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The 19th century - a period of rapid growth for Itchen Ferry and Woolston. From the 1820's onward, steam driven paddle ships, good
roads and fast stage coaches established Southampton as a major port in
the South. By the 1830's the volume of goods being handled, and the
numbers of passengers using the port were such that the Town Quay and
West Quays were inadequate to deal with them. The Royal Pier and the
Old Docks were built to ease the situation. Hundreds of workers flocked
to the town, attracted by the promise of work for all. They built the
docks (owned by the railways) and the warehouses. Later they were joined by hundreds more who came to build the railways. The workers had to be housed , so after each influx there was a building boom. The Woolston railway houses still stand on Victoria rd between Swift Rd & Weston Grove Rd in Woolston
In time, the population spilled over on to the Eastern side of
the river, into Woolston and Itchen. Another major change as a result of the growth in
population was the coming of the Floating Bridge. which began to operate in 1836.
There was a further influx of people in the 1870s, mainly from the North of England and Scotland, when Oswald and Mordaunt's, later Thornycroft's, was established on the bank of the river. Thus there was a significant rise in the population of the parish of St Mary Extra, throughout the nineteenth century , with the period of greatest expansion being from 1875 to 1880 with the establishment of the Woolston shipyard[Census Survey 1871-1901] In 1871 the population of woolston was fewer than 1500. by 1881 Oswald Mordaunt alone employed 1200 men in his shipyard, and the area poulation had risen to 3,158 the population then grew only slowly to 1901 when the census return shows a poulation of 3,823. The The 20th Century The 1911 census has the poulation as 5,450. Employment levels continued to rise and in 1931, 6500 men worked in the shipyards on either side of the river Itchen. Families were drawn from all over the country to work at Thorneycroft`s shipyard or the Supermarine aircraft works. There was even a proposal to extend Southampton`s docks down the east side of the river Itchen, but they were never built. See also THE SHIPYARD SUPERMARINE FLOATING BRIDGE
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