Gloucestershire

An old cathedral city situated on the eastern bank of the Severn, Gloucester was said in 1820 to be ‘as pleasant and healthy a place as any in England’. The pin making and wool stapling industries were in serious decline, but this was partially compensated for by the growth of rope making, brush making and tanning. However, the city owed its prosperity chiefly to its position as a distribution centre supplying coal, corn, timber and other imported commodities to the surrounding region and to Birmingham and the West Midlands.

Tewkesbury, a ‘very handsome and improving’ market town situated in the Vale of Gloucester, on the eastern bank of the Upper Avon near its confluence with the Severn, had been a major cloth manufacturing centre in the sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century this trade had ‘long since been lost’ and framework stocking knitting was now ‘the chief industry of the town’, employing a quarter of the population in 1830.

Cirencester, a market town situated ‘on the borders of the Cotswold country’ and ‘intersected by branches of the River ... Churn’, had been a major fortified settlement in Roman times. By the early nineteenth century it had lost its prominent position as a centre of the wool trade, while wool combing and cloth making were in decline and the carpet and edge tool manufactories were soon to be supplanted by those of the West Midlands.

A populous cathedral city and port, situated on the rivers Avon and Frome about eight miles from the Severn, Bristol had been ‘the commercial capital of the West of England’ until the onset of relative economic decline in the late eighteenth century, when it was overtaken by Liverpool. The costly and belated construction of new harbour facilities, completed in 1809, did nothing to reverse this trend, as large vessels still had difficulty in navigating the river connection to the sea.