This was the confident prediction of the editor of the Devon Weekly Times in August 1869 on the occasion of the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Exeter. These week-long ‘parliaments of science’ as they became popularly known, were inaugurated in York in 1831 and continued to be held in a different provincial town or city each year. They attracted the foremost scientists of the day along with the rank and file of local scientific societies, gentry patrons and leading figures from the provincial towns and cities in which they were held, to attend lectures and discussions on the latest advancements, new technologies and discoveries in all fields of science. For the British Association, the annual meeting was the major event of the year, and for the public at large it became an established feature of the late summer and early autumn calendar in Victorian Britain.

The Exeter meeting in 1869 was not the first time that Britain's leading scientific congress had been held in the south-west: it visited Bristol in 1836 and Plymouth in 1841. But historians of the British Association have viewed the Plymouth meeting in particular as a one-off, a concession to ‘geographical remoteness’ before the BAAS resumed its normal round of visits to the large industrial and commercial centres of England.Footnote ² To secure a return visit 28 years later was a coup for the city of Exeter. In the mid-Victorian period it was a fiercely contested and highly prized honour to be chosen to host the week-long mass scientific congress of the BAAS. Prolonged campaigns of lobbying between rival venues were the norm, and even large industrial centres like Leeds and Manchester found themselves having to submit repeated invitations over successive years before finally securing a meeting.Footnote ³ A considerable financial burden had to be shouldered by the host town or city to ensure that standards of hospitality and accommodation for the visiting scientists lived up to expectations. The bar had been set high since the 1830s when cities like Dublin laid on lavish dining and entertainment for delegates.Footnote ⁴ In Exeter, estimates of the monies needed to receive the Association ‘in a manner that will reflect credit upon the city and the western counties’ varied from £2,500 to £4,500, all of which had to be raised through public subscription. The BAAS had to be satisfied that its members would receive a fitting level of accommodation and hospitality. Exeter's local organizing committee compiled a list of 121 hotel beds in the town itself, along with a further 178 in neighbouring Dawlish, Teignmouth and Torquay and a choice of private lodgings.Footnote ⁵ In addition, they had to undertake to address ‘the want of a public room large enough to accommodate the two thousand persons which it is expected will meet to hear the President's inaugural address’.Footnote ⁶

In order to understand why cities like Exeter were willing to go to such lengths to host congresses of science in the mid-Victorian period,Footnote ⁷ it is necessary to view these events from an urban history perspective. In the many excellent studies of the activities of the BAAS, written by, or for, historians of science, this perspective has not been extensively explored.Footnote ⁸ It is evident from the pages of institutional histories of the major knowledge organizations of the nineteenth century that the roaming annual meeting was conceived as a tool for spreading knowledge and enlightenment to all parts of the country, and that the growing provincial towns of the mid-nineteenth century, with their public halls and lecture rooms and their burgeoning populations, provided the ready made venues and audiences for the latest scientific ideas and debates.Footnote ⁹ But the question of how, specifically, towns and cities hoped to benefit from the hosting of a high-profile scientific meeting requires an analysis centred on the receiving town rather than on the visiting association. It is surprising, given the growing influence of the spatial or geographical ‘turn’ in science history that towns have not attracted more analysis as locations for science.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, research has focused on more specific places – the laboratory, museum, lecture theatre or botanic garden – or, in an attempt to escape the ‘local’, on larger units of scientific endeavour such as the region.Footnote ¹¹ Where town-centred studies have been attempted, it has been shown that towns and cities viewed the hosting of ‘parliaments of science’ partly as a means of generating revenue for the local businesses which catered for the influx of visitors, but also as a device for advancing social, cultural and civic life.Footnote ¹² This study will examine the British Association's visit to Exeter in 1869 in the wider context of urbanization in the south-west of England in the mid-Victorian period.Footnote ¹³ The focus is not on the scientific business of the meeting but rather on its implications for urban and civic life in Exeter before, during and after the visit. In particular, the effect of the event on Exeter's standing as a regional capital is examined, especially in relation to the growth of Plymouth. It will be shown that, from the point of view of urban leaders in Exeter, the BAAS meeting was about much more than just knowledge promotion in the city and its vicinity. In fact the week-long scientific festival was used as a tool with which to advance the reputation and status of the town at a time when its traditional standing as a county and regional centre was perceived to be under threat.

