David Reeder, who has died aged 74, made a major contribution to the understanding of two academic fields: urban history, and the history of education. The son of a railway fireman, David was born in Hull in 1931 and evacuated during the war from the family's council house first to Rawcliffe, near Goole, and then to York in 1942. There David attended Nunethorp Grammar School, where he was head boy, and won a scholarship place to Durham University, graduating in 1952. David Reeder began a 50 year association with the University of Leicester when he embarked upon a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education course in 1952. Heavily influenced by his National Service experience as an RAF Education Officer (1953–56), and by his spells successively as a teacher and superintendent of the Evening Institute in Leicester (1956–59), lecturer in history at Westminster College (1959–62) and as Head of the Faculty of Education at Garnett College, Roehampton (1962–66), David initially established a reputation in nineteenth-century British history by publishing general historical syntheses.

Although it is widely acknowledged that urban oligarchy pre-dominated across medieval England, oligarchy's foundations are only partly known. This article argues that part of oligarchy's success derived from close social interaction between oligarchs and the rest of the citizens. A case study of social networks and arbitration within the city of Wells demonstrates how the elite insinuated themselves into the town's social web, establishing and securing their influence and power. Moreover, such a social role brought the oligarchs together often and helped to define the elite. Such power encouraged a more benevolent form of oligarchy than later prevailed.

Historians have argued that American social welfare reformers looked to Europe for examples of successful programmes. This article provides a counter-case where a progressive American state, Massachusetts, developed public health reforms prior to their British counterparts. Social concerns about reducing cases of tuberculosis in Massachusetts' cotton manufacturing cities led to the transference of the public health discourse from the urban living environment to the workplace. This same relationship could have been applied within the Lancashire industry. Instead, the urban public health discourse focused on living conditions. In both countries, local and state political structures influenced health campaigners' actions.

This article analyses the relationship between the port-city of Bremen and its different hinterlands. It examines four determinants of port–hinterland linkages: the political framework; the volume and pattern of trade; the extent and significance of population transfers; and Bremen's contribution to the transmission of cultural innovation. It focuses, in turn, on trade, migration and cultural exchange as distinct, but interrelated, fields of interaction and discusses new theoretical approaches for understanding the historical complexity of port–hinterland relations and the extent to which trading, migration and cultural hinterlands were part of an interactive system.

Through a case study of Birmingham fire brigade, this article examines the plethora of international networking activities undertaken during the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Birmingham fire brigade, under the control of Alfred Tozer, led British municipal participation in early international fire networks, attending international congresses and exhibitions in Berlin and London, and also visiting continental cities to inspect fire brigades and their appliances. Locating the study firmly within historical debates concerning the embryonic international municipal movement, this article demonstrates that municipal institutions participated in networking activities as part of a policy learning and knowledge-transfer process.

Between 1950 and 1971 Birmingham City Council built 464 housing blocks of five or more storeys. The city pursued parallel programmes of building high-rise flats both in the central areas on slum cleared land and in its suburbs on greenfield sites. Examining Birmingham's post-war suburban housing programme, this article suggests that the use of high-rise in suburban areas represented an important change in the nature of British cities, both in the use of a particular building type on the urban fringe and also in the location of high-density workers' housing far outside of the city core.

This article first explains why the London County Council (LCC) was, by the 1930s, the largest provider of hospital beds in Britain. It then examines contemporary perceptions of the LCC hospital service showing how the complex series of responses to it fed into debates about the nature of the post-war National Health Service. Finally, an assessment is made of the service's place in the history of the health services.

One of my colleagues likes to say that if a subject was worth one book, it was worth more than one. A comparison of two books on the development of New York City's manufacturing, commercial and financial elite demon-strates how differences in theoretical approaches, research materials and literary form can lead in significantly different directions. Beckert depicts the rise of the bourgeois class in the late nineteenth century with touches of tragedy and irony. Kessner's capitalists, while flawed, particularly in their mistreatment of labour, tend to come across as heroes who make America a dominant world power.

Researching and producing this review of theses poses many challenges, the least of which is how to produce a meaningful summary of an abstract that already summarizes some 200–400 pages of detailed research, while avoiding sounding clichéd. However, undertaking this review for four years does give one the opportunity to consider the patterns and changes that have emerged. Thus this article will commence with a short review of the sources of theses, their numbers and the themes they had pursued.