AHC- Greater Bristol

SinghKing

Banned
Well, first, as noted by SinghKing, Liverpool surpassed Bristol before 1800.

Second, it wasn't just Liverpool, but also Manchester and Birmingham. If you want Bristol to be the second city, you need to explain why it's bigger than Manchester and Birmingham, too. 19c Liverpool had more people in the city proper than Manchester and Birmingham, but its metro area was and still is smaller.

Northern England's industrial dominance comes out of geographic factors: it is drier than the rest of UK, which makes it less agriculturally productive, so in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, it specialized in industry (Lancashire) and mining (Yorkshire) instead. The same is true of the West Midlands: Birmingham was located next to iron deposits, which led to early metalwork industries like gun manufacturing, eventually making it a steam engine powerhouse.

So if you want Bristol to remain the second city, you need to somehow shut down both centers of British industrialization.

Now, this is perfectly plausible! Figure out a POD that delays British industrialization. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution started in the Netherlands, which had a 150-year head start on Britain even in OTL. Lancashire remains a backwater, and nobody needs a city on a watershed between three counties. In this setting, it's not hard for Bristol to overtake York and Norwich as it did in OTL - Britain is still going to have a maritime empire, it's just going to be more like the declining Spanish empire.

So, going with this, let's say an unspecified late-17c POD made Britain incapable of wresting control of maritime trade from the Netherlands, and conversely prevented Dutch stagnation. In OTL, even with 18c Dutch stagnation, the Netherlands' GDP per capita income remained higher than Britain's throughout the Industrial Revolution. So if industrialization began in the Low Countries, it happened earlier - let's say 50 years in advance of OTL, to give metalwork time to catch up to allow steam engines. Let's also say Belgium industrializes as early as the Netherlands - either the early-industrializing Netherlands is capable of conquering it (or maybe of splitting it with France along linguistic lines), or Liege expands its industry to compete with the Netherlands.

Around 1750, the *Netherlands has a growing urban economy, with so much population growth that it dumps settlers all over the world, including New Netherlands, which in the 1770s gets to leapfrog British North America to the Midwest using the Erie Canal. In 1780, railroads are developed, starting from Walloon mine-to-port lines and expanding to replace Dutch canals since they're faster and don't freeze in the winter.

By 1800, the less developed monarchies of Britain and France want a piece of the Dutch industrial economy, but aren't really capable of conquering any of it. They hire Dutch engineers to build them their own factories and railroads and steamships, same way OTL's late-20c developing countries hire first-world firms to build factories and architectural megaprojects. Britain is interested in connecting London with the three biggest regional cities: York, Norwich, and Bristol. The London-York line flops because of the locality of travel (read Andrew Odlyzko for much more detail - it's all online). The other two lines succeed, and Britain slowly develops a specialized maritime economy around Bristol, and undergoes urbanization and income growth, although it lags behind the Low Countries. Just as OTL's France didn't have a big change in city size ranking, except specifically that the Occitan-speaking cities went into relative decline in the Vergonha, TTL's Britain has roughly the same city size ranking as in the 18th century.

Well, that's a fair suggestion. Still, I'd prefer to do this without having to pursue a Brit-screw solution- hoping to err toward the other side, and to boost the British economy and population size ITTL compared to IOTL. I've been wondering though, about the importance of the role which could be potentially be played by Edward Parry's discovery of what would IOTL be re-discovered and patented in the USA as Fiberglas (perhaps patented ITTL as Glasswool or Cottonglass?), 99 years earlier ITTL.

It's pretty important to remember which era we were in at the time- the Little Ice Age was still ongoing, and it would take another 20 years or so until temperatures started to rise again. In London, in and around this era, between 1849 and 1860, Victorian newspapers reported that cold snaps were responsible for increasing the average mortality rate by around 25% every annum- as a conservative estimate, which didn't take the unregistered street population into account. And what is Fiberglas most commonly used for IOTL? Housing insulation. If they pioneer the use of the material to insulate housing as the Little Ice Age takes its final and most intense dip in temperature, going into the early 1850s, then South Wales and Bristol will have the warmest homes in the world at the time when it matters most. Just through the benefits of the improved housing insulation alone, over the space of only ten years, they could plausibly reduce mortality rates in the city and its immediate environs to levels which would only be seen at the dawn of the 20th century IOTL. And that could have a huge impact on the population growth of the city.