The wider claim of this study is that the scientific meeting should be seen, along with other activities like civic ceremonies, new building inaugurations, royal visits and the like, as part of the repertoire of activities by which Britain's provincial towns sought to enhance their public image and distinguish themselves from neighbouring centres.Footnote ¹⁴ Connections between the scientific and the civic have been made in scholarly studies of particular regions and institutions,Footnote ¹⁵ and recent research on promotional activity in towns has highlighted the importance of ‘cultural capital’ as a signifier of local pride, but the hosting of ‘parliaments of science’ has not been extensively researched in this context.Footnote ¹⁶ In the years between the mid-1830s and the mid-1880s especially, when public interest in the provincial scientific congress was at its height, the impact of these meetings on patterns of urbanization deserves consideration. By this period, significant shifts in the hierarchy of British towns and cities had seen many older market and county centres reshaped and redefined by changing transport infrastructures, industrial development and population growth.Footnote ¹⁷ Amidst the uncertainty which accompanied this change, the hosting of high-profile annual meetings was a means of putting down a powerful marker to signal the continuing or renewed importance of a town in relation to its neighbours and its wider region.

When the British Association began its annual visitations to the provinces in the 1830s, it seemed that Bristol might become the venue of choice for scientific congresses in the south-west. The Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science had been in operation since 1823 and boasted a wide geographical membership. When it hosted only the sixth annual BAAS meeting in 1836 the assembly rooms, guildhall, theatre, merchants’ hall, medical school and library were taken over as meeting rooms for the various sections.Footnote ¹⁸ The event drew in participants from across the region. An autograph book containing the signatures of some 200 of the delegates in attendance includes a sprinkling of representation from the major towns of the south-west, including Exeter, Plymouth, Taunton, Truro and Penzance.Footnote ¹⁹ But Bristol's scientific institutions, like its commercial life, looked conservative and dependent upon established interest groups, compared to the more dynamic brands of scientific culture developing in the newer industrial towns.Footnote ²⁰ Membership of the Bristol Institution went into steady decline as, elsewhere in the region, new scientific societies were established which were more representative of the interests of upwardly mobile social groups in trade, industry and the professions.Footnote ²¹ The two urban centres of Plymouth and Exeter acted as a focus for much institutional activity in Devon and Cornwall, but Exeter retained a reputation in some quarters for conservatism and tradition in its cultural life. In the words of one contemporary scientist, it was ‘distinctly a literary centre, although the atmosphere of a cathedral city was not then altogether favourable, it was supposed, to scientific investigation’.Footnote ²² Like many larger, industrial towns, it had a Scientific and Literary Institution dating from the mid-1840s which organized classes, lecture series and reading facilities for its members.Footnote ²³ At about the same time, the Exeter printer William Roberts began producing Pantheon, ‘a monthly magazine of literature, science and art’. But these sorts of initiatives did not greatly distinguish mid-nineteenth-century Exeter from other towns in the south-west. In Plymouth, publication of the Plymouth Literary Magazine or Devon and Cornwall Scientific Repository dated from 1814 and the town had, in the Athenaeum, a building dedicated to science, literature and the arts. Torquay was another lively Devonian scientific centre with its own Natural History Society, founded in 1844, and an inspirational figurehead in the person of William Pengelly, the distinguished geologist and archaeologist.Footnote ²⁴ Elsewhere in the county, the Teign Naturalists’ Field Club was active from 1858 and, in Cornwall, the interests of natural history enthusiasts were catered for by a number of associations including the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society, founded in 1839.Footnote ²⁵ But perhaps the most obvious sign of the scientific ambitions in the south-west of England was the formation, in 1862, of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science (DAAS). The DAAS seems to have served two important functions in the scientific life of the region. One was to provide an over-arching organization to which enthusiasts from throughout Devon and neighbouring areas could belong, and the second was to win favour with its namesake. Its founder members, including William Pengelly, used the DAAS to try to draw the eye of the British Association towards the south-west, claiming that ‘Few counties had showed so high an appreciation of the Association having established a humble imitation of it.’Footnote ²⁶

