Commons 1820-1832

The market town of Bridport continued to prosper mainly because of its harbour, which lay about a mile to the south, particularly after the passage, sponsored by the Members, of the Bridport Harbour Act of 1823. To the traditional production of rope and fishing-nets were by this period being added the new manufactures of sailcloth and shoe thread, and the port’s commerce consisted of extensive coastal and Newfoundland trades. Western Flying Post, 17 Nov. 1823; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 278; PP (1835), xxiv. 487-8; Procs. Dorset Natural Hist.

Tiverton, a large market town situated near the confluence of the Rivers Exe and Loman, about 13 miles north-east of Exeter, had been ‘the most considerable industrial town in Devon’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, its manufacture of serges and other woollen cloths had gradually declined during the eighteenth and it suffered an economic collapse when export markets in northern Europe were lost as a result of the French wars.

A Lakeland county separated from Scotland by the Solway Firth, Cumberland was noted for having numerous small farmers (statesmen) and few great landowners, its corn, lead and hand-woven cottons, and its coal trade with Ireland. Administratively it was divided into five wards (Cumberland, Eskdale, Leath, Allerdale below and Allerdale above Derwent). The city and county of Carlisle, the county town, shared the assizes with the county’s second parliamentary borough, Cockermouth, which was the usual venue for elections.

The castellated cathedral city and county town of Durham, 14 miles south of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was built on a high rocky outcrop overlooking a bend in the River Wear, and connected by bridges to its suburbs of Elvet and Framwellgate. Gas lighting was introduced in 1823, a new Framwellgate bridge opened in 1828 and the town’s commerce and prosperity were affected by the construction in this period of the Stockton-Darlington railway and a steam packet service to Newcastle. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales, ii. 639-70; VCH Dur. iii.

Dover was a port ‘of considerable consequence’ situated in east Kent, 72 miles from London and 21 from Calais, to where (and Boulogne) there was a daily steam packet service. Dominated by ‘stupendous [white] cliffs’ and its castle, it had docks, warehouses, a custom house and barracks. There was paper manufacturing in the neighbouring villages of Buckland, Charlton and River. Dover’s marine promenade housed a number of medicinal baths for fashionable hypochondriacs. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

A mountainous Lakeland county, Westmorland comprised four wards: Kendal, Lonsdale, East and West - the first two derived from the barony of Westmorland, the last two from that of Appleby. The county and assize town of Appleby, Westmorland’s only parliamentary borough, had been eclipsed in size and local importance by the textile and shoe manufacturing town of Kendal on the River Kent, where enclosure and canal building to improve communications with Lancaster and Preston were in progress and legislation for an improved road network sought.Parl.

The county town of Brecon (Aberhonddu), on the confluence of the Rivers Honddu and Usk, comprised two parishes and a chapelry, whose large church formerly served St. Mary’s priory.Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i. 261, 262. There was little industry, but a canal linked Brecon to the South Wales iron and coalfields and the Bristol Channel, most trades were represented in the town, and it housed the headquarters of Wilkins’s Bank, the supplier of specie for the iron works of Merthyr Tydfil.R.O.

Reading, the only substantial urban centre in Berkshire, was prosperous and expanding. It remained in this period essentially an agricultural market town and hub of trade and communications, though it was a major centre of brewing and had some small scale industry in the form of sailcloth and iron manufacture and silk weaving.PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 29-30; R.C.F. Baily, ‘Parl. Hist. Reading, 1750-1850’ (Reading Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1944), 1-7; N.

Drogheda, a city and county of itself straddling the Boyne about four miles from the sea, had a declining linen industry, and though possessed of ‘good streets and excellent houses’ in ‘its interior’, was surrounded by ‘rows of the most wretched mud cabins’ extending ‘for at least a mile from the town’, which in their ‘filth’ and the ‘ragged appearance of the inmates’ were ‘as miserable a suburb as any in Ireland’.

Colchester, a Roman settlement and the largest urban centre in Essex (but not the county town), lay on the River Colne in the north-east of the county, five miles from the Suffolk border. Its once flourishing cloth making industry had virtually disappeared by the end of the Napoleonic wars, and in this period its economy was largely dependent on the agriculture of the surrounding area. There was some trade through its small port at The Hythe and a lucrative oyster fishery on the river. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 288-9; T. Cromwell, Hist. Colchester, i.