Fringe Belts: A Neglected Aspect of Urban Geography

Fringe Belts: A Neglected Aspect of Urban GeographyAuthor(s): J. W. R. WhitehandSource: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, No. 41 (Jun., 1967), pp. 223-233Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/621338 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 08:34

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.49 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:34:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rgs

http://www.jstor.org/stable/621338?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Fringe Belts: a Neglected Aspect of Urban Geography

J. W. R. WHITEHAND, B.A., PH.D.

(Lecturer in Geography, University of Glasgow) MS. received 17June 1966

THE PRIMARY criteria for the recognition of morphological regions within towns are plan, building types and land use. It is possible to divide an urban area into regions based on one or all of these morphological elements. Morphological regions, whether based on limited or total integrations of morphological elements, are defined in terms of the possession of certain common forms from which they derive a unity distinguishing them from adjoining areas. The recognition of such homogeneous regions has been central in attempts to produce generalizations about the internal structure of urban areas. Stemming from such an approach have come such simple but valuable generalizations as the Concentric Zone and Sector models.l

Heterogeneous regions, on the other hand, such as urban fringe belts, are less easily recognized and have received comparatively little attention. In the case of urban fringe belts this is particularly unfortunate since their recognition provides a genetic rather than a purely descriptive basis for the analysis of towns. They are examples of regions that derive their unity, not from homogeneity of form, but from certain common factors that influenced their original location. Their unity is derived from the fact that their component parts are derived from morphological elements which had their original location near the fringe of the built-up area. During the periods of relative stagnation which punctuate the growth of any urban area certain elements tend to gather on the fringe of the built-up area. Examples of land uses which have generally found their requirements best served by such a peripheral location are playing fields, various types of community buildings, market gardens, nurseries, allotments, cemeteries, country houses and certain types of industry. Factors leading to the location of such land uses near the fringe of the built-up area are space, cheap land, seclusion and little need of accessibility to or from the built-up area as a whole. These peripheral land uses, when later encompassed by the outward growth of the built-up area, tend to survive as a belt, sometimes continuous, separating older from younger development.

The fringe belt is in a sense the corollary of the central business district (the CBD). It is the product of centrifugal forces, while the CBD is the product of centripetal forces. The centripetal forces which produce the CBD have their morphological expression within a relatively restricted area, which tends to remain relatively constant over a long period of time; whereas the centrifugal forces have a morphological expression within an extensive penumbra around the built-up area which is constantly being moved farther out as former fringe areas are overtaken by the growing residential area. The CBD changes its location only slowly in relation to the built-up area as a whole; and its morphology is intelligible, at least in part, in terms of present-day conditions. The fringe belt, on the other hand, unless of very recent development, is not explicable in terms of its present location within the urban area, but must be referred to the edge of the built-up area at a past period of time.

The intricacies of fringe-belt development have been investigated by M. R. G. Conzen,

223



particularly in relation to the town plan.2 Attention here will largely be confined to the place of the fringe belt in the urban land-use pattern, although it is equally important in relation to plan and building types. The scope of the present study is limited very largely to the Tyneside conurbation, although observations of a less systematic kind have been carried out elsewhere. The investigation of the urban land use of Tyneside on which this paper is based is still in progress and much of the detailed investigation of the fringe belts still remains to be carried out. Conzen's work on fringe belts provides the foundation for the present study, and unless otherwise indicated the terminology used is that employed by him in his work on Alnwick and central Newcastle. A multi-nuclear conurbation such as Tyneside has not been investigated before in terms of fringe-belt development and the results obtained so far both confirm and add to existing concepts. The paper is divided into two main parts: first, an investigation of the development of sample fringe belts within the conurbation, giving particular attention to Newcastle; secondly, an attempt to recognize general principles underlying these developments, particularly in respect of the changes which take place in fringe belts after they cease to be at the fringe of the built-up area.