This strength in depth of scientific and cultural life in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century was significant. Any town harbouring an ambition to host the annual meetings of the leading knowledge organizations of the day would have made little headway if its motivations were purely utilitarian. Strong scientific credentials had to underpin any successful application to the British Association and, by the late 1860s, the south-west had built up considerable momentum in scientific and cultural development. But despite this, the towns of the region were not high on the list of potential meeting venues for the BAAS and its fellow peripatetic associations in the Victorian period. Although, by the mid-1860s, railway connections linking Exeter and Plymouth with the wider rail network were in place, there was still a perception, in some quarters at least, that the urban centres of the south-west were inaccessible.Footnote ²⁷ In the light of this, it was all the more remarkable that the BAAS had decided to go to Plymouth in 1841, before the arrival of the railway, when delegates had to make the journey by coach or ship.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, the 1841 meeting was an acknowledgment of Plymouth's growing presence as an urban centre in the south-west of England. Thanks to its position at the western entrance to the Bristol Channel, its role as a Cornish headport and its growing importance as a naval port, Plymouth grew and prospered during the years of conflict with France and the Netherlands when other towns were suffering from disruptions to trade.Footnote ²⁹ Its demographic growth was based on the coalescing of the three neighbouring settlements of Plymouth, Devonport and East Stonehouse into one urban conurbation.Footnote ³⁰ Its townscape was also harmonized in the early decades of the nineteenth century as architect John Foulston built new streets, crescents and public buildings including a Grecian town hall in Devonport.Footnote ³¹ The decision to establish a naval dockyard in Plymouth in 1690 had long-term repercussions for employment patterns with the armed services accounting for some 11,000–12,000 workers in the ‘Three Towns’ in the second half of the nineteenth century. The dockyard was also an important employer of civilian labour in shipbuilding and other trades and elsewhere in the town, the building industry and the expansion of the retail sector gave employment to large numbers of immigrant workers from the surrounding counties and further afield.Footnote ³² Successful municipal improvement projects, underway since the late 1850s, had created a culture of activism in Plymouth's urban life, as the town's leaders took the initiative to widen, straighten and repave streets, and to provide its citizens with water and sewage disposal services worthy of an important modern town. By 1841, the combined population of Plymouth and Devonport was 70,000 making it one of the largest provincial centres of population in the country, and dwarfing Exeter which had grown to only 37,000 by the same year.Footnote ³³

There was evidence, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of a growing awareness in Exeter of Plymouth's rise and the possible threat this posed in the long term to Exeter's county town status. Exeter's traditional wealth and prominence had been built on its functions as a regional entrepôt and centre for the shipment of woollen cloth to customers in Europe.Footnote ³⁴ It enjoyed a long-standing position as an administrative and diocesan capital and the ‘undisputed centre of Devon county government and society’Footnote ³⁵ but, compared to Plymouth, its economic and civic life in the mid-nineteenth century was stagnant. There were no great monuments to civic pride constructed in this period and there were no economic developments similar to those that transformed levels of wealth and prosperity elsewhere in provincial England. Exeter was still ‘a cathedral city with a rural environment’.Footnote ³⁶ The dominant figures in its public life were Bishop Henry Phillpotts,Footnote ³⁷ an arch-conservative who presided over an enormous diocese spanning Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and Sir Stafford Northcote, Conservative MP for North Devon and member of an ancient county landowning family.Footnote ³⁸ The sense of a place being left behind by faster-paced urban developments elsewhere was palpable. Any lingering doubts that this was the case were removed in 1864 when Exeter was overlooked in favour of Plymouth by the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) as the venue for its annual show the following year. Despite having staged a successful show in 1850, and sending Northcote as part of a powerful delegation to present an invitation to the Society, Exeter was defeated by 24 votes to 10 by a strong Plymouth bid led by Lord St Germans.Footnote ³⁹ The result was that Plymouth played host to some 88,000 visitors, including the prince and princess of Wales, and was the centre of attention during the week-long festival of agricultural science in July 1865.Footnote ⁴⁰

