This dataset includes a reconstruction of historical ports and shipping routes in England and Wales, between the c.16th and c.20th. It includes 479 ports and landing locations compiled from primary and secondary sources. It also includes shipping routes aimed to broadly represent historical corridors followed by ships and vessels.Between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries England underwent both massive urbanisation and a radical transformation of the urban hierarchy not paralleled in any other European country. Over the same period the country's transport infrastructure was transformed, by river improvements, by turnpike road construction, by the creation of a canal network, the railways and the advent of steam-powered iron and steel hulled ships. These two developments were closely related to a third, the diffusion of new productive technologies. In this project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the National Science Foundation and the Isaac Newton Trust, we are taking advantage of the new technological possibilities created by Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to combine the massive body of datasets created by the Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 project at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure with a range of new datasets to explore the relationships between improvements in transport infrastructure (navigable rivers, canals, turnpike roads etc), urbanisation, market access, technological change and long-run economic development.

Historical data was gathered from several primary and secondary sources; including scholarly articles, book chapters, historical atlases, early charts, and manuscripts.