The Cambridge Urban History of Britain

Urban Growth in parts of northern England during the three centuries under review was spectacular even by the standards of the first industrial nation. The growth of international trade, and of manufacturing for diverse and distant markets, brought unprecedented and generally accelerating urban expansion to much of the region, while disrupting the rudimentary urban hierarchy which had existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The complex urban networks of 1841 were imposed on a region where towns had been small, unsophisticated and dispersed at the beginning of the period. Liverpool played its part in all the urban networks of the western side of northern England, and beyond, from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, as the commercial heart which pumped goods, services and capital through an economic system which depended increasingly on access to materials and markets on a world stage.