The uneasy feeling of being eclipsed by its larger neighbour meant, according to the historian of Victorian Exeter, that the overwhelming mood ‘was not one of civic pride but of doubt and self-criticism. Exeter was being seen for what it was, a survivor from a declining society’.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, it seems likely that the experience of losing out to Plymouth over the Agricultural Society show in 1865 must have hardened the resolve of Exeter's worthies to reassert themselves in a different arena. The following year, they dispatched an influential group of representatives to Nottingham to present an invitation to the BAAS. This initiative was part of a determined campaign by the city's leaders in the 1860s and early 1870s to reclaim and redirect some of the town's lost impetus in urban life, but self-doubt was evident even as they got underway. The case for hosting a British Association meeting at Exeter was presented almost defensively. Members of the Exeter delegation argued that, ‘Though its manufactures had decayed, the town was historically interesting and was surrounded by beautiful scenery.’Footnote ⁴² It did not pretend to be a thriving commercial centre, but traded on the geological attractions of its hinterland, and also its geographical advantages as a kind of gateway to the south-west. This link with the wider region was important. In particular, the attractions of the landscape and flora of the south-west for natural history enthusiasts was an important trump card,Footnote ⁴³ but in order to play it effectively Exeter had to present itself as an effective base from which the whole area could be explored. In support of this last point, the Exeter delegates claimed that they had the wider backing of Devon as the best venue the county had to offer. One of their number, the silversmith, jeweller and prominent townsman, Henry Ellis, stated that ‘The Natural History Society of Torquay had passed a resolution that it considered Exeter as the most convenient place in Devonshire for the meeting.’Footnote ⁴⁴ A rival delegation from Plymouth, however, also appeared before the British Association council that year to bid for the right to host a BAAS meeting. Its members were not about to concede the geographical point. In fact, they extended it, claiming that although they did not wish ‘to appear in antagonism to any other place in the South West of England’, Plymouth was the town which best ‘represented both Devonshire and Cornwall, being on the borders of the latter county’.Footnote ⁴⁵

That the decision went in favour of Exeter for the 1869 meeting may in part have been due to the determination of the BAAS to visit untried places in the late 1860s. A number of other towns were first-time hosts in this period, including Nottingham and Dundee. It also owed much to the role of influential individuals in promoting Exeter as a venue for scientific and intellectual life. Stafford Northcote had helped found the Exeter School of Art in 1854 which operated successful evening classes,Footnote ⁴⁶ and the MP Sir John Bowring, native of Exeter and renowned writer and translator,Footnote ⁴⁷ had travelled to Nottingham as part of the Exeter delegation. The willingness of such powerful figures from gentry and political life to join with local government representatives such as Henry Ellis, indicated the unity of purpose in the city and its environs behind the British Association initiative. In contrast, the Plymouth campaign appeared muted and less purposeful. No major figures from the military or from landed society attended with the delegation,Footnote ⁴⁸ and it may have been that 1866 was just too soon after the RASE visit for Plymouth dignitaries to contemplate another bidding campaign for British Association honours. Whatever the precise combination of factors which led to the selection of Exeter for the 1869 BAAS meeting, the decision had a galvanizing effect on the town. It put the promotion of knowledge and learning at the heart of a new agenda of urban development and, crucially, laid the foundations for a redefinition of Exeter's role in the wider region as a knowledge centre serving the south-west. This was evident even before the meeting commenced, as can be illustrated with reference to three key developments in cultural life and local government in the 1860s.

