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.

‘This city has a circular form, and such a marvellous roundness is the sign of its perfection. A trench of surprising beauty and breadth surrounds this city and contains, not a swamp or a putrid pool, but living water from fountains stocked with fish and crayfish.’ For friar Bonvesin de la Riva at the end of the thirteenth century, as for most of his successors, glorifying Milan consisted of singing the praises of its running water. Abundant, regular, gushing water was everywhere; it was ‘marvellous to drink, clear, healthy, within reach of the hand’.This praise is evidently for the geographical situation of Milan, which brought it harmony and wealth. But it is also for the Milanese themselves, who brought running water from the rivers to the Lombard capital. Milan, after all, was naturally ‘Medio-Amnium’, at an equal distance from the two rivers (the Ticino and the Adda) that flowed around it. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was at the centre of the most immense system of navigable rivers in Europe, and it owed this condition to three centuries of effort during which the communal power, but also private initiatives, had dug the canals and connected the streams. Water became the vital element in the economy, and the development of Milan multiplied the concurrent, sometimes rival uses of it. How could stagnant water from trenches be reconciled with that of the navigable rivers? How could it be ensured that the water that irrigated the garden would also supply the needs of the paper mill? There were many economic contradictions that could be resolved only by an equitable and measured sharing of the water. At the same time, the growing strength of the seigniorial and territorial state sought to appropriate the management of the water to itself. If the prince succeeded in guaranteeing a supply of clean water, which flowed constantly for the good of the whole community, he would have found the best way not only of participating in the development of his city but also of ensuring that his own power was retained.

This paper illuminates the significant contributions that Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, a British town planner, editor and educator, made to transnational discourse on modern urban planning and design from 1941 to 1951. This is when she formulated her synthesis of utopian planning ideals, grounded in the bio-regionalism of the Scottish visionary Patrick Geddes and informed by European modernism. Her hybrid grew into the Geddessian branch of the planning arm of the post-war modern movement. In addition to uncovering Tyrwhitt's hidden voice, the article also uses the biography of a transnational actor as a vehicle to analyse the emergence of the concept that urbanism encompasses both the global and the local.

This article examines the architecture and design of the pioneering planned fishing villages established by the British Fisheries Society across the Highlands of Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Society established a utilitarian planning model which fundamentally influenced the subsequent planned village boom that remains so evident in the historic landscape of the Scottish Highlands today. The British Fisheries Society also made a significant contribution to urban history with Thomas Telford's innovative plan for its last development of Pulteneytown. Pulteneytown remains the most complete example of Telford's work as a town planner.

This article presents a case-study of ‘parliaments of science’ and their impact on towns in the south-west of England in the second half of the nineteenth century. These were the week-long annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and other national associations for different branches of knowledge which became a much publicized feature of the social and intellectual calendar of Victorian Britain. With particular reference to Exeter, it is argued that these events were used by towns and cities to assert their status and reputation and to compete with rival urban centres, and it is contended that they should be viewed, along with other cultural initiatives, as an important instrument in the shaping of urban and civic identity in mid-Victorian Britain. The study demonstrates the role of towns as scientific locations in the nineteenth century and suggests that they deserve attention in place-centred studies of Victorian science.

The physical forms of England's inter-war suburbs are examined, concentrating on those created by private enterprise. Attention is given to the contrasts between inter-war suburbs and those created before the First World War, and the timing of the adoption of architectural styles and other aspects of built form characteristic of the inter-war period is considered. In places, houses in Edwardian styles continued to be built well into the inter-war period. The dominant characteristic of the period was the creation of garden suburbs. The Tudor Walters Report was more an endorsement of such suburbs than a stimulus to them and many of its recommendations were not adhered to.

