Nearly a quarter of England’s population lives in small rural towns, and between 2001 and 2006 that population grew by 5.3 per cent – over twice as fast as the rate of growth of larger towns and cities.

These are just two facts which stand out from research undertaken by Professor John Shepherd of the Rural Evidence Research Centre at Birkbeck College, working with Action for Market Towns.

The research has developed a classification – or typology – of rural towns from 1,500 to 40,000 people in size. It is a commonplace to speak of the rural/urban divide, but the reality is that small towns have a wide range of different characteristics, problems and opportunities. As a basis for more detailed research on policies from housing to services to economic development, it is important to understand the makeup of the different types of towns in rural England.

So the idea behind Professor Shepherd’s research is to use a range of social and economic indicators to classify England’s rural towns into meaningful categories. Population size alone is not enough: a large town close to a big city may have fewer services than its size suggests, while some small places – particularly if their economy is based on tourism or recreation – may have considerably more.

The research used 48 different measures taken from the 2001 census to group towns into eight main types. These include commuting towns with relatively high levels of professional and managerial workers, towns with high proportions of younger households with families, towns with mainly retired persons and towns in which many households are experiencing various forms of disadvantage and difficulty.

Professor Shepherd explains that choosing eight categories is a compromise between detail – which would produce a larger number of categories as towns were further differentiated – and generality, which is more user-friendly as there are fewer groups to deal with. The typology is not a simplistic categorization of towns and there are shades of difference between towns in the same category – as well as overlapping similarities between towns in different categories.

So what, then, is the use of the typology? It is potentially a more useful tool for social and economic planners who need to understand the subtleties of rural settlement, rather than use typologies based simply on settlement hierarchy. It will be useful for AMT members to identify towns similar to their own and share experience. And it will help to tease out some issues which need drawing to the attention of policymakers locally, regionally and nationally. The typology research is a work in progress – but here are a few policy issues which it has already highlighted:

Scale: In 2001 the total population of rural towns was 11.1 million – more than the populations of Greater London (8.5 million) and the West Midlands conurbation (2.3 million) put together! But do our towns feature as prominently in the political agenda?

Rapid housing growth: The population of rural towns is growing twice as fast as large cities and three-quarters of that growth is being accommodated in new development outside the core of established towns. The research shows that this is particularly marked in two types of towns:

towns characterized as the ‘Young Families, Managerial Jobs’ group found mainly in the Wiltshire – Cambridgeshire belt expanded at nearly twice the rate for all towns, whilst the ‘Singles, Routine Jobs’ group found in the more deeply rural areas of Norfolk, Suffolk, Wiltshire, Cornwall and Devon, also experienced very high rates of outward town expansion.

Challenges: One group of towns includes high proportions of census measures that have been used to identify social and economic challenges of various kinds. These include: routine and low skill occupations, lack of qualifications, unemployment, long term illness, lone parents, lack of a car and the presence of social housing. Mapping the members of this group shows an overwhelming concentration in the former coalfield areas, namely, Notts/Derby, South and West Yorkshire and Northumberland/Durham, although there are other, smaller, geographical clusters of places and individual, isolated towns.

The meaning and implications of the typology for users were discussed in depth at an open meeting organised by AMT in Oakham discussion in April 2009. Details of the Oakham meeting are are at weblink:Typology Event. There the typology met with general approval, including its usefulness as a valid summary of the diversity of small rural towns, the need for a typology of this sort as a basis for benchmarking change, and its value in comparing service levels and for assessing ‘best practice’ activities. There was also general agreement that the typology would benefit from the addition of data on functions and services.

The research is therefore the first stage in understanding the role of smaller rural towns within the settlement system of England, including linkages between smaller towns and larger towns and among the smaller towns themselves.

AMT members can download the full report of Professor Shepherd’s research, with a preface by Chris Wade, AMT Chief Executive, and also see how their towns fit into the typology by going to weblink: Typology Research

Can you help?

AMT needs help is carrying this important research forward. We are looking for groups towns who would be interested in testing the typologies concept in their work. If you would like more information on how to participate, please contact the AMT Policy Office Alison Eardley at: alison.eardley@towns.org.uk

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