The first is the debate over the establishment of a free library in Exeter. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 allowed town councils, with the endorsement of a majority of voters, to levy a rate of one penny in the pound to fund the establishment of a library which would be open and free to all comers. Deliberations over the adoption of the Act took place in the towns and cities of provincial Britain and, where there was vocal liberal support behind free libraries as an improvement measure which would benefit the greater public good, the legislation was quickly implemented. In Manchester, for example, the radical Unitarians took up the cause and succeeded in securing early adoption of the Act in 1851.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the same year, local ratepayers in Exeter opposed the adoption of the Public Libraries Act. As in many other towns, resistance to increases in rates were voiced and opponents of the scheme argued that those who wished to use such a facility should be the ones to foot the bill. The coming of the British Association, however, brought a renewed opportunity to float the idea. At a public meeting in May 1869, on the eve of the British Association visit, supporters of the free library legislation in Exeter argued that it had taken on even greater importance in the context of the forthcoming BAAS meeting. Sir John Bowring noted that, ‘Ere long we shall have an influx of philosophers and of knowledge. I hope that Exonians will on this occasion show that they are moving with this movement.’Footnote ⁵⁰ The decision to implement the Act was carried by a majority of four to one.

The second example of the galvanizing effect of the BAAS visit on urban life in Exeter was its role in hastening to completion the initiative to fund a museum in the city. A subscription to raise the necessary funds for an Albert Memorial Museum had been underway since shortly after the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, but had struggled to raise the necessary money despite the best efforts of Henry Ellis and other activists. However, with the plans for the hosting of the British Association meeting nearing completion in 1868, the Albert Memorial's promoters took a risk and opened the building, albeit unfinished and in debt, in the belief that the momentum of the BAAS visit would generate the final monies needed to complete it. Their gamble paid off. Work continued and in May 1869 one local newspaper report noted that ‘It is satisfactory to see the scaffolding removed from the south wing of the Albert Memorial Museum.’Footnote ⁵¹ By the time of the commencement of the BAAS meeting on 18 August, the Museum was capable of hosting the general committee and the meetings of the Chemical Science section.Footnote ⁵² Ellis formally inaugurated the building during the BAAS meeting, while the eyes of the wider region and the scientific fraternity were trained on Exeter. In doing so he proclaimed that, along with the town's new Free Library and School of Art, Exeter was now equipped to become ‘the grand county centre of art and science’.Footnote ⁵³

