Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
its chief proponent, the minister of public works, Charles Freycinet, the
program, in addition to the expansion of main lines, included state sub-
sidies to promote the growth of secondary lines designed to serve rural
and agrarian communities.
24
A decade later, in the 1890s, the projected
expansion of “lines of local interest” got under way, and the pace of con-
struction quickened, culminating in the 1920s. Railway accessibility in
the relatively vast territory of rural France lagged, accordingly, behind
Britain, but the gap continued to narrow after 1870. By 1900 villages in
moderately populated cantons (between twenty-five and fifty persons
per square kilometer) were on average within three miles of the nearest
railway station (see figure 1.1b).
Proximity to Railway Stations in Rural Britain
and France: Change over Time and Space
Turning to spatial analysis, first of Britain and then of France, we used
the GIS data on railways and parishes to map the distance from parish
centers to the nearest stations at the end points of three different de-
cades: the 1850s, the 1880s, and the 1900s.
25
As shown in figure 1.2, British
farmers had less reason to complain in the 1880s than before, and by the
first decade of the twentieth century they had even less so, for by then
there were only a few clusters of parishes where the nearest station was
more than three miles away from the parish center - a good deal closer
than the ten-mile isolation point mentioned by Jefferies. In other words,
the majority of parishes in 1900 or earlier fell
within
what one farmer
thought was a maximum distance: beyond three miles from a station,
he remarked, is “agricultural death.”
26
he high degree of accessibility
held in Derbyshire and in the midlands and the south generally. Not
surprisingly, in sparsely populated regions, accessibility was more of a
problem. Around the periphery of the country - in Denbighshire and
Cardiganshire (Wales), the southwestern counties of Dorset, Devon,
and Cornwall, and the northern county of Northumberland - there were
numerous parishes where convenient access to rail stations was in doubt.
And yet, even in Wales and the southwest, such inconvenience as existed
in 1850 had been much reduced by the eve of the Great War.