Bristol was the primary port and transport hub for the West Country, which was an extremely popular tourist destination for people from London and the Midlands once the transport links were in place (becoming known as the 'English Riviera'). Several Victorian resort towns sprang up in this region, and large numbers of holiday homes were constructed in the region, with these wealthy tourists swelling its population every summer, before returning home in the winter. But ITTL, as the first region to feel the benefits of modern housing insulation, the houses in and around Bristol would be the warmest and most comfortable residences in the entirety of Great Britain- during the Little Ice Age, when cold mortality rates were higher than they would ever be again.

Why would those tourists want to return home in the winter, running the very real risk of catching their death of cold every year? ITTL, if they relocate to this region, and take permanent residence there, they can have the best of both worlds- relaxing in their seaside resorts in summer, and living in warmth and comfort unparalleled anywhere else in the United Kingdom (until the innovation of house insulation spreads further afield- by which time, the Little Ice Age will have largely abated anyway) during the harsh winters. And unlike the French Riviera, they'd still be residing in the British Isles, enabling them to continue running their British business affairs from here in the era prior to widespread telecommunication.
 
It's not Britscrew! Having the Industrial Revolution start fifty years earlier is huge, and eventually all of Western Europe would catch up, just as it did in OTL (Britain is very far from the richest European country today).

The first problem with making Bristol a major city based on its mild climate is that mild climate is a consumption amenity, which means it is going to reduce wages rather than increase them, delaying industrialization. In the US, the urban wage premium actually went down in the decades surrounding 1900, because the improvement in urban public health meant that workers were willing to move to the cities even without being offered as high a premium over rural wages as before.

The second problem is that it kind of is Britscrew if you make Britain orient its economy around which cities have the mildest climate, and not which cities are the best-placed for industrial production. It actually benefits economies to be able to abandon city locations that are no longer useful; here's a paper arguing that England expanded faster than France in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era because France maintained a core of Roman cities located based on Roman road networks, whereas England did not and instead oriented its medieval expansion based on medieval sailing technology.

Basically, any world in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham failed to overtake Bristol's population is a world in which metalwork and the garment industries happened in places other than England.
 

SinghKing

Banned
It's not Britscrew! Having the Industrial Revolution start fifty years earlier is huge, and eventually all of Western Europe would catch up, just as it did in OTL (Britain is very far from the richest European country today).

Well, I suppose so. But it also makes it extremely difficult to project the paths and repercussions of all of the butterflies, which could make it a lot harder to plot out a detailed and realistic ATL (which I was kind of hoping to develop for this).

The first problem with making Bristol a major city based on its mild climate is that mild climate is a consumption amenity, which means it is going to reduce wages rather than increase them, delaying industrialization. In the US, the urban wage premium actually went down in the decades surrounding 1900, because the improvement in urban public health meant that workers were willing to move to the cities even without being offered as high a premium over rural wages as before.

The second problem is that it kind of is Britscrew if you make Britain orient its economy around which cities have the mildest climate, and not which cities are the best-placed for industrial production. It actually benefits economies to be able to abandon city locations that are no longer useful; here's a paper arguing that England expanded faster than France in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era because France maintained a core of Roman cities located based on Roman road networks, whereas England did not and instead oriented its medieval expansion based on medieval sailing technology.

Basically, any world in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham failed to overtake Bristol's population is a world in which metalwork and the garment industries happened in places other than England.

But it's not about giving it a milder climate, or even basing Bristol's increased size ITTL upon its milder climate. After all, Climatological and geological PODs are supposedly ASB, aren't they? In fact, you yourself touched upon what I actually was trying to get at in my last post, in that same paragraph;

In the US, the urban wage premium actually went down in the decades surrounding 1900, because the improvement in urban public health meant that workers were willing to move to the cities even without being offered as high a premium over rural wages as before.

If Edward Parry pursues the production of fiberglas (cottonglass seems like a decent, sufficiently British name to go with) patents it as his invention ITTL (99 years ahead of schedule), and commences commercial production; given that he himself noted its potential IOTL as "a splendid non-conductor of heat, and incombustible", then the 'Severnside' region of South Wales and Bristol will be the first to benefit. Given its prevailing use for house insulation IOTL- and the even more pressing need for house insulation in this era, with the Little Ice Age still going strong- it seems nigh-on inconceivable that it wouldn't be used to insulate newly constructed houses in the region ITTL.

And this advancement would provide a massive improvement to urban public health, with evidence indicating that the resulting drop in the mortality rate (which, by my estimates, could equate to a drop of up to 25%) would indeed be analogous to the improvement in urban public health in American cities in the period between 1890 and 1910- eventually across the world, but during the new industry's infancy, for the first ten to twenty years or in which Cottonglass is produced (which happens to coincide with the last ten or twenty years of the Little Ice Age) there would only be a large enough supply of readily available Cottonglass to have a major impact on urban public health locally- in the Severnside region alone. In an era when people were dying of cold in massive numbers, it's not inconceivable that the resulting improvements to urban public health in this region will mean that workers are more willing to move to these cities, even without being offered as high a premium over rural wages as before.