The third illustration of the marked ‘British Association effect’ on urban life in Exeter concerned Ellis himself and, more particularly, his position in the municipal life of the town. Henry Ellis, locally proclaimed ‘man of science’, who was instrumental in bringing the British Association to Exeter and central to so many of the urban initiatives in the town in the 1860s, was fast-tracked into mayoral office for the crucial period of 1868–69. Elected an alderman on 7 November 1868 and declared mayor just two days later,Footnote ⁵⁴ the Tory Ellis was not welcomed at first by the town's Liberal press, but even they were won round as he steered Exeter through the preparation and delivery of a successful scientific congress. The practice of electing a scientific man to the mayoral office for the year of the British Association visit was by no means unique to Exeter. The actions of the local council and aldermen may well have been influenced by the lead of Newcastle-upon-Tyne where, in 1863, Isaac Lowthian Bell, FRS, held the mayoral office and presided over the programme of meetings and discussion in one of the sections, attracting the notice and praise of the visiting BAAS scientists. In Exeter, as in Newcastle six years earlier, the ability to field a ‘scientific’ mayor signalled ‘an identity of interest between the scientific community and the management of the town’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Even before the commencement of the meeting, then, there was evidence of the stimulus that a British Association visit could bring to urban life. Once the congress was underway, the Devon Weekly Times, the Exeter-based Liberal newspaper, which reported extensively on the 1869 meeting, played its part in the process of sustaining this momentum. Its editorial a week before the meeting set an optimistic tone, predicting that ‘Exeter will be en fete next week. The visit of the “wise men”, which has been looked forward to for a considerable time, is at hand and the meeting of the British Association in the capital of the West is anticipated with much interest.’Footnote ⁵⁶ As previous BAAS meetings had demonstrated, the occasion provided an opportunity to showcase the best assets of the town. Newcastle-upon-Tyne favourably impressed visiting BAAS scientists in 1838 when a number of Richard Grainger's newly completed buildings were fitted out for evening gatherings.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Manchester in 1842, the membership ticket issued for the BAAS meeting bore the image of one of the town's most venerated scientific worthies, John Dalton.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Exeter, use was made of the full range of public buildings, with lectures, sectional meetings and evening events held in the Albert Memorial Museum, the Grammar School, the Temperance Hall, the newly completed Victoria Hall and the Royal Public Rooms. In addition, the local organizing committee encouraged visitors to acquaint themselves with other noteworthy buildings and places of interest with access granted to the cathedral, the chapter house, guildhall, college hall, Devon and Exeter hospital, the gaol, the Devon and Exeter Institution and the West of England Deaf and Dumb Institution.Footnote ⁵⁹ There was also scope for place promotion in the sectional meetings, where indicators of local achievement could be woven in to the scientific business. Sir Stafford Northcote's opening address to the Economic Science and Statistics Section set the tone. He pointed out that ‘each county had lessons of its own to teach as well as to learn’ and went on to present comparative data for Lancashire and Devonshire on a number of key social indicators such as literacy rates. His assertion that 82.7 per cent of Devonian bridegrooms could sign their own name compared with only 78.6 per cent of their Lancashire counterparts was greeted with cheering.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other sections, papers dealing with the scientific interests to be found in the locality and wider region were to the fore and in general the meeting provided an opportunity to advertise the scientific wealth not just of the host town but of the county as a whole. In the Geology Section, for example, a talk by Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen on ‘The Devonian Group, considered geologically and geographically’ was followed by a paper by George Wareing Ormerod on Dartmoor granite.Footnote ⁶¹ The programme of excursions on offer included the site of archaeological excavations at Torquay as well as Plymouth's naval dockyards and to Gittisham Hill near Honiton to view the ‘pre-historic archaeology of the district’.Footnote ⁶²

The local press played its part in milking maximum advantage from the meeting. The editors of the Devon Weekly Times, when the meeting was in full swing, described Exeter as the ‘metropolis of the West’ and found much to be proud of in the town's response to the scientific meeting. Favourable comparisons were drawn with the other towns and cities where similar events had also featured on the British Association's annual meeting programme. The evening lecture for the working classes was hailed as a particular success with an attendance of over 2,000 which, the editors pointed out, exceeded the equivalent turn-out the previous year at Norwich: ‘with a population more than double that of Exeter, only 800 persons attended to hear Professor Huxley's popular lecture. Never before has any lecture of the British Association gatherings been so successful, either in point of attendance or in the deep interest taken in the subjects.’Footnote ⁶³ With tickets issued to a total of 1,856 members and associates, a figure which, as the mayor pointed out, put Exeter only a ‘very little short of the number issued at the meeting at the great and scientific town of Birmingham’,Footnote ⁶⁴ there were good grounds for satisfaction. Intellectually, the business of the meeting also compared well with that of recent congresses. The Devon Weekly Times’ London correspondent considered that ‘a very large share of attention from the London press’ was being directed to the BAAS meeting at Exeter, and that ‘the papers read at the sectional meetings have come quite up to the mark of those discussed at previous gatherings’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Interest was fuelled by the entry of a number of local clerics into debates over Darwinian theory, which produced some forthright defences by the scientific dignitaries assembled in the city and captured the attention of the newspaper editors well beyond the south-west.Footnote ⁶⁶