The Development of the Fringe Belts of Tyneside To understand the development of the fringe belts of Tyneside it is essential to envisage

the pattern of discrete settlements out of which the conurbation has grown. In mid-Victorian times the conurbation comprised approximately forty nuclei. The more important of these were on the riverside, having developed on either side of the only bridging point, or in association with transport and with manufacturing industry. The form taken by the expansion of each of these more rapidly growing nuclei has largely determined the present-day pattern of land use in the conurbation. Nine of these nuclei are of especial importance since they are all large enough and sufficiently diversified to have developed a marked internal differentiation in their patterns of land use. These, arranged in decreasing size according to their built-up areas today are Newcastle, Gateshead, South Shields, North Shields, Gosforth, Wallsend, Felling, Jarrow and Hebburn.

The process of fringe-belt development begins at the inception of town growth. Within medieval Newcastle there were already marked indications of certain land uses, notably that by the religious houses, occupying a peripheral location just inside or just outside the town wall. This was the beginning of the process which has produced the present-day inner fringe belt (the IFB) around the CBD. The process by which fringe-belt land uses have attracted kindred uses and have been succeeded on the same plots by those having related locational requirements has been investigated by Conzen in his plan analysis of central Newcastle. Figure I shows in generalized form the present outline of the IFB as far as the land-use pattern is concerned- this differs from a similar map based on the town plan since the latter is slow to reflect land-use changes.

By the mid-Victorian period Newcastle's IFB was encompassed by residential accretions. Subsequent changes have either been internal, involving a succession of different land uses on the same plots, or have involved changes of land use at the boundaries with adjoining regions (either uses conformable with fringe-belt uses taking over the plots of adjoining regions, or vice versa). Even before the IFB was enclosed by the residential expansion of the Victorian period, later fringe belts were forming at much greater distances from the centre. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the building of numerous country houses within

J. W. R. WHITEHAND 224



R z tT1 bd

tT1 Hd v,q

FIGURE i-The fringe belts of Newcastle. Based on the I:63,360 Ordnance Survey Map with the sanction of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office; Crown Copyright reserved.



a few miles of the city. During the Victorian period in particular, various institutions (notably several isolation hospitals and a lunatic asylum), residences standing in their own grounds, cemeteries and waterworks found sites generally within one and a half miles of the built-up area of the time. Where the geology permitted, quarries and brickworks found similar peripheral locations. During the vigorous residential growth of the late-Victorian period some of the less distant plots were swallowed up by the house builder, but the majority sur- vived to form a discontinuous belt of varying width. This belt stretched northward from the riverside in the area of Elswick and Benwell and incorporated the open spaces of the Town Moor and Nun's Moor (surviving fringe-belt features of the medieval period), where the city freemen still preserve their historic grazing rights. In the east the belt followed approximately the line ofJesmond Dene (where the gorge had attracted a number of country houses) down to the Tyne near its confluence with the Ouseburn. The moder representative of this fringe

JESMOND

H EATON

IIl^^ --T

Jsy i For keyseeFigure3

FIGuRE 2-Parts of the middle and outer fringe belts of Newcastle.

belt may be traced on Figure I and is termed the middle fringe belt (the MFB). In Edwardian times there were certain additions to the MFB, but in the east this was also a time of considerable residential growth beyond the MFB in Byker and Heaton. East of Byker and Heaton a third (outer) fringe belt (the OFB) was in process of formation with the arrival of the City Hospital, the Walkergate railway works and the engineering works of C. A. Parsons (this is shown on an enlarged scale at the eastern edge of Figure 2). In the west, a somewhat different development took place. At the end of the Victorian period the MFB consisted of an area approximately a mile wide comprising mainly country houses, detached houses in their own grounds, cemeteries, institutions (including the present General Hospital), quarries and brickworks. These fringe-belt land uses were dispersed among agricultural land. During Edwardian times there was relatively little residential spread from Newcastle but there was vigorous growth northward from the riverside at South Benwell (Fig. 3). This northward growth took place in a narrow belt at the expense of agricultural land, and also absorbed the sites of three country




(INCLUDING ADDITIONS DURING MODIFICATION / PHASE)

PRESENT USE US Eo D,a)0) 0) 0) 00)

Manufcturng9,extractive -i i ; '> J 0 & public utility Industries, s///\----I! !