The growth of interest in urban and housing history during recent decades has produced a large volume of studies that has examined broad societal parameters, or themes, such as housing policies, economics and legislation. Concurrently, a growing volume of historical research about households and families has been published, but few studies examine the lifestyles and values of the residents. In sum, there rarely has been any systematic analysis of how longitudinal developments in domestic life are related to developments in the spatial layout, the meaning and use of shared and private spaces and the daily activities these accommodate. In general, the inter-relations between the architectural, cultural and societal dimensions of housing history have commonly been overlooked. This paper argues why, and then illustrates how, integrative concepts and methods can be applied to diversify and enrich recurrent interpretations by referring to a published study of urban housing and daily life in the French- speaking cantons of Switzerland between 1860 and 1960.1

This article shows the centrality of movement – the freedom to move, the inability to move and being forced to flee – to the suburban development of Bombay. The reason as well as the spatio-temporal rhythm of movement differed among population groups inhabiting the city. The early suburbs of colonial Bombay were predicated on the ability of a tiny European elite to move to different parts of the city according to the seasons. By the mid-nineteenth century, their movement would no longer be restricted to the several islands that constituted Bombay. Instead, tracing the governor's footsteps they would move many miles away, from Bombay to Poona during the monsoons, to Mahabaleshwar after the rains and back to Bombay for the cool winter season as the seat of governance shifted according to the season. In late nineteenth-century Bombay, the growth of the mill industry would force Europeans to retreat to other areas of the city from their former suburban homes, which were now transformed into mill districts. In contrast to the freedom of movement that underlay the early foundation of European suburban development in Bombay, Indian suburban development was based on the necessity to flee the crowded and insalubrious native city districts. The bubonic plague that first struck the city in 1896 was most virulent in the native districts of the city, long subject to municipal neglect. After 1896, large numbers of Bombay's native citizenry were forced to flee their homes each year during the plague season. Moving to different locations, often along the railway lines, they formed small communities that became the foundation of Bombay's future suburban development.

Measuring residential segregation is a challenging and crucial task. Many important questions in urban history can be understood fully only after correctly assessing the importance and significance of the clustering patterns of different groups of urbanites. However, the extent to which and the ways in which various social classes, races, and ethnic groups congregated in the expanding industrial metropolis of nineteenth-century America form the subject of heated debates among historians. With large black ghettos now existing in all major cities, experts and lay citizens alike agree that Americans live in a ‘separated society’. In the first half of the twentieth century, metropolitan areas took the form of ghettoized central cities with white suburbs. With the transfer of many urban functions to suburban units, and the shift of America from a nation of urbanites to a nation of suburbanites, a complex pattern of suburban segregation also developed. The universal concern about the magnitude of today's segregation makes the historical debate intriguing. Was it once different? Was there a time when cities were integrated? At some time in the past, many believe, American cities were better places in which to live—hence we should strive to recover our lost community.

Over the past two decades the enumerators' books of the nineteenth-century censuses have rightly become one of the major sources for the study of nineteenth-century social structure. Containing as they do, for the whole population of Great Britain, information on name, residence, marital status, relationship to household head, sex, age, occupation, birthplace and infirmity of sight or hearing, they have made possible a wide range of studies of, for example, patterns of residence, household composition, occupational structure, migration, age of marriage, patterns of education and farm labour utilization. Linked to other sources or bodies of material they have been used in studies of class consciousness, voting, voluntary association membership, property ownership and development, farming, poverty, the employment of married women and servant keeping, to name but a few.

In 1976 a medieval and renaissance theatre history project was launched under the masthead Records of Early English Drama (now more familiarly known as REED). The official launch had taken two years of planning by scholars from Britain, Canada and the United States, and was given assurance for the future through a ten-year major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council. REED's stated goal – then as now – was to find, transcribe and publish evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and musical activity in Great Britain before the theatres were closed in 1642. The systematic survey undertaken would make available for analysis records relating to the evolution of English theatre from its origins in minstrelsy, through the flowering of drama in the renaissance, to the suppression first of local and then of professional entertainment under the Puritans.

This article explores the statutory limitations faced by the metropolitan commissioners of sewers. It is largely based on an analysis of judicial decisions in cases involving the commissioners and their taxation policy from 1812 to 1845. It argues that the commissioners pursued a potentially radical agenda for sewers financing and taxation, but that their agenda was resisted by ratepayers and thwarted by a generally though not completely hostile judiciary. This article thus contributes to the ongoing revaluation of the metropolitan commissioners of sewers and illustrates the constructed nature of statutory limitation.

