Lewis (1965): Building Cycles and Britain's Growth

Summary

Building Cycles and Britain's Growth (Macmillan, 1965, 384 pp.) is a study by British economic historian J. Parry Lewis tracing the history of building activity and its relationship to broader economic growth in Britain from roughly 1700 to 1950.[1] Like Homer Hoyt's One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago for the United States, it functions in the Georgist land-cycle literature as a long-run, empirical, national data source documenting that British construction and property activity did not grow smoothly but moved through recurring booms and slumps over more than two centuries.[1][2]

The practitioner-author Fred Harrison's Boom Bust draws directly on Lewis's data, citing Table 5.1 of the book (p.74) for an average cycle duration of 17.4 years across the building cycles Lewis identifies — figures Harrison uses as UK corroboration for the same roughly-18-year periodicity that Hoyt's Chicago data documents for the US.[2] Secondary summaries describe the cycle as tracing back at least to the early 1700s, with reported cycle lengths in the literature ranging narrowly around 17–21 years.[3]

This page draws on secondary summaries, a book-listing record, and the peer-reviewed reception record (Cairncross's 1967 Economic Journal review and Barras's 2009 synthesis, cited below) rather than on Lewis's primary text, whose digitized copies are under controlled-digital-lending or search-only restrictions. The exact peak/trough dates, the precise definition of "building cycle" Lewis uses, and his own stated conclusions about periodicity should accordingly be treated as second-hand — the 17.4-year average in particular is Harrison's reading of Lewis's Table 5.1 rather than a figure checked against the original.

Three independent full-text indexes of the book — Google Books' search-within-book index and two separately digitized HathiTrust library scans (University of Michigan copies, items mdp.39015007186649 and mdp.39015030457421) — each report exactly one occurrence of the string "17.4" in the scanned text, and the two HathiTrust scans place it at printed page 314. That corroborates the figure's presence in Lewis's book and gives it a location, but not its context: these indexes are search-only and display no snippet, so whether p. 314 states the 17.4-year average as Lewis's own summary figure (p. 314 falls late in the book, where a recap table is plausible) or in some other role is unknown. The page number is not in tension with Harrison, whose "Table 5.1, p. 74" citation locates his own table in Boom Bust, not a page of Lewis. Barras's 2009 synthesis contains no "17.4" anywhere and quotes Lewis only for methodology (its preface quotes Lewis 1965, p. 1, on the building cycle presenting "a problem of method as well as of theory").

Relation to the Georgist Case

Lewis's book, like Hoyt's, is a historical-empirical source for the premise that construction and land markets exhibit a recurring cyclical rhythm — it does not itself argue for land value taxation or test an LVT counterfactual. Its evidentiary role on this wiki is to extend the land-cycle claim beyond the single American city (Chicago) that Hoyt studied to a second, independent national dataset (Britain, 1700–1950), which Harrison then uses to argue the pattern is not a Chicago-specific artifact.[2] As with Hoyt, readers should not treat Lewis's data as evidence that an LVT would dampen the cycle it documents — only as evidence that the cycle itself is a real, recurring, long-run historical pattern in more than one country.

Nuances and Limits

• Pre-econometric methodology. As with Hoyt's contemporaneous Chicago work, Lewis's 1965 study reflects mid-twentieth-century economic-history practice — descriptive statistics and narrative periodization — rather than modern time-series econometrics.
• Secondary sourcing. The specific figures cited here (17.4-year average, Table 5.1) come from Harrison's Boom Bust, not from Lewis's original tables; they have not been checked against the primary text.
• No LVT variation to test. Britain in this period had no land value tax regime distinct from ordinary property taxation, so — exactly as with Hoyt — the book cannot speak directly to how a taxed-land counterfactual would have altered cycle amplitude or timing.

See Also

• One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago — the US counterpart Lewis's UK data parallels
• 18-Year Land Cycle — the pattern this study's data feeds into
• Fred Harrison — cites Lewis's Table 5.1 directly in Boom Bust
• Boom Bust (Harrison, book page) — the wiki's page for the book that cites Lewis
• Land Speculation Causes Boom and Bust

Sources

1. J. Parry Lewis, Building Cycles and Britain's Growth (Macmillan, 1965), 384 pp. — used for the book's title, author, publisher, year, and scope (1700–1950 British building-cycle history, with forecasts to 2000) (bibliographic listing; no full text or table of contents is publicly accessible). Google Books listing
2. Fred Harrison, Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010 (Shepheard-Walwyn, 2005), Ch. 5 §1, p.74, Table 5.1, as cited on the wiki's book page for Boom Bust — used for the 17.4-year average cycle duration figure Harrison attributes to Lewis (B-claim; empirical, secondhand via Harrison's citation, not independently confirmed against Lewis's primary tables).
3. Alec Cairncross (1967), review of J. P. Lewis, Building Cycles and Britain's Growth (London: Macmillan, 1965), The Economic Journal 77(306), pp. 361–364. DOI: 10.2307/2229317 — a peer-reviewed academic review of Lewis's book by the economic historian Alec Cairncross; used as the citable scholarly anchor (replacing the earlier search-indexed summaries) for the book's standing and reception in the building-cycle literature. The review's full text sits behind the EJ paywall, so it anchors the book's scholarly standing rather than the specific 17.4-year figure, which remains sourced to Harrison.
4. M. C. Fleming (1966), review of J. P. Lewis, Building Cycles and Britain's Growth, The Economic History Review, New Series 19(2), pp. 435–436. DOI: 10.2307/2592282 — a second contemporary peer-reviewed notice of the book, located 2026-07-17; used (alongside Cairncross) to anchor the book's scholarly reception. Full text behind the JSTOR paywall; not used for the 17.4-year figure.
5. Richard Barras, Building Cycles: Growth and Instability (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), esp. Ch. 3 ("The Nature of Building Cycles," including its survey of historical building-cycle research) and Ch. 5's UK building-cycle chronology (1785–2005). DOI: 10.1002/9781444310009 — the standard modern scholarly synthesis of the building-cycle literature, cited as contemporary context for the long-run British building-cycle research tradition of which Lewis's study is part.