The Rise of a Victorian Ironopolis: Middlesbrough and Regional Industrialization by Minoru Yasumoto (review)

It has long been recognised that the sequence of industrialisation and urbanisation witnessed in nineteenth-century Middlesbrough has a significance that extends considerably beyond the town itself and the surrounding area. Given both the rapid pace of its emergence from the 1830s and the fact that this took place on a site lacking any tradition in proto- or handicraft industries, the town encountered in their most extreme form many of the challenges attending urban and industrial growth in the early industrial period. These included the mobilisation of the capital required to fund and sustain industrial expansion, along with the need to attract and retain a sufficient quantity of appropriately skilled labour. Alongside these, rates of urban disamenity, from industrial injuries to infant mortality, were high, calling forth particular institutional responses informed by a creative combination of employer paternalism and working-class self-help. It is an interesting story, whose outline is broadly familiar but which has not received the kind of detailed treatment afforded other areas which centre on the production of textiles and coal.

In this meticulously researched if somewhat narrowly focused and selective study, Minoru Yasumoto charts the rise of W. E. Gladstone’s “infant Hercules” to its mid-Victorian maturity, while also hinting at the premature onset of senescence in later decades (xi). The first chapter contextualises the town’s emergence. Initially envisaged as a site for the transit of coal, its career as an ironopolis was launched with the discovery of bountiful seams of ore in the neighbouring hills. Yasumoto traces the development of structures of town governance through the work of the early proprietors, the owners of the Middlesbrough Estate, and leading employers. Overlapping networks of authority are hinted at here, with recurrent references to figures such as the ironmaster Henry Bolckow, who in addition to his manufacturing commitments, served on the town’s improvement commission, was its first mayor following incorporation in 1853, and was elected its first Member of Parliament in 1868. There is, however, little attempt to elaborate on the emergence of a public sphere in Middlesbrough, until the final chapter, devoted to the development of medical provision within the borough. Here, attention is particularly directed at the foundation and running of the Middlesbrough Cottage Hospital, later the North Ormesby Hospital. The chapter makes much of working-class involvement both in the hospital’s funding, with subscriptions and contributions raised from local workplaces, and administration, through a committee made up of representatives of workers themselves or of working-class savings institutions. It is a characteristic of the book more generally that while structures are outlined in some detail, their importance for a broader understanding of the development of Middlesbrough society and urban Britain more generally is not followed through. The degree to which similar methods were employed elsewhere to provide workers with a form of insurance remains unclear. There are parallels with institutions which developed in another industry with a high propensity for occupational injuries, the coal trade, and these might have been explored with profit. Yasumoto’s reluctance to engage systematically with the literature on the functioning of civil society in early industrial Britain will be a source of regret for many urban historians.

Such themes are, it must be admitted, peripheral to the book’s main concern, which is to trace the development of the industry on which Middlesbrough’s fame was founded. This is pursued through three central chapters, the first of which centres on the forces promoting the consolidation of iron and steel production in the Cleveland area. This, Yasumoto suggests, was not simply a consequence of resource endowments, but was encouraged and sustained by the pooling of technical knowledge through organisations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Cleveland Institution of Engineers, and the Iron and Steel Institute. These formal expressions of the underlying process of industrial agglomeration are competently described, but it is difficult not to conclude...