784 and was replaced in the
early years of the twentieth century by Belfast City
Hall):
the character of [Belfast's] streets is by no means uniform,
with the commercial quarter differing much from those to the
south in the neighbourhood of College and Donegall Squares
where the houses are large and handsome' (Hall and Hall,
1841).
This area had begun to be built up from the 1790s
and had almost been finished by 1837. Donegall Square
Belfast 1837
East still had building ground left. The early phases of
the development of this area took place during the
lifetime of the First Marquis of Donegall who died in
1799. He was Belfast's landlord and had insisted upon
high standards being imposed upon buildings in this
area. His son, the feckless Second Marquis, was not so
concerned about standards, being more worried about
turning his ownership of Belfast into ready cash to help
meet his immense personal debts (Maguire, 1983,
Roebuck, 1986) by leasing land for building without
imposing controls. As Johnstone (1990) has said in a
restrained fashion 'Georgian Belfast... was overlaid by
Victorian Belfast' with all that implies in terms of
building standards and townscape. However, in 1837,
the year of Queen Victoria's accession, the Donegall
Square area retained its good reputation, with its 'elegant tall brick houses in a Georgian style which
remained popular in Belfast until the 1830s, long after
it had gone out of fashion in Dublin' (Bardon, 1982).
Indeed, 'newly rich industrialists vied with one another
and with the older monied classes in building grand
terrace houses' here (Jones, 1960). Those to the north
of the Square were 'most eligibly situated'; there were
'very good residences' to the east; whilst the Donegall
Square West had 'the best situations in town as private
residences. Very commodious and handsomely fitted
out in every way' (quotes from the Field Books, PRONI
VAL 1B/74A).
Doctors, army officers, architects, professors, J.P.s
and clergymen were amongst those recorded as living
in this area in the Field Books; the 1839 Directory gives
a more complete picture. The 52 different households
recorded in Donegall Square and Wellington Place in
1839 contained professionals such as doctors (6), lawyers (5), clergymen (2), army officers (2), two publishers
and a banker; and businessmen in fields such as linen
and muslin manufacture (5), provisions (2), and haberdashery (1). There were five 'merchants' and three
shipowners. No information was given about the other
households, except for six persons recorded as gentry
or 'Esq.'. The offices, businesses and mills owned by
these people were elsewhere in the city. Unless some
of the doctors or lawyers carried out their calling from
these premises, all these houses were private residences.
Some of the persons in this Donegall Square area
had probably come from the original central high status
area as with theother'mercantile'cities, for'the town's
centre of gravity was shifting southwards to the White
7
Linen Hall' (Bardon, 1982) and 'the air of aristocracy
which had once invested Castle Place was now transferred to this new sector'(Jones, 1960). Confirmation
of this process, both the moving away of the wealthy
and their replacement by traders, comes from a note in
the Field Books about Bank Lane opposite Casile Place
where there were five 'pretty comfortable houses"
valued at over £7 each whose 'size and convenient
situation [had] made them eligible residences for genteel families' before 'the introduction of public houses
and other business people to the street caused such
families [i.e. the genteel ones] to remove. They were let
at one time at £40 p.a. A few years ago they were £28
yearly, now let at £22' (PRONI VAL 1B/77B).
Finally, some of the houses in the newly developing
Cromack Street area were of good quality and 'occasional fine Georgian houses' (Jones, I960) were lo be
found in the grid iron network of streets to the northern
edge of the city, hence some of the high valuations
recorded for the major streets there, but this particular
area, close to the docks and with developing factory and
warehouse employment became a poor part of the
town.
By 1837, the very rich tended to live outside the city
in mansions, with grounds, if not estates, surrounding
them. For example, the Donegall family itself had left
its town house in what became Donegall Place for the
rural wilds of what is now Ormeau Park in east Bellas!
in 1807. A lot of the money gathered by the 2nd
Marquis as he realised much of his holding in Belfast in
1822 (Maguire, 1976) seems to have been spent not on
paying off his debts, but on building agrand Tudor style
house in the midst of this estate. Landed families like
the Donegalls did not need daily access to the city but
the urban middle classes had their jobs there still and
most still lived in or only a few score metres from the
centre of the town.
