Camborne functioned through most of its history as a local church town, a hamlet sized settlement serving farming settlements scattered through the parish. By the seventeenth century the town had become a service and market town, acquiring formal market and fair rights as late as 1708. This increase in commercial activity was connected with local tin streaming and shallow tin mining, first recorded here from the 1400s, and adit mining first recorded by the sixteenth century. It was the early eighteenth century development of the local copper mines and the subsequent eighteenth and nineteenth-century industrialisation of tin and copper mining that transformed the surrounding area into Cornwall’s principal industrial centre and set the town on a new development trajectory. During the nineteenth century Camborne became Cornwall’s most industrialised town, expanding rapidly to house both the ever expanding workforce and the associated industrial processes, such as the internationally important Holman drill works. With this expansion the town was quickly urbanised, becoming a rival to the earlier established town of Redruth. The numerous impressive late nineteenth century civic, religious and commercial buildings are testimony to the success of this period. However, with the decline in Cornish mining the economic success of the town weakened. The CompAir Holman works has recently closed, although another engineering firm is reusing part of the site.

Downloads:
The downloads offered below represent the different elements of the CSUS Camborne Report including the core text, seven illustrative figures and five character area summaries. The majority of the downloads are large files (to maintain some quality of image resolution) and therefore may take time to download.