Crewe

This study makes an important contribution to the new urban history, describing and analysing one of the best examples of a company town in nineteenth-century Europe. Crewe, the archetypal railway town, was built on a green-field site by a railway company in 1842-3. It was at a major junction, and was an important administrative and manufacturing centre. Thus, Crewe provides an ideal arena in which to study the relationship between company and people and the effects of this claustrophobic association on emerging economic and social structure and politics, in the era of large-scale development and modernization in Europe and America.