Walford, Nigel (2016) Changing household composition and structure in selected local authorities of London and Middlesex during the first decade of the 20th century. In: European Social Science History Conference; 30 Mar - 02 Apr 2016, University of Valencia, Spain. (Unpublished)
Abstract
The digitisation of historical documents continues apace and offers an expanding range of opportunities for detailed investigation of demographic, economic and social patterns of historic living spaces. The wealth of spatial information contained in historic-geographic sources in recent years has enabled such data to be explored with a GIS-framework and has resulted in the creation of national Historical GIS projects. This paper takes a more local focus and is based on data relating to individuals, households and addresses from the 1901 and 1911 British Population Censuses for six local authorities in the historic counties of London and Middlesex. These local government areas were selected for their contrasting trends (growth, stability and decline) in respect of population change during the first decade of the 20th century and for representing both the densely populated centre of London as well as localities that were to become developed as a result of 20th century suburbanisation. Although historical records bring their own problems, they may offer the opportunity to explore questions at the micro-geographical scale that are difficult to address with contemporary data on account of access and confidentiality issues. The research on which this paper is based is seeking to unlock the socio-economic and demographic geography of London in the first decade of the 20th century through micro-scale analysis and to make comparisons with the current situation by aggregating historical data to current spatial units. This paper starts to explore these historical records at the level of households and individuals and outlines the geoprocessing techniques employed to geocode the historical census records, thereby enabling investigation of geographical patterns of household structure and composition.
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