.. :'': C' storoge & transport I :: TBENWELL

Community buildings

COuntry houses & residences ELSWICK Open spaces

Allotments

Absorbed plots

, yardst 5o -- -

ige b RI VER TYNE

FIGURE 3-Part of the middle fringe belt of Newcastle.

b~ Is '-4



houses and their parks, two quarries and a brickworks. Fringe-belt plots immediately to the east and west were left untouched, so that the MFB was cut in two to give the impression today of two separate fringe belts (although they are in fact contemporary).

During the inter-war period rapid residential expansion, expecially northward into Gosforth and High Heaton and north-westward and westward into Fenham and Scotswood, closed off the MFB. The MFB itself underwent internal changes as institutions, public parks, playing fields and allotments took over the extensive sites of country houses, residences and disused quarries and clay pits. In the east, industries occupied the sites of brickworks in the vicinity of the lower Ouseburn. In the north, on the Town Moor, Nun's Moor and Castle Leazes, changes of use well before the First World War had been considerable on those parts nearest the city centre; and this trend continued in the inter-war period, when playing fields took over considerable areas. Conversion of existing fringe-belt plots to public open spaces was also a feature of the OFB which had started to form east of Byker before the First World War.

In contrast, at the rural-urban fringe it was a period of fairly steady residential growth with relatively little agricultural land taken over as open space. This was not, for the most part, a period of new fringe-belt formation. The OFB east of Byker and Heaton was soon closed off as suburban Newcastle merged with the hitherto separate development of Walker. To the north Gosforth expanded southward to the northern edge of the Town Moor, but to the north-east and to the west and north-west it was largely a period of relatively uniform residential growth broken only occasionally by a school or some other community building.

After the Second World War considerable areas of farmland were acquired for public and private open spaces, schools and decentralized government offices (the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and the Ministry of Agriculture). This started the OFB in the west and extended it northward in the east. By this time, Gosforth, formerly a separate settlement with its own fringe belt,3 was already part of the built-up area of Newcastle, so that after the war land uses seeking peripheral location in this area had to find sites beyond Gosforth. The OFB from High Heaton to North Gosforth and eventually south to Denton is characterized throughout by land uses which have moved close to the fringe of the built-up area in marked contrast to the early plots of the MFB which in many cases originated up to two miles from the edge of the built-up area of the time. The plots of the OFB are larger (including three golf courses) and less built-up, with open space attached to schools and other institutions in contrast to the closely built-up character of corresponding land uses in the MFB.

In the other major nuclei of the conurbation, processes of fringe-belt formation similar to those in Newcastle are evident, although they are almost entirely a late nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon. In Gateshead, the only other substantial nucleus of comparable age to Newcastle, the IFB, which consisted largely of development along the two back lanes behind the High Street, has virtually been erased, largely as a result of the opening up of these back lanes as main thoroughfares, but partly by a policy of clearance and redevelopment as multi-storey flats. The residential area now extends outward from the CBD more or less continuously to the limit of Edwardian housing, where there is a marked fringe belt of similar origin to the MFB in Newcastle. The southern part is similar also in composition, being characterized by public parks and institutions which have acquired the sites of country houses and residences, but it contrasts markedly with the engineering industries and railway installations of the eastern and western parts. The western part has been greatly increased in size by the 3 50 acre Team Valley Industrial Estate started in I936 as a substitute for the declining riverside and coal-mining industries.

228 J. W. R. WHITEHAND



4 . .. ...... ...... ...

.. ....... ... ..

