Mixed blessings: The landscapes of industry and commerce in three British cities during the early Industrial Revolution

In the 18th and 19th centuries industrial and commercial expansion recast a rural Britain into an urban society. Resultant towns and cities have often been dismissed as "formless" or "illegible" and largely of the same cloth. Differences illuminated in the landscapes and in the processes of development of three cities examined here refute that notion of uniformity.; Merthyr Tydfil was the quintessential boom town, a small farm village transformed into the industrial and urban capital of Wales by the growth of a modern iron industry. The landscapes that emerge, environments of striking elemental contrasts, exemplified the power of industry to order the physical makeup of cities, and to influence a way of life.; Cardiff was similarly restructured, but by commerce born of industry rather than by the manufacturing process itself. The development of port facilities in the 19th century created a new incarnation of pre-industrial Cardiff, a "Tiger Bay" that would stand alongside the older town. Yet both were shaped by the new expansionist age. Moreover, each was largely the product of a single individual, the Second Marquess of Bute; Cardiff is a most telling example of a city structured by one man. It is also testimony of even the most powerful individual's inability to control completely the headlong spirit of the age.; Bristol, in whose orbit both Merthyr and Cardiff existed, was by contrast already a metropolis at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Its story is one of attempts to adapt well-established physical and social patterns to allow the city to compete with new rivals. Moreover, unlike at Merthyr or Cardiff, Bristol commerce and industry were directed not by a few entrepreneurs, but by unwieldy quasi-civic bodies often more obstructionist than expansionist.; The examination of the three cities reveals the variety inherent in urbanization born of the early Industrial Revolution, and illuminates the significance of industrial and commercial development in the ordering of both physical and social landscapes.