And Bristol is fairly well placed for industrial production- there were large reserves of coal and iron within the city limits itself, with even larger reserves in the general region as a whole (at least on a par with those of Lancashire), and it produced vast quantities of industrial goods IOTL. The coalfields in this region were never as profitable as those in Lancashire, not because of inferior quality or smaller reserves, but because of the costs of running them- with its significantly larger population of desperate immigrants, and the relative impoverishment of the general population IOTL, the mining industry in the North-West had better access to cheaper labour, which made it far more profitable.

But if the improvements to urban public health do result in the workers' increased willingness to move to towns and cities in this region ITTL, without having to be paid as high a premium over rural wages as they needed to entice them IOTL, then it stands to reason that the Bristol, Somerset, Shropshire, Forest of Dean and South Wales Coalfields should become far more profitable ITTL than the Lancashire Coalfield. They'd have levels of urban public health (based on mortality rates anyway) that nowhere IOTL could boast of until the early 1900's; logically, workers should be more willing to move into the coal towns and cities here for lower premiums than anywhere else in the British Isles, and as such, these coalfields should be able to gain access to far cheaper and more abundant labour ITTL, making these coalfields the most profitable of all.
 
But Lancashire wages were actually elevated, due to its production amenities (initially none, but once it specialized in industry, it had a local ecosystem of industrial firms). Southern Lancashire itself was not a mining region, but a manufacturing region. Mining was more of a Northeast thing, which is why the Australian coal-rich city was named after Newcastle and not after Liverpool.

Consumption amenities in Bristol, in this case early insulation, wouldn't actually encourage anyone to build labor-saving devices. Who needs cotton factories when you can just add more workers in cottages? Moreover, both production and consumption amenities tend to increase rents, so consumption amenities end up a wash for producers, who can pay lower wages but also have to pay higher rent; production amenities raise both wage and rents, but by assumption they raise producers' profits just enough to cover the higher expenditures.

Besides, if the issue is just fiberglass, and not the combination of fiberglass and a particular climate, then it can very easily be copied elsewhere, in areas with more of an industry; there's no economies of scale there. Same way that omnibuses were invented in Nantes, but Nantes itself got no first-mover advantage from them, as other cities copied the idea.
 

SinghKing

Banned
But Lancashire wages were actually elevated, due to its production amenities (initially none, but once it specialized in industry, it had a local ecosystem of industrial firms). Southern Lancashire itself was not a mining region, but a manufacturing region. Mining was more of a Northeast thing, which is why the Australian coal-rich city was named after Newcastle and not after Liverpool.

Consumption amenities in Bristol, in this case early insulation, wouldn't actually encourage anyone to build labor-saving devices. Who needs cotton factories when you can just add more workers in cottages? Moreover, both production and consumption amenities tend to increase rents, so consumption amenities end up a wash for producers, who can pay lower wages but also have to pay higher rent; production amenities raise both wage and rents, but by assumption they raise producers' profits just enough to cover the higher expenditures.

So- Consumption and Production. We're talking about the equilibrium model of city crowdedness, aren't we? Where individuals are theorised to derive utility from consumption amenities- traded goods, housing and leisure; and business capital derives utility from production amenities- traded goods and housing, using land, capital, and labour. The level of consumption amenities and production amenities are supposed to be in equilibrium, with each economy needing to offer individuals and business capitalist the same levels of utility and rates of return.

So, what doesn't add up? Bristol was a major manufacturing and engineering centre as well. And that logic is seriously contradictory- consumption amenities won't encourage anyone to build labour-saving devices, because more individuals will derive utility from those consumption amenities, bringing more people into the city (which was kind of the whole point), which means that business capital won't be able to derive utility from the production of the amenities which they provide to the increased numbers of consumers any more? Seriously? So, the production market dwindles away- because the consumption market, which relies upon them to sustain it, gets bigger? Increasing the demand for production amenities- actually destroys any demand for them? I really don't get it...

Besides, if the issue is just fiberglass, and not the combination of fiberglass and a particular climate, then it can very easily be copied elsewhere, in areas with more of an industry; there's no economies of scale there. Same way that omnibuses were invented in Nantes, but Nantes itself got no first-mover advantage from them, as other cities copied the idea.