Some scholars have argued that the process of gentrification can bring about development, attract businesses and even lower the crime rate in an area. However, no scholars have considered developments in a colonial situation where government policies sometimes produced unintended results, which have subsequently become a permanent feature of those socio-political situations. The experience of colonial Lagos shows that the colonial government policies of town planning and segregation forced the working-class residents of Lagos to the suburbs. As a result, both the population and housing rent of the area were increased with implications for the demography and physical development of metropolitan Lagos.

Industrial policy has long been considered a federal responsibility. Indeed, most scholars date modern local economic development programmes as starting in the 1960s. Before that, in this view, industrial policy was ad hoc, unco-ordinated and fragmented. In this article, I argue that the origins of modern industrial policy initiated by the local state slowly emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Chicago. Using an assortment of sources, I show that a new type of industrial policy was forged in the conflict over the 1923 zoning ordinance. The city's real-estate, financial and political elites were able to mobilize information, science, funding, individuals and arguments to convince industrialists that zoning was to their advantage. In the process, the city's industrial interests were able to frame the new zoning ordinance to their ends.

This article examines the economic culture of urban food markets in early modern England. It focuses on London between 1590 and 1640 to argue that market regulation, even in fast-growing, commercializing cities, was underpinned by moralized values. It also assesses a largely untapped citywide book of fines, containing payments for regulatory offences. The first section outlines London's market system and regulation, the second looks at enforcement in practice and the third discusses the underlying values. This contributes to our understanding of day-to-day food marketing and proposes that studies of ‘moral economy’ should examine everyday commerce and major cities.

Obviously the city of Mexico is far away from Europe. Nevertheless, it was the perfect exemplar of city organized along imperial lines. As the capital of ‘New Spain’ and the headquarters of the viceroy and archbishop, it was the showcase of Spain in America. But suddenly and unexpectedly, the Spanish government's colonial policy had to be reconsidered on 8 June 1692 when the most important riot in the history of the city of Mexico broke out. A crowd of thousands of Indians gathered on the Plaza Mayor and kept shouting ‘long live the king, but kill the government’. They lynched the National Guards and burned every sign and symbol related to Spain. Far from being a mere food riot, it was a genuine political movement. The riot of 8 June 1692 was the result of ‘good government police’ that is to say ‘police’ understood in its original sense as good government of the city. This article examines the consequences of the revolt for the city's police and for the Spanish colonial order which was based upon the separation of the Spanish and Indian population.

The funerals and reburials of prominent Hungarian leaders (Count Lajos Batthyány, Ferenc Deák, Lajos Kossuth and Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II) over the course of the Dualist decades (1867–1918) – a time period when Hungary was integrated into a federal structure with Austria – were important moments in the imagining of Hungarian national identity. The article argues that turn-of-the-century Budapest served not just as stage for patriotic mythmaking on the occasion of these funeral ceremonies but was both affected by and shaped the former's content and significance.

In March 1447, a great fire broke out in Valencia, caused by a former member of the municipal government. This fire destroyed many houses and craft workshops around the Market Square, the economic centre of the city. The municipal government had to compensate the citizens, who had lost everything, and restore everyday life in the area. A versatile Italian watchmaker living in Valencia was chosen to supervise the rehabilitation of the area. Under his direction, the debris was removed. Then after a conscious campaign of urban planning aimed at eliminating any traces of the old Islamic city, the streets were reconstructed according to the norms of the western city.

This article discusses the material and spatial features of the tournaments on the Grote Markt, the central market square in Brussels, in the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century. It investigates how the tournament acquired meaning in the urban space where it was organized, and how the chivalric event in its turn altered that urban space. These Brussels tournaments, for which both archival, iconographical and narrative sources are available, show us the dynamics of an inherently courtly festival within an urban setting. Recent historiography has stressed that these tournaments, just like other urban festivals, for example joyous entries, demonstrate the submission of the town to the ruler. Indeed, the prince and his household used the public space of the Grote Markt and the facilities of the town hall to organize tournaments and festivities. However, they could not do this on their own. They needed the town government for the organization and logistics of the tournament and for its hospitality. Moreover, the town managed to put its own stamp on the architecture, both permanent and ephemeral, emphasizing the responsibilities that the duke had towards his town, as well as the long tradition of subservience and loyalty of the town to the duke.