Even allowing for the over-exuberance of some of these accounts, it seems that the 1869 British Association visit did give a genuine boost to Exeter's sense of importance and bring a renewed determination to resist any encroachments on its functions as a county town. This can be seen by tracing its rivalry with Plymouth in the years following the BAAS visit. If anything, the competition between the two centres intensified over the next decade, as the larger south coast town continued to threaten Exeter's status as regional capital. Its most ambitious move in this direction was the borrowing of £30,000 in 1870 to fund a project to build a new guildhall and municipal offices.Footnote ⁶⁷ This initiative was particularly ominous from the vantage point of Exeter, because the new guildhall complex included law courts and a new central police station,Footnote ⁶⁸ and provided the basis for a memorial to the Judicature Commission in favour of the removal of the county assizes to Plymouth.Footnote ⁶⁹ This was perhaps the most direct challenge that had yet been posed to Exeter's county town status and it prompted an instant reaction in Exeter town council which set up a committee to resist the move.Footnote ⁷⁰ A counter memorial was prepared, pointing out that ‘Exeter is the centre of a system of railways in connection with all parts of the county of Devon, no part of which is more than fifty-two miles distant, whereas Plymouth is at the south west extremity of the county, and 100 miles from the northern and eastern boundaries.’ After reading the memorial, the mayor warned that

The mayor's words were heeded and, by 1876, facilities were in place to hold a new Winter Assize for the counties of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset in Exeter.Footnote ⁷² But the rhetoric revealed a measure of the concern that rankled in older provincial centres over issues of status and, in this context, the attractiveness of using cultural congresses as a vehicle for competing with and asserting superiority over neighbouring centres can be appreciated. Although larger, faster-growing urban centres were keen to host ‘parliaments of science’ too, for them the incentives were a little different. Plymouth, as already noted, was successful in attracting national organizations despite losing out to Exeter for the British Association visit in 1869. It hosted the 1872 congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, which also staged lavish week-long annual meetings in the mid-Victorian period, and it eventually welcomed back the BAAS in 1877. But for Plymouth, these events were about capitalizing on the existing attributes of the town, more than they were about redefining urban functions or reasserting lost status. In 1841, the Grecian town hall in Devonport was used as the main venue for the visiting British Association scientists and the naval dockyard was the focus of much attention during the week, with the launch of a new warship, The Hindostan, providing one of the evening events.Footnote ⁷³ The Social Science congress in 1872 was used as an opportunity to demonstrate the unity of Plymouth and Devonport with the two corporations sharing the hospitality duties and thereby providing double the usual level of municipal patronage to the visiting dignitaries.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1877, meanwhile, the recently opened new guildhall was used as the venue for ‘a large and brilliant assemblage . . . to hear the President deliver his inaugural address’,Footnote ⁷⁵ and an exhibition of art was organized by the Plymouth Art Club to showcase the work of local artists and to exhibit works donated by local collectors.Footnote ⁷⁶

The response in Exeter to the events in Plymouth showed no signs of the fear or defensiveness of earlier decades. Instead, with its own successes as a host town still fresh in the memory, and its status as a legal centre recently reasserted, events on the south coast could be viewed with an air of detached criticism. The Exeter press largely chose to ignore the Social Science congress in Plymouth in 1872. The Devon Weekly Times, reporting on the president, Lord Napier's, opening address, regretted that ‘we have not the space this week to follow him’,Footnote ⁷⁷ and the Exeter Flying Post wrote rather dismissively of the gathering as ‘a mere debating society’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1877, coverage of the Plymouth BAAS visit in the Devon Weekly Times dwelled on the part played by Exeter Corporation in hosting a luncheon for one of the excursion parties, and quoted rather smugly a ‘Central News’ telegram stating that ‘the British Association Meeting at Plymouth is a comparative failure, only about 1,000 tickets having been taken’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Exeter, meanwhile, had moved on to newer initiatives. The town's Albert Memorial Museum, which housed the Schools of Art and Science, was taken over by the city in 1870. Attendance levels at the School of Art were buoyed by initiatives such as the free library, the new museum and the British Association visit. In 1886, when the Albert Memorial committee decided to apply to Cambridge for a course of university extension lectures, the ambition of the town to improve the quality and reach of its adult education classes was confirmed and the pace of change quickened with the establishment of the Exeter Technical and University Extension College in 1893.Footnote ⁸⁰ In 1900, it was renamed the Royal Albert Memorial College, but became known to the general public as the University College Exeter and eventually gained university college status in 1922 as the University College of the South-West of England.Footnote ⁸¹ The pattern of development here mirrored that of the emergence of other civic colleges and provincial universities from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many of which evolved from the foundations laid in earlier decades by the establishment of local institutions of science, art and literature.Footnote ⁸²

