The nineteenth century saw rapid urbanization and dramatic social change in Great Britain, some of which can now be viewed at national scales for the first time through linkage of georeferenced digital historical data to contemporary and historical framework data. Here, we attempt to georeference every individual address record from the 1881, 1891, and 1901 censuses for Great Britain and to define the fast-growing historical street networks and residential geographies of every urban settlement. We next devise a scale-free historical geodemographic classification using variables common to these three censuses and assign cluster group characteristics to every urban street segment. We also link the evolution of the urban street morphology with changes in residential differentiation and the geodemographic assignments over the twenty-year study period. The results of this intensive data processing make it possible to chart the development of urban residential areas across Great Britain and bring focus to the changing social structures of the cities. We examine these changes with examples drawn from the entire British urban settlement system. Our conclusions discuss the implications of this extensive analysis for improved understanding of the evolution of Great Britain’s urban system.

英国在 19 世纪见证了快速的城市化和剧烈的社会变革，通过将地理参考数字历史数据与当代和历史框架数据联系起来，现在可以首次在全国范围内观察其中的一些变化。在这里，我们尝试对 1881、1891 和 1901 年英国人口普查中的每个单独地址记录进行地理配准，并定义每个城市定居点快速增长的历史街道网络和住宅地理。接下来，我们使用这三个人口普查共有的变量设计了一个无标度的历史地理人口学分类，并为每个城市街道段分配了集群组特征。我们还将城市街道形态的演变与二十年研究期间的住宅分化和地理人口分布的变化联系起来。这种密集数据处理的结果使绘制英国城市住宅区的发展图表成为可能，并将重点放在城市不断变化的社会结构上。我们通过从整个英国城市住区系统中抽取的例子来研究这些变化。我们的结论讨论了这一广泛分析对增进对英国城市系统演变的理解的意义。