writing home to the Doge and Senate, those crusty patricians ensconced in their colonnaded palace on St Mark’s Square, Venetian ambassadors to the Tudor Court hymned the praises of London as one of the principal cities of Europe, but ignored or dismissed almost all the remaining English towns. Other sixteenth-century visitors from the great continental states were equally critical. Only travellers from the more remote central European countries found anything remarkable in English provincial towns. Scottish and Welsh towns barely figure in foreign reports: Edinburgh on one occasion was compared to a French country town. Yet by the late eighteenth century British towns – not just London but provincial towns – were the envy of the civilised world, admired in the many travellers’ accounts which rehearsed details of their affluence, manufactures, vigorous club life, bustling, friendly shops, well-lit, orderly streets, and much else. Whereas at the start of our period only a minority of English people, maybe 15 per cent or so (and a much lower proportion in Scotland and Wales) resided in cities and towns, by the accession of Queen Victoria nearly half the British population was urban. Not only was there an increasingly integrated national system of towns, but British towns became notable as centres of economic and social innovation, of political discourse and cultural enlightenment, their advance having a growing impact on national society and beyond. Hitherto located on the European periphery in terms of urban development, analogous to regions like Scandinavia and central Europe with their low urban populations and localised towns, from the eighteenth century Britain emerged as the chief laboratory of a modernising world.