Truro: Cornwall’s ‘county’ town

Truro is now Cornwall’s premier town, leading the way in the transformation of Cornwall into a ‘home county’ by the sea. Its residents might prefer to call it a city though, courtesy of the cathedral built there in the 1880s after an Anglican diocese was restored to Cornwall. A population of just under 19,000 in 2011, up from 13,000 before the Second World War, is set to double by 2040 as housing unstoppably sprawls into the surrounding fields and woodlands. While this growth rate is by no means exceptional in post-modern Cornwall – Helston and Bodmin for example can look forward to similar – Truro has also since the 1970s consolidated its position as Cornwall’s main shopping centre.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it made its claim to pre-eminence through providing the financial, legal and other support services for the mines of west Cornwall. This, plus a strategic location on travel routes to places such as St Austell, Camborne-Redruth and Falmouth, which were actually growing faster in terms of population, produced a higher than usual middle-class and professional sector. This process was sealed by the siting of the new Cornwall County Council at Truro in 1889, adding to the townsfolk’s pretensions to grandeur.

Truro had therefore in the 1800s become a main centre of attraction for migrants within Cornwall. Young women as well as the educated classes were attracted to the town to go into service, while craftsmen and shopkeepers were more likely to find a demand for their skills. But where did the denizens of Truro itself go?

As we can see, the migration pattern of the Truro-born cohort in the Victorian Lives database was little different from the rest of west Cornwall. Truro was only part of the registration district, the town being greatly outnumbered by the mining districts to its west and north. Therefore, the small difference between it and the other RDs is not unexpected.

However, although the absolute numbers, at below 40, are too low to draw any hard and fast conclusions, the data on those born in the town do suggest that the Truro-born were more likely to stay in the town or move to other regions within the British Isles, this being especially the case for men.