Have Britain have fewer but larger conurbations and less sprawl

How do you have Britain industrialise and urbanise in a way that causes there to be a smaller number of conurbations which are denser and more populous? So for example, have all the industry and population of Manchester develop alongside the Scoussers in A Liverpool with an urban population of 4 million rather than 2 million. Do the same elsewhere, so that Leeds and Bradford develop as one, as do Leicester, Nottingham and Derby etc...

Also, have red brick tenemant blocks, rather than Terraced Houses be the norm in the Victorian/edwardian era and have there be fewer new towns in the post-war era and more french style banlieues
 
Ooh! (Transportation and urban activist here.)

So, first, Britain doesn't have that many metro areas relative to its size, at least by comparison with France. Look at how many million+ metro areas Britain has and how many France has. Also... the French banlieus are horrible places.

Second, if you want Britain to have less sprawl, then you need to knock the political causes of sprawl: namely, the garden city movement, which itself came out of the general hatred the urban elites had of the living environment of the urban working class. In the US, this hatred had an ethnic component (WASPs hating on white ethnics), but in Britain, it was purely about class. More fundamentally, because Britain industrialized first, it had a huge city and several big ones before modern advances in public health, and this colored people's perception of cities. Paris urbanized early, too, but was also Hausmannized early; New York urbanized early and had the exact same anti-urban elitism as London.

An earlier socialist movement would have probably done the trick: postwar Labour engaged in a lot of urban renewal, but late-19c socialists focused on higher wages and shorter working hours, and had living conditions on the East End improved earlier, there would have been less impetus to build modernist housing estates.

Alternatively, a less functional government would also have done the trick. In New York, the reason the areas developed by the subway have red-brick apartment buildings and not modernist housing estates or single-family houses is that the city was stuck in fights between the ethnic machine and the WASP reformers, so by the time it managed to get the subway built, there was so much pent-up demand for housing that the new housing was dense, contrary to the reformers' hopes of building single-family houses to properly Americanize all the immigrants. (References: the Historic American Engineering Record.) Conversely, in Sydney, early development of commuter rail is cited as one reason the city has low density: it made it easier for workers to suburbanize early. So your POD could involve the London Underground taking much longer to build, to the point that Metro-land would be much denser.

In the postwar era, you'd want to find reasons for the state to build fewer roads and more trains. Maybe the postwar governments decided to follow Japan's example and invest heavily in public transit while limiting motorization, in order to reduce oil and car imports. It wouldn't give London a Parisian density, but it would extend OTL's Outer London density farther into the suburbs.
 
One drive for suburbanisation in the inter-war and post war period was the bombing/nuclear threat that made low densities more attractive so that's something else that needs to be solved.
 
One drive for suburbanisation in the inter-war and post war period was the bombing/nuclear threat that made low densities more attractive so that's something else that needs to be solved.

In the US, suburbanization in the New York area began in the 1920s: Westchester County attained half its present-day population in 1930 already (for most suburban counties, the half point was in the 1950s or later). This was already low-density suburban sprawl built for cars, of the type that's built today all over. Metro-land was fairly low-density too, even though it was built around the Underground. In both the US and the UK, the social impetus for suburbanization goes back to the 19th century, when social reformers wanted to move the working class away from the cities, believing that this forced assimilation would eliminate all of their social problems.

The postwar nuclear threat was used as an excuse to build more roads and move a few corporate headquarters to the suburbs where the CEOs lived, but the postwar era was actually a period of high-rise construction in American CBDs, continuing into the 1970s. Large-scale job sprawl only began in the 1970s and 80s in the US, after the duck and cover era.
 
Perhaps some reason to cause farm/pasture land to become too valuable to build on. It could be anything - poor economic relations with Argentina would reduce beef imports; less efficient farming methods would reduce crop yields; poorer preserving technologies (canning, refrigeration) would keep land until cultivation instead of development.
 
Perhaps some reason to cause farm/pasture land to become too valuable to build on. It could be anything - poor economic relations with Argentina would reduce beef imports; less efficient farming methods would reduce crop yields; poorer preserving technologies (canning, refrigeration) would keep land until cultivation instead of development.

Problem is if you hold back agriculture the likely effect isn't denser cities, it's just going to be less people. Outside a handful of cases (the Netherlands is all I can think of) Urbanisation doesn't actually take that much land out of cultivation, even the UK which is fairly densely populated and reasonably suburban is only 6.8% so even if you halved the surface area of cities it you wouldn't be adding that much farmland.
 
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