Borough

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.

Jane Austen wrote of Lyme Regis, a small port and market town, that

Built along a narrow peninsula at the centre of Galway Bay, the overwhelmingly Catholic borough of Galway was described in 1818 by John Christian Curwen* as being ‘of great length and crowded with low, mean cabins, which shelter a numerous population, living apparently in great poverty’, and in 1834 by Maria Edgeworth as ‘the dirtiest town I ever saw, and the most desolate and idle-looking’.

Appleby, Westmorland’s assize and county town, was a castellated pocket borough on the River Eden, in the parishes of St. Lawrence and St. Michael, 13 miles south-east of Penrith. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i.

Richmond, a ‘wealthy and substantial’ market town, was situated ‘in the midst of an agricultural district’ known as ‘Richmondshire’, at the entrance to Swaledale in the North Riding of the county, 44 miles north-west of York. It was reported in 1831 that the ‘higher class’ of the population was ‘composed in a great measure of persons ... wishing to live a retired life’; there were ‘no manufactures’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 1049-50; PP (1831-2), xl. 157-8. The borough was coextensive with the parish.

Ipswich was a garrison town and port situated on the Rivers Gipping and Orwell, 12 miles from the North Sea. William Cobbett† described it in 1830 as a ‘fine populous and beautiful place’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 619; W. White, Suff. Dir. (1844), 89. Its shipbuilding industry was then in decline, and legislation for new docks was not enacted until 1837.

Great Grimsby, a seaport with ‘several good streets, the houses of which are well built’, was, according to Oldfield, ‘second to none in the history of corruption’. White’s Lincs. Dir. (1826), 133; Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iv. 155. Political events turned on the rivalry between the Whig Blue party of the Anderson Pelham family of Brocklesby, Barons Yarborough, and the Tory Reds, headed by George Tennyson† of Bayons Manor, Tealby, who had inherited the old interest of the Clayton family.

East Retford, a thriving and genteel market town in the hundred of Bassetlaw, on the border with Yorkshire, boasted hat and sailcloth manufacturing, but had been superseded by Worksop in the barley trade. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 344; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of England (1844), iii. 632; J.S.

Tewkesbury, a ‘very handsome and improving’ market town situated in the Vale of Gloucester, on the eastern bank of the Upper Avon near its confluence with the Severn, had been a major cloth manufacturing centre in the sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century this trade had ‘long since been lost’ and framework stocking knitting was now ‘the chief industry of the town’, employing a quarter of the population in 1830.