With regard to the poor, the invaluable Mr and Mrs
Hall (1841) noted that 'the northern districts and the
suburbs of Ballymacarrett on the Down side of the
Lagan are the poorer and meaner parts of the town."
This is something of a simplification; Figure 1 displays
a more complex pattern. One concentration of low
valued, low status properties was in the courts and
alleys of the older parts of the town, especially off the
major thoroughfares such as High Street and Donegall
Street. Perhaps this is the Halls' 'northern district'.
Heatley's (1983) description of the urban poor's loca-
Royle
8
lion at the turn of the century still held true for this area.
People living in these courts, behind the property of
their wealthier neighbours fronting the streets, would
have formed part of the town's unskilled labour force,
there would have been work nearby in the harbour and
in the shipyards- not at that time Harland and Wolff, but
small yards then situated on the west (Antrim) bank of
(he Lagan near the Corporation Docks. Additionally,
there was a growing sector of low value housing to the
west, around Smithfield and Mill Street. Two reasons
may be advanced for this. First, this is the original
Catholic area of the town; the first Catholic Chapel, St
Mary's, was erected in Chapel Lane off Smithfield in
1784, and Catholics tended to be poorer. Secondly, the
western sector of the city was a developing industrial
area with a number of mills and distilleries. These
institutions would have needed a locally resident
workforce in these days before the full development of
intra-urban transportation. There was also some low
value housing off Cromack Street to the south. Cromack
Street lay near the gas works and was also reasonably
accessible via the Long Bridge to Ballymacarrett just
over the Lagan where spectacular industrial growth
was not being matched by new housing provision
( Roy le et al, 1983). Though not mapped in this analysis
of Belfast, the 1837 valuations for Ballymacarrett do
confirm the Halls' observation of the housing in this
area as being of low quality. The 1839 Directory
however, cannot help to bring out the low status locations since such people, as usual, did not feature in its
listing.
Conclusion
Belfast in 1837 was a city on the threshold of its
ma jor industrialisation phase. Its population was growing from the 53,287 recorded in the probably inflated
census returns of 1831 towards the 75,308 recorded in
the better organised 1841 survey; it was developing
rapidly in terms of its textile industry with the cotton
factories giving way to linen- six of the former against
fifteen of the latter; the port was growing and had
become the largest in Ireland in 1835 (Green, 1967).
The development of Harland and Wolff with all that
meant to Belfast was only just overadecade away. But,
it was not then the city with the industrial socio-spatial
distribution as described by Collins (1983) for the late
19th century, though nor had it quite retained Heatley's
( 1983) pre-industrial pattern of a century earlier. It still
had pre-industrial type elements with a residential core
and with wealthy people living along the major streets
in the traditional heart of the city whilst to the west and
southwest along Durham Street and across the river in
Ballymacarrett there were some poor peripheral areas.
However, there is evidence to demonstrate that
Belfast was changing from this pre-industrial position
towards the mercantile city structure phase. It had a
newly built high status area for its growing number of
wealthy citizens to the south of the town around the
White Linen Hall, whilst the central area of the city was
commercialising. The major socio-spatial transformation towards the 'industrial city' structure was undoubtedly still in the future when full industrialisation
occurred and commerce encroached even on the newer
'select residential area of [and near] Donegall Place...
By 1860 only ten of the twenty eight houses in Donegall
Place were still private residences' (McCracken, 1967).
The broad social geographical pattern revealed by
this analysis of 1837 data is not newly discovered.
Reference has been made to contemporary descriptions
and to historical analyses such as the seminal work of
Emrys Jones published over 30 years ago (1960); there
is also Brett's descriptions of Georgian Belfast (1967),
McCracken's chapter on early Victorian Belfast ( 1967)
and Bardon's more recent work (1982). Even today,
some of the late Georgian grandeur of the old White
Linen Hall area can be appreciated from the few surviving formerly residential buildings. This analysis,
then, is largely confirmatory. However, by being able
to build into it a valuation for every residential property
in Belfast in 1837, a more comprehensive and quantitative view of the entire city's socio-spatial structure is
revealed than has been seen before. Further, the paper
has also made the link to the 'mercantile city' phase of
socio-spatial transformation.
Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges with thanks a grant from
the Local Population Studies Research Fund to support
his work on nineteenth century Belfast.
Belfast 1837
9
References
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