CO ~ ~ ~ ~



ringe belts of Tyneside. Based on the 1:63,360 Ordnance Survey Map with the sanction of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office; Crown Copyright reserved. faciSg p. 228



JO, :" , wP:1n: ·:i,i:'

`~:~ -J* :M

ui 10 ~ iIr ~ ~ r l

~~~~::::" ·~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~* '" rles. --P"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~------

iM P'l. '*; ·rT."I i-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. ......

<WI~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~W

Ii~~~~~~~~~~~~ i ·::::· :~~~~~~~~~~~~~~· i & ; iFOn~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I ,g 5 ` ~i



FIGURE 4-The fringe belts



Outside Newcastle and Gateshead IFB development is, on the whole, slight. Other nuclei are, as towns, comparatively recent growths, lacking the well-defined medieval town limits which are so critical in the formation of continuous IFBs. South Shields possesses a discontinuous IFB. This began to develop in early Victorian times as the market place and main street (King Street) grew in importance and as adjacent agricultural land was taken up by land uses seeking a peripheral location, notably the railway station, warehouses, industries, a library, a school and a nonconformist chapel. However, many of the first buildings behind King Street (like King Street itself) were dwellings; and only later, as King Street developed as a shopping street, did their sites become occupied in a piecemeal fashion by uses seeking a location close to the growing CBD. IFB development in North Shields is by comparison slight, and in other nuclei it is virtually non-existent. This is because such settlements were, until the turn of the century, little more than extensive housing appendages to riverside industries and lacked the functional diversity of fully fledged towns.

Newcastle is thus unique in Tyneside as far as its IFB is concerned. In marked contrast many of the characteristics of Newcastle's MFB are repeated throughout the conurbation, in South Shields, North Shields, Wallsend, Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling. In each case these fringe belts occur beyond the Victorian and Edwardian residential areas and have been designated 'Edwardian fringe belts' in Figure 4. They comprise public parks, cemeteries, allotments, institutions and in most cases an area devoted to industry. Many of these land uses have taken over former fringe-belt plots such as quarries, brickworks, country houses and residences; some have preserved their original fringe-belt use, notably the cemeteries.

These pronounced fringe belts associated with what was the edge of the built-up area in Edwardian times are related in part to changes of attitude towards building densities associated with the garden-city movement. The recognition of the need for open spaces after the First World War probably helped to preserve the fringe-belt plots since these almost always had a low building density. Sometimes the existing use was preserved but more often the plots were converted for such uses as public parks or schools with their playing fields.

With the merging of the several Tyneside nuclei into a single conurbation in inter-war and post-war times, land uses seeking peripheral locations have naturally had to do so with respect to the whole conurbation, rather than to the formerly separate nuclei. It has been seen in the case of Newcastle that a largely modern fringe belt has already been closed off in parts where Newcastle has merged with expansion from an adjoining nucleus. There is no sign of the development of a marked fringe belt at the present edge of the conurbation comparable in any way to the fringe belts which occur at the several Edwardian fringes. A variety of light industries attracted under development area policy have been established near main approach roads, notably along the Whitley Road and in the West Chirton Industrial Estate on the coast road. Roads on the outskirts of the conurbation are associated with the usual land uses which seek such locations, notably garages, nurseries, a caravan salesground, a riding school, golf courses, a highways depot and a corporation rubbish tip. On the whole fringe-belt plots are scattered and already close to the built-up area, and it seems likely that they will be enveloped by residential accretions before any marked fringe belt has a chance to develop.

Principles Underlying Fringe-belt Development Work so far suggests that fringe-belt development can be interpreted in terms of evolu-

tionary stages and their associated processes. It is possible to recognize two main phases of

FRINGE BELTS 229