But at this stage- indeed, throughout its history, to the present day- Bristol's industrial engineering sector was one of the largest and most powerful in Europe (and indeed, in this era, the entire world). If you want areas with more of an industry in the 1840s, with the exclusion of London, you'll be hard placed to find one. And the omnibus isn't a workable analogy- first off, as a transport industry, it was part of the consumption economy, not a part of the production economy (unlike the commercial production of Fiberglas, a synthetic industrial fibre which has to be produced in factories). The first omnibus service was actually invented in North West England, between Liverpool and Manchester, 2 years prior to the development of the service in Nantes. And they weren't patentable- the 'invention' of the omnibus wasn't an invention, it was merely an innovation which provided proof of concept for a new service industry.

I'm not claiming that the innovation won't be copied elsewhere, because it undoubtedly will be. The benefits of housing insulation are too great to ignore, and it'll spread as fast and as far as it can. But Perry still possesses the patents to produce his invention, and his business is based in this region, along with the early industrial factory (factories, soon enough) which produces it. IOTL, Toledo itself undoubtedly did get a first-mover advantage from the Fiberglas industry, because the Owens Corning Corporation help all the patents- other businesses in other cities were legally forbidden from copying the idea.

And a hundred years earlier, during the frigid Little Ice Age (at a point in time when the commercial asbestos industry hadn't even been come into existence yet, and wouldn't do so for another 30 years IOTL), wherever Perry decides to base his business and factories (probably in Newport, which was then the largest town in Wales- but conceivably in Bristol itself, just across the Severn, given that its far larger population and stronger economy would offer a far more lucrative local market and a higher potential for capital investment, along with better transport links) is going to derive a huge first-mover advantage from the industry.

This is still in the 1840s- it'll still take a significant period of time to crank up commercial production enough to generate significant sales of the product further afield, and to get commercial production of the material by other methods (with Parry having patenting his own method, which by his own account seems to have been virtually identical to Russell Games Slayter's method) up and running elsewhere. Ten, maybe even twenty years. And it's in this ten to twenty year window, before the Little Ice Age recedes, that it'll be the most beneficial.

And the benefits aren't limited to home insulation. The first thermoplastic, Parkesine (Celluloid), was invented and patented by Alexander Parkes, at the Elkington Silver Electroplating Works in West Birmingham; literally only two blocks away from Birmingham Snow Hill Station, which then provided a direct service to Bristol. If he sets up his Parkesine Company in Bristol instead ITTL, and realises the potential to remedy its brittle nature by reinforcing it with cottonglass, then you get the Victorian invention of fiberglass as a structural material.

And with the invention and exploitation of synthetic fibres, comes the invention and development of synthetic fabrics and textiles- especially in Victorian-Era Britain, with the coming Cotton Famine spurring higher interest and more intensive development. Unlike every other synthetic fabric created prior to 1894 IOTL- which all utilised cellulose and nitrocellulose- a synthetic fabric derived from cottonglass wouldn't be explosive, or even highly flammable (as all other commercially produced synthetic fabrics were IOTL until the invention of Nylon in 1935). In fact, it'd be extremely flame-retardant, water-resistant and acid-resistant, as well as being significantly cheaper to produce in bulk (as an industrial product, rather than an agricultural one- and one derived from glass, which can be produced far more primitively, easily and cheaply than plastics).
 
Toledo was never a very big city - its metro area is smaller than Bristol's today.

Also, an 1840s POD is far too late for this. In the 1841 census, Bristol was already down to sixth biggest, behind London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. Sheffield was also growing quickly and gaining on it, and would overtake it by the 1861 census.
 
The United Kingdom qualifier makes things tough.
The easiest way to do this would be a bit of a Scotland wank with Liverpool, if not the border of the north, at the least under constant threat.

I suppose it isn't too wacky a scenario to have Britain take the lead in a modern industry, electronics for instance, and for this to be in Bristol, thus dragging it out as the second largest?
 

SinghKing

Banned
Toledo was never a very big city - its metro area is smaller than Bristol's today.

Also, an 1840s POD is far too late for this. In the 1841 census, Bristol was already down to sixth biggest, behind London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. Sheffield was also growing quickly and gaining on it, and would overtake it by the 1861 census.

Wasn't talking about using it as the POD, just about the potential to have this becoming a noteworthy factor later on (using the POD i.r.o. 1800). Because, of course, no single POD is going to be capable of doing this on its own; you need the repercussions of that POD, and the subsequent snowballing of butterflies, spawning more butterfiles, spawning more butterflies (as they logically would in any ATL) over the course of several decades, to bring about the required outcome. After all, if this was a DBWI AHC, and I asked you to come up with an ATL where Manchester becomes the 2nd city of the United Kingdom, how would you go about doing it?

