Manchester Urban Area, with Manchester city centre itself southwest of Shaw and Crompton. Described in Samuel Lewis's A Topographical Dictionary of England (1848) as located in "a bleak situation", Shaw and Crompton is in the valley of the River Beal, which runs northward through the town towards the village of Newhey. The land to the east of the town steadily rises, reaching a height of at the summit of Crompton Moor. To the west, the land reaches around at High Crompton and at Whitfield, and from these highpoints the surface slopes away in all directions. The River Irk rises on Shaw and Crompton's western boundary with Royton. The geology is represented by carboniferous coal measures. The soils of the town are broadly sterile, the poorest being in the upland moors. Rainfall rises steadily from the Cheshire Plain in a northeasterly direction, and totals are between to a year in Shaw and Crompton, which is well above the UK average of and compares to about a year at Ringway. Shaw and Crompton's built environment is similar to the urban structure of most towns in England, consisting of residential dwellings centred on a High Street in the town centre, which is the local centre of commerce. There is a mixture of low-density urban areas, suburbs, semi-rural and rural locations in Shaw and Crompton, but overwhelmingly the land use in the town is residential; industrial areas and terraced houses give way to suburbs and rural greenery as the land rises out of the town. Generally, property in the centre, west, and south of the town is older and smaller in comparison to that found in the east and north. Shaw and Crompton is divided into two political wards, named "Shaw" and "Crompton" (to the east and west respectively). Demography According to census data, in 2001 Shaw and Crompton had a total resident population of 21,721, with a population density of around 4,692 people per square mile (1,811 per km2), and an average age of 39. Around 3% of Shaw and Crompton's population is from a black and minority ethnic background (which includes a small but long established community of Bangladeshi heritage), the rest broadly being of white background. Of the residents in the combined electoral wards of Shaw and Crompton (which are coterminous with the town) 41.7% were married, 9.2% were cohabiting couples, and 9.7% were lone parent families. Forty percent of households