development. The first phase is that when land at the fringe of the built-up area is taken up for the first time by urban land uses. This phase continues until the growth of the built-up area is such that land under these uses no longer abuts on to rural land: it may be termed the phase of fringe-belt formation. Thereafter further development of the fringe belt by the addition of new plots at the actual fringe of the built-up area is clearly precluded, and changes in the character of the fringe belt can only take place by the modification of existing land uses. This may be termed the phase of modification. Modifications of plots may occur before the fringe belt is sealed off, but most modifications are attendant upon the changes of location that result from the enveloping of the fringe belt by the outward growth of the built-up area.

Fringe-belt Formation The phase of fringe-belt formation is broadly the equivalent of Conzen's fixation and

expansion phases in his work on plan analysis.4 Certain periods have been conducive of fringe- belt formation, and so have certain areal conditions: the two are clearly inter-related. A further factor influencing this phase is the mutual attraction and repulsion of various land uses.

Areal conditions conducive of fringe-belt formation include any obstacle to the normal outward growth of the residential area. This may be a visible limitation, like the medieval town wall in the case of Newcastle's IFB. Such limits were often preserved over many centuries and have a striking influence on the location of fringe belts, as Conzen has shown.5 Towns of post-medieval origin in Britain have usually never experienced such fixed limits to their nuclear areas, and did not develop such continuous IFBs. The role of fixation lines in the formation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fringe belts has not been properly investigated, but certain obvious limitations on urban growth, such as the valleys which break up the site of the Tyneside conurbation, can be located. The eastern limit of the residential accretions of Newcastle was marked for several decades at the end of the nineteenth century by the steep- sided Jesmond Dene. The continuous nature of the fringe belt which developed here can be seen in Figure 2. As has already been noted, the combination of scenery and fringe-belt location was such as to attract a great number of country houses and residences to sites in or near Jesmond Dene. It was not until the inter-war period that the northward spread of Heaton sealed off this part of the fringe belt and terminated the formation phase. South of the Tyne, the ill-drained Team Valley marks the western limit of the residential growth of Gateshead; and in Newcastle the medieval pasture-lands of the city freemen on the Town Moor set an effective limit to residential accretions on the northern side until well into the present century. The role of less obvious limitations to the outward spread of the residential area, such as administrative boundaries and changes of land ownership, requires further investigation.

Periods of time conducive of fringe-belt formation seem to be of national rather than local occurrence, and may even be recognizable in the western world generally. In Tyneside the century preceding the First World War was notable for the scattering of a variety of land uses at distances up to two miles or more from the built-up area. Several causal factors can be adduced here, and some of them are operative in western Europe generally-for example, the introduction of sanitary legislation leading to the dispersion well beyond the town limits of cemeteries and certain types of institutions. On the whole this was a period when a rapidly rising urban population was generating fringe-belt features on a large scale, but at the same time was being housed at exceptionally high densities, with the result that the edge of the residential area was pushing outwards only relatively slowly. The inter-war period with its fashion for bringing the country into the town was influential in converting existing fringe-belt plots into

J. W. R. WHTEHAND 230



recreation grounds and public open spaces, but was not, on the whole, a period of new fringe- belt formation. Renewed fringe-belt formation occurred at the time of the Second World War and has continued to a lesser extent since, but mainly close to the fringe of the built-up area and not, as in the nineteenth century, scattered in a broad zone. A significant factor since the last war has been planning legislation. For example, in new housing estates central sites are reserved for community buildings (such as schools and churches) whereas in former times such late arrivals in the land-use pattern often acquired fringe-belt locations.

From the inception of a fringe belt the mutual attraction or repulsion of certain land uses plays an important part in the internal differentiation of fringe belts. For example, country houses and residences acquired adjacent sites in the vicinity ofJesmond Dene, while industries and warehouses concentrated in a quite separate area lower down the Ouseburn. Some types of fringe-belt land uses, notably certain industries, have certainly been incompatible with the development of middle-class residential areas and are thus likely at times to have delayed the envelopment of fringe belts by the outward spread of housing. Such delays would allow more time for the character of fringe belts to become established.

