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Poplulation migration is one of the demographic and social processes which have structured the British economy and society over the last 250 years. It affects individuals, families, communities, places, economic and social structures and governments. This book examines the pattern and process of migration in Britain over the last three centuries. Using late 1990s research and data, the authors have shed light on migrations patterns including internal migration and movement overseas, its impact on social and economic change, and highlights differences by gender, age, family, position, socio-economic status and other variables.

Poplulation migration is one of the demographic and social processes which have structured the British economy and society over the last 250 years. It affects individuals, families, communities, places, economic and social structures and governments. This book examines the pattern and process of migration in Britain over the last three centuries. Using late 1990s research and data, the authors have shed light on migrations patterns including internal migration and movement overseas, its impact on social and economic change, and highlights differences by gender, age, family, position, socio-economic status and other variables.

Oddfellows' lodges in mid-nineteenth-century Lancaster and Preston offer fresh perspectives on affiliated friendly societies. These societies combined fraternal good fellowship with a hierarchical organization which operated on the assumption that members were breadwinners supporting dependants in nuclear family households. Despite the skilled or artisan occupational status of many oddfellows, their domestic economies often relied on more than one wage and complex household structures. Since oddfellows' households also clustered in certain neighbourhoods, social associations established by lodge membership overlapped with local networks. By considering these lodges less as bounded institutional entities and more as focuses for intersecting social networks where mores of respectablity and social identity were worked out, relations of gender and community as well as class, can be brought to bear on a historical appreciation of this topic.

The paper explores the links between changing transport technology, individual mobility and urban form in the British cities of Manchester and Glasgow in the mid-twentieth century. The variability of individual commuting preferences is stressed, and it is argued that decisions about the provision of public transport rarely took into account the views of individual commuters. It is also suggested that factors governing modal choice have remained quite stable from the 1930s to the 1960s.

In the XIXth century the journey to work was one of the main constraints on intra-urban residential mobility. During the XXth century these ties have gradually been weakened as more people have gained access to faster forms of transport, and workers have been able to live further from their places of employment. However, we know relatively little about precisely when and how such changes occurred. This paper uses original quantitative and qualitative life history data to explore changes in the journey to work in Britain during the XXth century, and examine the likely impact of such changes on residential choice. It is demonstrated that whereas mean journey to work distances increased significantly during the twentieth century, the average amount of time spent commuting has changed little. There were notable variations in the structure of the journey to work by gender and location throughout the twentieth century, with women usually utilising slower transport modes, and experiencing greater life-cycle constraints on the journey to work. It is argued that the journey to work is an important and neglected factor that fundamentally influenced residential mobility in cities.

Leaving the parental home for the first time is one of the most significant migration decisions in the life course, but relatively little is known about such events in the past. This article uses high-quality longitudinal data on the lifetime residential history of individuals to investigate changes in the age at leaving home both over time and between different groups of the population. The age at which men and women left the parental home fell from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century, with women usually leaving home earlier than men before the twentieth century. Men were most likely to leave home for employment and women for marriage, and the number of men and women leaving home alone increased over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was quite common for the first move from the parental home to occur with a spouse and children after a period of coresidence with parents. The article sheds new light on an important life course transition and raises questions about the meaning of leaving home.

ABSTRACTThe paper uses unusually rich evidence from a manuscript life history written in 1901 from personal diaries to explore the changing relationship between home and workplace in Victorian London. The life history of Henry Jaques demonstrates the way in which decisions about employment and residence were related both to each other and to stages of the family life course. The uncertainty of work, lack of income to support a growing family, rising aspirations, the constant threat of illness, the ease of moving between rented property, close ties between home and workplace, the stresses produced by home working, and the attractions of suburbanization all interacted to shape the residential and employment history of Jaques and his family. The themes exemplified by this detailed life history were also relevant to many other people. Evidence collected from a large-scale project on lifetime residential histories is used to place the experiences of Henry Jaques in a broader context, and to show how they related to the changing social and economic structure of Victorian London.