In 1862 Middlesbrough was heralded by Gladstone as a ‘remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise…an infant Hercules’. In under a century the town expanded from having been a tiny hamlet with only 25 inhabitants in 1801...
moreIn 1862 Middlesbrough was heralded by Gladstone as a ‘remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise…an infant Hercules’. In under a century the town expanded from having been a tiny hamlet with only 25 inhabitants in 1801 to one exceeding 90,000 by 1901 and approaching 140,000 thirty years later. Central to Middlesbrough’s growth was the establishment of the town’s iron industry, which went on to dictate the economic, political and social development of the town in the ensuing decades, with the town’s ironmasters sitting on the town council, providing the first Member of Parliament and gifting to the town its first public park and urban institutions.
However, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has been seen as a period that heralded a decline in participation by British urban elites in the towns and cities that housed their businesses as they withdrew from leadership in the urban sphere and adopted a more leisurely, gentrified lifestyle. Recent work has however, challenged the extent of this elite withdrawal and it is the intention of this paper to argue the period instead saw a reconfiguration of industrialist engagement with the Victorian Boom Town rather than a decline. Taking Middlesbrough as a case study, it will be shown that through leadership of voluntary organisations, patronage of company-driven initiatives and continued involvement with municipal authorities, the town’s steel magnates played a crucial role in the fabric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century manufacturing town alongside the petite bourgeoisie and working-class organisations that emerged during this period.