Fringe-belt Modification Once a fringe belt is within the built-up area rather than on the edge of it, it is subject

at one time or another to most of the forces for change at work in any urban area. The changes that take place naturally depend in a large part on the existing character of the fringe belt. It is striking that fringe belts retain their distinctiveness long after they cease to be at the actual fringe of the built-up area. Although their character inevitably changes, and though they often expand or contract, nevertheless, except in unusual circumstances, they remain distinctive from adjacent areas.

One of the first changes to take place is fringe-belt consolidation. Areas of agricultural land often remain within a fringe belt after it ceases to be at the actual edge of the built-up area, but are often eventually taken over by some use akin to that of the adjoining fringe-belt plots. A knowledge of land ownership often helps to illuminate this process. Cases so far investigated reveal that such residual farmland has often been purchased for potential urban use while actually still at the urban fringe. In north-east Newcastle the Ministry of Public Building and Works acquired approximately Io5 acres of land at the time of the Second World War, nearly half of which is still awaiting urban development as the site of a hospital and a school.

Existing fringe-belt plots, like other parts of an urban area, are subject to a cycle of adaptation and redevelopment which usually involves a change of land use. Such a cycle may have already run its course several times in a medieval IFB, but in the Edwardian fringe belts of Tyneside relatively few plots have actually experienced redevelopment (for example, the acquisition of the sites of brick-clay pits by manufacturing industries near the lower Ouse- burn). Many plots are still in their original use (for example, the residences east of Jesmond Dene) or in a first stage of adaptation (for example the country houses converted to institutions in Jesmond Dene). The adaptation of a plot to a new use naturally reflects a change in the balance of the factors which keep a plot in any given use, but the physical manifestation of this change (for example, the conversion of a country house into an institution) can itself precipitate similar changes in adjoining plots when their changed land value and use value are recognized. The balance of factors from which such changes ultimately stem may be related to social and economic changes, but these are in turn generally related in some way to

Q

FRINGE BELTS 23I



locational changes, notably the fact that as an urban area grows existing plots change their position in relation to the built-up area as a whole. The older the fringe belt, the greater the relative change; and an IFB more often than not finds itself not on the fringe of the built-up area but on that of the modern CBD. Where this occurs land uses seeking location on the periphery of the CBD take over the conveniently placed and often relatively spacious plots of the IFB, which thus becomes part of the CBD Frame-the name given by E. M. Horwood and R. R. Boyce to the belt of mixed land uses which characterizes the periphery of the CBD.6 But it should be stressed that a CBD Frame may develop independently of an IFB. This may be seen, for example, where a moder CBD only occupies a relatively small part of the medieval town (as in Norwich), or in towns of essentially post-medieval origin where only rudimentary IFBs have developed (as in North Shields). Such CBD Frames tend to have a different character from IFBs. This is partly because their antecedents are mainly relatively small house plots in contrast to the frequently large and variously shaped plots of a fringe belt.

A further fringe-belt modification involves changes near the boundaries between fringe belts and adjoining areas. The conversion of plots not associated with fringe belts to uses compatible with them is just one instance of the more general and continuous process of change that is particularly characteristic of boundaries between urban regions. In the case of fringe belts the extension into an adjoining area may be due to the relative decline of existing uses in that area (for example, the decline of CBD functions in the Sandhill area of central Newcastle and the adaptation of offices for storage purposes). On the other hand fringe-belt expansion may be the result rather of pressure on land within the fringe belt: this is evident in the expansion of the institutional section of Newcastle's MFB just south of the General Hos- pital in Benwell, where the adjacent residential accretions are being taken over for institutional

purposes. The opposite of this process, namely the absorption of fringe-belt plots by uses not apparently influenced in their choice of location by the existence of the fringe belt, can also be seen at Benwell: here the demand for residential space in Edwardian times was sufficiently great to drive a wedge of housing into the MFB. In central Newcastle too, fringe-belt absorption is evident where the CBD has pushed northward at the expense of part of the IFB.