The 1869 British Association visit played an important part in enabling Exeter's emergence from the choppy waters of the mid-Victorian period, when it seemed set to be eclipsed in the urban hierarchy of the south-west by the rise of Plymouth, to become a centre of sufficient cultural and educational standing to support a university college. The 1869 meeting helped to define this new trajectory of urban development by bringing added momentum to the cultural and educational initiatives already underway in the city and giving urban leaders a reason to value and promote science and culture. In a place which had not experienced significant industrial transformation or demographic growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, the impact of this was magnified. With few alternative initiatives or rival plans for urban advancement, it was possible for gentry, political and urban leaders to unite under the banner of science and learning and to direct their energies towards promoting this single cause. As a result, Exeter arguably had more to gain from its role as host to a ‘parliament of science’ than was the case in larger industrial and commercial centres and the success of the week-long scientific meeting in August 1869 evidently filtered a new sense of confidence into other areas of urban life.

The significance of this small regional case-study as a pointer to wider questions about the role of science in urban life in the mid- to late Victorian period is to remind us of the importance of cultural activity as a tool of civic advancement. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the badge of honour of any ambitious town to support a thriving ‘Lit. and Phil.’ society. Later in the nineteenth century, towns derived much cultural capital from the opening of libraries, museums, reading rooms and other local institutions dedicated to promoting knowledge. But the role of the mid-Victorian scientific congress as a driver of urbanization is also an important part of the picture which needs to be considered in this context. At the interface between histories of urbanization and histories of science, it is possible to explore what we might call a ‘parliaments of science effect’ which had the capacity to impact on the fortunes of individual towns and cities. A scientific meeting on its own could not regenerate a declining town, but the Exeter case suggests that it could provide a rejuvenating stimulus and give urban leaders the confidence and ambition to pursue further status-enhancing initiatives. Such outcomes may not have been anticipated by the scientists who looked for suitable locations in which to meet and debate each year, but they were fully appreciated by the urban leaders who bid so enthusiastically to bring learned congresses to their towns.

Although the focus of this article is fixed firmly on the urban rather than the scientific, it has a contribution to make to debates on the spatial dimension in science history. The various spaces within towns where scientific business was conducted – the public halls, lecture rooms, museums and the like – provide one level from which to view Victorian scientific space, but the BAAS and the other major knowledge organizations of the day also dealt at the level of the town. The requirements of their annual meetings tested the resources and capacity of towns to provide overnight accommodation, visitor attractions and reception areas as well as lecture and discussion space and, at the same time, they provided towns with an opportunity to rise to the challenge and put their best architectural, cultural and civic assets on show. But if the geography of science, and especially of scientific meetings, in nineteenth-century Britain, cannot be fully understood without some consideration of this town-based dimension, then neither can the urban rivalries and status-enhancing activities of nineteenth-century towns be properly appreciated without an analysis of science, and in particular of the scientific meeting. The scientific dimension in urban and civic life in the mid-Victorian era is crucial to understanding patterns of inter-town rivalry, especially in towns where claims to regional importance could not be based on commercial or demographic strength. Exeter continued to occupy an important place in the urban hierarchy of the south-west in these circumstances, at least in part because of the success of the 1869 BAAS meeting. That such rewards could be reaped by host towns explains much about why, in its heyday, the scientific congress was such a desirable prize.