This paper brings a range of techniques from space syntax and fractal geometry to the
question of the diachronic description of spatial structures that are usually considered in
purely synchronic terms. Drawing on historical research into the growth of the English
industrial city of Sheffield c.1770-1905 it asks how far the spatial configuration of the city’s
rural hinterland (its ‘parish’) was implicated in the processes of social change and continuity
that unfolded during this period. Time-series data on the development of Sheffield Parish is
provided by the syntactical analysis of detailed historical maps, the routes taken by roadbased
public transport systems and contemporary newspaper reports. The data is interpreted
in the light of Hillier and Iida’s notion of angular, topological and metric “distance concepts”
which are said to represent distinctive ‘modalities of scale’ in the emergence of an urban area
embedded in the historical spatial configuration of its rural hinterland. In traditional urban
geography the growth of cities is conventionally represented as the projection of an
expanding built environment onto a blank surface. The discourse that accompanies this
teleological notion of urbanization is typically one in which the countryside is ‘absorbed’ by
the rapacious city. This language can be misleading, since urban areas whose growth can be
regarded as ‘organic’ - in the sense of arising piecemeal over time - suggests the inadequacy
of conceptualizing the built environment in a single (synchronic) dimension. The evidence
from Sheffield Parish indicates how the differentiation of urban form is constituted both
synchronically and diachronically in the description of spatial elements structured at different
modalities of scale consistent with prevailing patterns of social practice, some of which relate
to innovations in public transportation. The analysis of rural road networks represents a
relatively new area of space syntax research. An historical study of this kind helps to ground
future work by focusing on the emergent properties of space at the urban-rural periphery
without also raising complex methodological questions relating to the application of space
syntax methodology to large-scale contemporary urban regions. Rather, the emphasis is on
drawing together the theoretical and analytical aspects of the Sheffield case study to assert
that if the growing city is legitimately said to have ‘absorbed’ its rural hinterland then it is
equally evident that this process of urban transformation can be also described in terms of the
persistence of pre-urban road networks, historically embedded in local topography