Conclusion

Each plot of land within a fringe belt is in detail unique in respect of the factors that have affected its location. The investigation of individual plot histories is thus necessary before any general principles can be substantiated. The present study relies largely on past editions of Ordnance Survey maps which indicate where and approximately when a plot of land was taken over, but give no explanation why. In addition, more precise knowledge of the age of plots and the dates of changes in their use is desirable. For example, an important stage in the development of the Edwardian fringe belts seems to have been just after the First World War. At this time many fringe-belt plots of varied original use were apparently preserved as

open spaces, and certain areas of surviving agricultural land within the built-up area were acquired for a similar use, but to verify this requires more information than is available from successive editions of Ordnance Survey maps.

Usually a distinction can be made between fringe belts on the basis of the age of the

original plots, but in Tyneside this is less easy because of the peculiar circumstances of the

asymmetrical growth of most of the nuclei. There is often a physical separation of fringe belts but even this does not always provide a satisfactory delimitation, and in some cases it is




necessary to make an arbitrary designation of a plot to one fringe belt or another. Owing to cartographic difficulties the fringe belt to which a plot belongs is only indicated in a general way on the map of the whole conurbation and not at all on the other maps. For the same reason it has been necessary to introduce other simplifications: for example, there is no indica- tion whether plots are original fringe-belt plots or products of later modifications.

The fringe-belt concept provides a means of putting order into the otherwise bewildering complexity of urban morphology. Without concepts of this kind the intricacies of urban morphology defy generalization at anything more than a most superficial level. The main contribution of this paper is to offer tentative generalizations as to the factors that may explain the character of fringe belts at some distance from the CBD in an extensive urban area. The more obvious of the many items requiring further investigation are the developments associated with the fusion of a number of urban areas, and the peculiar circumstances of asymmetrical growth such as is imposed in Tyneside by the riverside location of most of the major growth points. Since the Edwardian fringe belts appear to owe their origins in considerable part to influences at work in the country at large, if not in the western world generally, it seems likely that they occur in a great many other towns and conurbations: but this requires verification.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The land-use survey which provided the starting point for this investigation was carried out in March 1965 by students of the Department of Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The author is indebted to colleagues in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne for their help and advice, especially to Professor M. R. G. Conzen, Mr. B. Fullerton and Mr. J. E. Knipe. Publication of the maps was aided by a grant from the Carnegie Trust.

NOTES

1 A summary of these models is given in C. D. HARRIS and E. L. ULLMAN, 'The nature of cities', in H. M. MAYER and C. F. KOHN (eds.), Readings in Urban Geography (Chicago, I959), 282-3.

2 M. R. G. CONZEN, 'Alnwick, Northumberland; a Study in Town-Plan Analysis,' Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr., 27 (I960); 'The plan analysis of an English city centre', Proceedings of the I.G. U. Symposium in Urban Geography, Lunrd I960 (Lund, I962), 383-4I4. The idea of the urban fringe belt (stadtrandzone) was first formulated by H. Louis in 'Die geographische Gliederung von Gross-Berlin', Ldnderkundliche Forschung (Stuttgart, I936), I46-71. 3 All parts of the conurbation which originated as discrete settlements are regarded here as having a separate raison d'etre. In reality, some, such as Gosforth, owe the greater part of their later growth to their function as dormitory settlements on the periphery of the main built-up area of Newcastle. Some settlements, such as Forest Hall, originated entirely as dormitory settlements. Such settlements are themselves partly or entirely fringe-belt features with respect to Newcastle, though sometimes having their own internal fringe belts. The theme of 'the fringe belt within a fringe belt' requires further investigation and more elaborate maps than can be presented here.

4 M. R. G. CONZEN, 'The plan analysis of an English city centre', Proceedings of the I.G.U. Symposium in Urban Geography, Lund I960 (Lund, I962), 406. 5 Ibid.

6 E. M. HORWOOD and R. R. BOYCE. Studies of the Central Business District and Urban Freeway Development (Seattle, 1959), I5-22.

233 FRINGE BELTS



Documents

Fringe Belts: A Neglected Aspect of Urban Geography