City and Region - Urban and Agricultural Rent in England, 1400-1914

As Europe moved from a 'preindustrial' and predominantly rural stage towards an urban-industrial society, improvements in agricultural productivity and more intensive patterns of land use produced upward pressures on rent. However the slow emergence of market relations and the persistence of ancient tenures underlay wide regional and local variations. In fact surprisingly little is known about rent movements over long periods of time, and even less about the growing divergence between rural and urban rents in the centuries before 1914.

City and Region assembles new data for just one part of England, the metropolitan region, for Kent, Essex, and the City of London. We intend to add further material, and hope that other researchers will join with us in providing a more complete picture of this and other regions in Britain.

Our aim is to link historic rental data with the texts and images which form its underlying documentation: details of leases and teneurial arrangements, and maps, building plans, surveys and architectural drawings. So far, we have assembled serial data for the Rochester Bridge and Cobham College estates from 1577-1914. We intend to add other estates in the region, including those of London Bridge and Eton College, and to push our starting-date back to 1400.