Urban Growth, Urban Problems, and the Census

Abstract

``A town, such as London,'' wrote Friedrich Engels in 1844, ``where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing.'' Engels' puzzlement and fascination with London, this ``heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point,'' was shared by many of his contemporaries, both British and foreign. As a writer for the Quarterly Review said in 1854, London's ``close-packed millions'' was ``the greatest camp of men upon which the sun has ever risen.''