Londonderry, a ‘very grand’ and ‘extremely imposing’ city on the west bank of the Foyle, was a thriving port and expanding commercial centre, which had a lively populace and in this period boasted three newspapers, the Chronicle, Journal and Sentinel. J.C. Curwen, Observations on State of Ireland (1818), i. 222-6; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 195-205; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii. 297, 300-2; PP (1831-2), xliii. 99; (1836), xxiv.
Belfast, ‘a sort of metropolis of the north’, as Anne Plumptre observed, was already in the early nineteenth century a byword for economic prosperity and genteel, overwhelmingly Protestant, society.Strangers to that Land ed. A. Hadfield and J. McVeagh, 225-7; Hist. Irish Parl. ii. 168, 169. Its opulence derived from its rapidly expanding linen manufactures, but it also benefited from the production of cotton, yarn, butter, glass and shipbuilding, and it was a busy and profitable seaport. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.
Huntingdon, the birth place of Oliver Cromwell, was separated from the borough of Godmanchester by the River Ouse.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 369-70. It lacked the ‘stir and bustle’ usually associated with a county town, but continued to flourish in this period. William Cobbett† described it as ‘one of those pretty, clean, unstenched, unconfined places that tend to lengthen life and make it happy’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i.
As befitted the long-standing ambiguity of the cultural status of the Irish capital, which was at once both constitutionally and economically dependent and socially and intellectually irrepressible, Dublin after the Union witnessed both the depths of electoral chicanery which marked out its politics as those of a colonial sewer and the heights of inspirational fervour which brought Ireland’s great causes into the heart of the imperial Parliament. T.C.
Armagh, the seat of the primate of Ireland, was dismissed as a ‘mere village’ in one radical source, but was, in fact, in ‘a very improving state’, partly owing to its linen market, which was rebuilt in 1829.Peep at the Commons (1820), 20; PP (1831-2), xliii. 1; (1835), xxviii. 242; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 66-69. In addition to the cathedral and archiepiscopal palace, it boasted a public library and observatory, and, according to Henry David Inglis, was
Tavistock, situated in the Tavey valley 15 miles north of Plymouth, was one of the principal market towns of Devon. It was not entirely agricultural: it had an old tradition of coarse woollen manufacture and was located at the centre of the west Devon copper, tin and manganese mining district, though all these industries were in decline in this period. It was connected by a canal, opened in 1817, to the River Tamar and Plymouth. C.E. Hicks, ‘Tavistock’, Trans. Devon Assoc. lxxix (1947), 155, 159, 165-6; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 251-3 and (1830), 259-60; P.V.
Portarlington, lying on the River Barrow with its left bank in King’s County and its right in Queen’s, had ‘little commerce’ and ‘no extensive manufactures’, the prosperity of its mainly Protestant population being ‘ascribed to its possessing a greater proportion of resident gentry than is generally to be found in towns of its size in Ireland’.
Christchurch, a market town close to the Dorset border, lay at the confluence of the Rivers Avon and Stour, but by the nineteenth century its natural harbour was too shallow to accommodate any but the smallest craft. In 1832 the boundary commissioners recorded that ‘the town presents no symptoms of activity or industry. The houses are of a middling description. The appearance of the inhabitants, who are thinly scattered, gives few indications of prosperity’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 311; (1830), 412-7; PP (1831-2), xxxviii.
Stamford, a large market town on the Great North Road, had recently been ‘very much improved in its buildings and general appearance’. White’s Lincs. Dir. (1826), 181. The representation was dominated by its principal landowner, the Tory 2nd marquess of Exeter, who resided at Burghley House just over the county border in Northamptonshire. He controlled the corporation of 12 aldermen and 24 capital burgesses, one of whom served annually as mayor, acted as the town’s recorder, and owned or leased most of the corporation’s property.
In the words of the 1831 boundary commissioners, Sandwich, situated on the River Stour on the east Kent coast, was ‘a dull, deserted town, with little prospect of improving its decayed condition’; and George Agar Ellis*, a visitor in 1832, described it as ‘a deserted looking town in a swamp’.PP (1831-2), xxxix. 15-16; Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 24 July [1832]. The harbour had long ago silted up, and by the end of the eighteenth century catered only for a limited coastal trade.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 411; H.C. Bentwich, Hist.