EDIT: And both to illustrate the point, and because it seemed like it'd be kind of interesting, here you go...
 
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I suppose it isn't too wacky a scenario to have Britain take the lead in a modern industry, electronics for instance, and for this to be in Bristol, thus dragging it out as the second largest?

That's possible... but why Bristol? In the US, the growth of Silicon Valley as a location comes from two geographic advantages: cheap hydroelectricity, enabling an early semiconductor industry, and Stanford's encouragement of industrialism among graduates.

Mind you, British Aerospace was headquartered in Hampshire, so it's not toooo much of a stretch to say airplane manufacturing was centered around Bristol in WW2 and that led to a cluster of high-value-added engineering or something. But I don't think it would've made Bristol a second city; in OTL Toulouse has Airbus and it's barely any larger than Bristol.
 

SinghKing

Banned
Reviving this thread with another amusing possibility of how this could be developed...

The United Kingdom qualifier makes things tough.
The easiest way to do this would be a bit of a Scotland wank with Liverpool, if not the border of the north, at the least under constant threat.

I suppose it isn't too wacky a scenario to have Britain take the lead in a modern industry, electronics for instance, and for this to be in Bristol, thus dragging it out as the second largest?

So- what about the film and entertainment industries? That worked out well enough for LA, dragging LA out from nowhere to become the second largest in the USA- why couldn't this work for Bristol in an ATL? More specifically (following on from the originally proposed POD in 1804 or earlier), what if William Haggar's family motto of 'follow the coal' (which almost led to Haggar's ruin IOTL, when the coal strike of 1898 led to the Welsh miners forgoing the luxury of paid entertainment) takes him to the more dominant Bristol metropolitan area instead of South Wales ITTL, with his major motion-picture company setting up production on the English Riveira- and becoming far more successful, without having to endure the crippling setback which it did IOTL?

His film production studio sets a precedent for other budding British filmmakers ITTL, many of whom also move their production out west to set up their own studios in and around the Bristol area; and by managing to get off the starting blocks earlier and build up a slender lead, the British Film Industry survives and thrives as a result; managing to remaining relatively competitive with the American film industry (although obviously being overtaken by it eventually, given the relative size of the market), with Bristol effectively becoming TTL's 'Bollywood', the British equivalent of 'Hollywood'. If this were to happen, how much bigger and more important would the city of Bristol become as a result?
 
In OTL there already is a Bollywood, in India. If anything, you could have a slight geologic POD which makes the Mersey silt up just like the ports of Cheshire did in OTL. Then Liverpool would be more like a modern-day Chester. Please forgive me if I'm wrong, I still need to get acquainted with my British geography, and if I get any support, I'll never walk alone. ;)
 

SinghKing

Banned
In OTL there already is a Bollywood, in India. If anything, you could have a slight geologic POD which makes the Mersey silt up just like the ports of Cheshire did in OTL. Then Liverpool would be more like a modern-day Chester. Please forgive me if I'm wrong, I still need to get acquainted with my British geography, and if I get any support, I'll never walk alone. ;)

I know full well that there's a Bollywood in India- I am Sikh, you know. But ITTL, if Bristol's film industry gets established first and becomes powerful enough early on, then it'll get dibs on the name. Or have an entirely different name which becomes synonymous with the film industry in the same way that Hollywood is IOTL, which I haven't decided on yet. Don't want to give too much away...
 
So- what about the film and entertainment industries? That worked out well enough for LA, dragging LA out from nowhere to become the second largest in the USA- why couldn't this work for Bristol in an ATL?
Didn't aircraft production during WW2 play a significant part in LA's growth too?
Anyway, one reason why LA became the favoured base for film-making in the USA was its sunshine... in which respect Bristol would lose out to places further east, such as Shoreham [in West Sussex] which was a significant centre for the British film industry's early days IOTL and had the added advantage of nearness to London.
 
Mind you, British Aerospace was headquartered in Hampshire, so it's not toooo much of a stretch to say airplane manufacturing was centered around Bristol in WW2 and that led to a cluster of high-value-added engineering or something.
:confused:

Am I misreading this? Are you saying that, seeing as in OTL, BAe was in Hampshire (and still is, although they do have offices elsewhere, including Bristol), then the British Aerospace industry could have taken root in Bristol instead? To some extent, with Rolls-Royce at Filton, and Bristol. If you can somehow get the RAE set up around Filton, instead of Farnborough, then the aerospace industry might consolidate around the mouth of the Severn, but I doubt that's going to see the area overtake Brum, Manchester and Liverpool...
 
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