INDICES OF HOUSE‐BUILDING IN THE MANCHESTER CONURBATION, SOUTH WALES, AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1851‐1913
| Author | J. Parry Lewis |
| Published date | 01 June 1961 |
| Date | 01 June 1961 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1961.tb00157.x |
INDICES
OF
HOUSE-BUILDING
IN
THE
MANCHESTER
CONURBATION, SOUTH WALES, AND GREAT BRITAIN,
WEBER’S
building index’ was based
on
data collected for
a
varying
number
of
large towns, ranging from two in
1851,
to six by
1856
and to
34
by
1900.
The towns were drawn from all over Great Britain and
their inclusion was due simply to the existence
of
statistics rather than
to any consideration
of
representativeness.
Hamish Richards and
I
subsequently produced an index for house-
building in the South Wales Coalfield2 and showed that the fluctua-
tions
of this index differed appreciably from those
of
Weber’s index.
This paper presents another example of a regional index, based on
data collected for the Manchester conurbation.
Dr.
S.
B. Saul has kindly given me data for a large number of other
towns, mostly for the period
1890-1913.
These have been incorporated,
along with the South Wales and Manchester data, in a new version of
Weber’s index.
1851-1913
SGuth
Wales
A
full list
of
the towns included in this index appears in the original
paper by Richards and myself. Almost all of the statistics are of
houses planned rather than built. To make subsequent combination
of these data with those of other areas possible it has been assumed,
on the basis
of
what information exists, that
85
per cent.
of
the houses
planned were actually built, and
a
lag
of
six months has been intro-
duced.
The actual index has been derived
as
follows. First an index for
two towns covering the period
1852-1913
was derived, based on
1901-10
=loo.
Then an index for four towns, consisting
of
the previous two
plus two others, was computed for
1856-1913,
based on activity in
these towns during
1901-10.
In
1856
the value of
the
two-town index
was
73.1
while the value
of
the four-town index was
81.6.
To
obtain
a single index for the period from
1852
based
on
the maximum amount
of
data these
two
indices were spliced by multiplying the first three
B.
Weber,
‘A
New Index
of
Residential Construction and Long Cycles in
House-building
in
Great Britain, 1838-1950,’
Scottish
Journul
of
Political
Economy,
Vol.
11,
pp.
104-32.
J.
Hamish Richards and
J.
Parry Lewis,
‘
House-building
in
the South
Wales Coalfield, 1851-1913.’
The
Munchester School, Vol. XXIV,
1956.
148
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