The economic ‘ health ’ of market towns a configurational approach to accessibility

This paper describes a first excursion into using spatial configuration to explore the impact of relative accessibility or remoteness on the economic ‘health’ or prosperity of a sample of English provincial market towns. It presents a case study of twelve market towns that are located within two small, distinctive geographical regions of the southeast, Breckland and the Weald, that historically were both inaccessible. Today the Weald has become much more accessible than Breckland, thus bringing changes in relative accessibility over time and geographical distance to the fore. In what follows, relative accessibility will be quantified in terms of the mean integration and mean choice of the built up area of each town, considered both as a physically and spatially discrete entity and when set within the context of an analysed axial map of the whole of the southeast of England (the Greater South East Map) that stretches from East Anglia and the Fens in the north, to Berkshire and Oxfordshire in a westerly direction, including Greater London and the Home Counties and, further south, the coastal counties of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. The first stage has been to describe and represent, in the form of an axial map, the shape and configuration of the urban public realm of each of the twelve towns as it exists today. The next stage was to recover processes of growth and change through an understanding of the cartographic record of each town, after which the analysed axial structure that corresponded to each town was located within the map of the whole of the southeast of England and interrogated visually and numerically at a variety of spatial scales. Configurational measures of accessibility have been correlated with widely available measures of each town’s economic prosperity, such as the extent of the commercial core, the numbers of workers employed in the retail and service sectors, the amount of retail and office floorspace and the rateable value income derived from retail and office premises, in order to shed light on the emergent patterns of accessibility and prosperity that may be indicative of a town’s vitality, viability and health. English market towns Most English market towns are physically discrete settlements in the landscape which have a historic core based around a marketplace and lie at the centre of a transport web that brings people and goods into and out of the town, as well as affording accessible sites for industry and employment. Legally, a market town is a settlement in possession of a town charter granted by the ruler of the day. The charter can normally be precisely dated and is usually linked to rights to hold a market or fair (Hoskins, 1955; Beresford, 1967). Criteria can also be drawn up on the basis of a settlement’s physical features, such as its metric area, population size or residential density, or by the presence of strategic non-residential building types such as fortifications, castles, cathedrals, town halls or a mint, or even from the occurrence of distinctive morphological features such as a planned street layout, market square, long, narrow burgage plots or being the hub of a network of long-distance transport routes (Heighway, 1972). A third approach has been to emphasise socioeconomic relationships, including the existence of an elaborate division of labour based on occupation, the presence of complex religious or judicial organisations or the formation of distinct