Urban conflict in medieval England often took one of two forms: public confrontation involving ritualistic acts of transgression on the one hand and legal challenges involving litigation on the other. This article explores an urban dispute in the latter category fought at Bishop's Lynn between 1346 and 1350. The rich series of records surviving from this dispute provides a rare opportunity to reconstruct in detail the legal strategies adopted throughout the conflict. The case is significant for the innovative legal challenge adopted by the burgesses, and for the subsequent campaign of misinformation propagated in parliament by the bishop of Norwich.

The London Bridge Waterworks (LBWW) was founded in 1581 and lasted until the removal of the bridge in 1822. The waterworks was one of the largest water companies in London during this time. In contrast to the other water companies, its history was closely tied to both the bridge itself, as well as the City of London. Its initial growth was linked to the City's expansion, but was more limited in the eighteenth century because its pipes could not reach the expanding suburbs. This article describes the LBWW mostly at its height around 1745, when its surveyor produced a detailed engineering report of its technology.

It has recently been revealed that English common law played a certain role in dealing with the pollution problems that accompanied industrialization. This article explores the role of legal actions in solving environmental problems, not within a legal theory but in a larger framework of environmental politics. By focusing on legal actions, it is shown that the Act on Smoke Abatement of 1821 triggered smoke and noise nuisance lawsuits in London, especially against printers. The introduction of the steam press not only contributed to the production of cheap prints but also transformed the printing business into a polluting industry. Legal actions could sometimes remove a polluting business from a plaintiff's neighbourhood, though it also raised the problem of environmental inequality.

Although little explored, regulations – in the form of laws and byelaws – formed an important technique of nineteenth-century government. This article explores the implementation and enforcement of two sets of regulations regarding the keeping and disposal of dirt imposed by Scottish local authorities: one on behaviours around the disposal of domestic refuse, the other on the keeping of dung – a form of property. While behaviours around refuse were more stringently policed than those affecting property, in both cases regulations were not the basis of a strict disciplinary regime, but a means of informing, educating and persuading residents into cleanly habits.

During the 1920s and 1930s many working-class families needed emergency credit. Their use of pawnbrokers is well documented but the presence of a network of moneylenders, most of whom were women operating from their own homes, is not. This article examines the background to and the impact of the Moneylenders Act (1927) which was designed to reduce the number of working-class lenders, widely perceived as disreputable, in order to protect vulnerable borrowers, most of whom were women. Using Liverpool as a case-study, I also examine the possible reasons for the dramatic decline in the number of licensed moneylenders and analyse the implications of this for the provision of working-class credit.

One of the world's great Victorian-era suburban metropolises, Melbourne, Australia, was transformed by mass immigration and the redevelopment of some of its older suburbs with low-rise flats and apartments in the post-war years. Drawing on a range of sources, including census material, municipal rate and valuation books, immigration and company records, as well as building industry publications, this article charts demographic and morphological change across the Melbourne metropolitan area and in two particular suburbs in the mid- to late twentieth century. In doing so, it both responds to McManus and Ethington's recent call for more histories of suburbs in transition, and seeks to embed the role of immigration and immigrants into Melbourne's urban historiography.

This article examines the infilling of canals constructed in early modern times and subsequent development on newly created land in central Tokyo in the 1950s, following the curtailment of official war-damage reconstruction after World War II. New developments included a high-rise central station building, a four-storey amusement complex, an underground entertainment street and an elevated motorway. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Japanese National Railways were driving forces in infilling and development, which resulted in enormous political and social reactions in the local communities, newspapers and the National Diet (Parliament).

The author would like to amend the incorrectly labelled segments of the scale bar he used in Figure 1 of the above article. Segments on the scale bar should read 100, 200 and 300 rather than 10, 20 and 30. The author would also like to remove from the scale bar, the ratio scale, which is reported to be 1:50,000, because this is inaccurate. The corrected figure is published on the following page.

Urban studies and urban history have, in recent decades, become a booming field in Russia. The most likely explanation for this is the post-Soviet development and transformation of Russian cities. It is not only the demographic growth – although for some cities it has been quite substantial in the last 25 years – but rather the striking changes made to urban space, economy, governance, social organization and residential patterns that have provoked interest in urban research among scholars and the general public. Reflecting this wave of interest, several new centres of urban studies emerged in Russia during the 2000s (for example, the Strelka Institute, the Graduate School of Urban Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the programme in urban studies at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences).