This article examines three social surveys carried out in English provincial towns after Seebohm Rowntree's study of York and before A. L. Bowley's sample surveys of five towns. The authors emphasized specific local circumstances and suggested local voluntary and municipal remedies for the social problems they described. Their focus was on the community, and although informed by the discourses of 'national efficiency' that also lay behind Rowntree's researches, the solutions to the problems of juvenile life and casual labour that compromised national efficiency were to be found in local endeavour. Poverty was viewed in the context of its impact on the community rather than on the individual
