For a quarter century, the term ‘class’ has been anathema for most writers of premodern urban history. The term's associations with discredited forms of analysis – forms often dubiously but persistently associated with Marxism – continue to hamper its reintroduction. In the absence of ‘class’, or a term like it, however, meaningful discussion of ‘horizontal’ divisions in urban society has dwindled. The present article suggests that ‘class’ can and should be reintroduced into our analysis, but that this should be done in an informed way, which takes into account the principal possible meanings of the term. To this end, we analyse the ways in which urban historians have employed the term ‘class’ and find four principal usages. Two of these are ‘material’ and two are ‘institutional’. It is further suggested that certain institutions, such as the nobility and town governments in Europe, can be ‘class determining’, insofar as they channel economic and productive differences into effective political, legal and ideological ‘classes’. This insight, and the typology it is based upon, open the possibility for integrating ‘class’ analysis with recent work in both European and Global contexts.

It is now several years since José Luis Oyón presented an overview of recent trends in Spanish urban history, and this article seeks to communicate a sense of developments in the field since the mid-1990s, dealing with publications covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ‘contemporary’ rather than ‘modern’ history, in Spanish terminology. The question of what constitutes ‘urban history’ in Spain remains problematic, in the absence of a ‘Dyos phenomenon’, a distinctive urban history teaching enterprise and a sustained and successful dedicated journal. Four annual issues of Historia Urbana, a ‘review of the history of ideas and of urban transformations’, appeared in the mid-1990s, but the final one dates from 1997, and most of the articles presented general theoretical perspectives or articles based on research in countries other than Spain. As Beascoechea and Novo have recently remarked, it seemed in the early 1990s that urban history (or, as they put it, ‘the history of the city’) was becoming established as a recognized discipline in Spain, but subsequent developments have failed to match the expectations that were aroused. Their themed urban history issue of Historia Contemporánea, produced in 2002, is aimed at regaining the lost momentum. Meanwhile, librarians still do not respond to ‘historia urbana’ as a category, seeking to redefine it as ‘urbanismo’, a narrower concept focused on town planning and urban design.

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.

The historiography of medieval cities in the Low Countries has long been influenced by the legacy of Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) and his pupils. The Belgian historian and his followers used new (positivist) methods to study history, such as critical source analysis and teaching in seminars, which had a great impact on contemporary scholars in Belgium and elsewhere. Furthermore, Pirenne's selection of original research topics drastically changed the study of medieval history on the Continent. Influenced by research trends in France and Germany, Pirenne did ground-breaking new research, for instance, in the field of urban history. His publications on the origins of towns, on the ‘early democracies’ in the Low Countries, and on the socio-economic background of urban growth and decline inspired many colleagues and his students. His research on particular topics in the field of urban history has, until the present day, been a fruitful starting point for many Ph.D. students. Three of these topics constitute the subject of this review article: first, the origins of towns; secondly, the social history of urban politics and thirdly, the economy and finances of cities. This review of recent Ph.D. theses on the urban history of the Low Countries will demonstrate the importance of Pirenne's legacy, paying close attention to the valuable refinements that have been made to his findings in the last decade. Moreover, the actual research trends and the fresh perspectives of young scholars on the Low Countries’ history can be of great use for scholars of the history of cities in other regions in late medieval Europe.

This article considers how the imagination and expectation of future air raids impacted upon the perception of the built environment, and asks how the boundaries between peace and war, and thus military and civilian, began to be dissolved in this context. It examines the interactions between architects, planners and government officials about how the design of cities and buildings might change in an age of air power. By looking at changes and continuities either side of the 1938 Munich crisis, it examines how the civilian space of cities was recast in anticipation of war.

Shopping during the eighteenth century is increasingly viewed by scholars as an important leisure activity, and an integral part of wider schemes of urban improvement. However, the physical evidence in the form of standing buildings is rarely considered. This article will demonstrate how a detailed examination and reconstruction of the urban landscape of York can illuminate how these practices were performed. The use of building biographies also allows owners to be identified and linked with specific shop types and surviving fabric. This enables exploration of how the physical environment influenced perceptions of the streetscape and the experience of interior retail space.

This article analyses the spread of public utilities and urban development through a wide-ranging comparison of European cities. It considers variables that are not simply demand-based to explain the diffusion of the telephone. The article explores the relationship between variables, city size, position in the urban hierarchy, urban growth and the function of the city in relation to the spread of the telephone. It concludes that the scale and the function of the city, together with the terms of concession and management strategies, were crucial for the diffusion of the telephone throughout Europe's cities.

The aim of this article is to study how the Swedish cities Linköping and Norrköping treated new working-class suburbs during the period from 1860 to 1890, by looking at the extension of piped water supply. The author concludes that working-class suburbs were located in poor, geographically unfavourable and unsanitary places, to which extensions of water could be technically demanding and expensive, which led to frequent urban inability or unwillingness to help. It is also suggested that by denying water cities separated spatially between city and suburb, thereby underlining already existing environmental and even spatial injustice between the two.

The literature on nineteenth-century Newcastle city region is a narrative of industrial progress premised upon technological prowess. But there is another story to be told about the transformation of a relatively small northern town into a conurbation with the attributes of a modern city. This second process of ‘rounding out’ the city with social, cultural and political institutions to accompany the economic prowess is relatively under-reported. In this study, we follow 1,621 individuals and compare their record of being mentioned in the literature to their participation in 343 local institutions. The focus is directed towards those who are much more visible in the literature compared to institutional membership – ‘narrative heroes’ – and those with the reverse pattern, much more to be found in institutions than in the literature – civic builders. The two sets of individuals are discussed and reasons for their contrasting positions are suggested.

This article analyses the changing options for the provision of burial places between the Reformation and the mid-nineteenth century in two major provincial cities, Bristol and Exeter. The two cities experienced very different patterns of change, especially in their Anglican provision, reflecting medieval differences of organization as well as the differential impact of dissent. Common factors include the effect of epidemics (plague, cholera) and population pressure, but also great conservatism regarding use of inner-city burial places. The major changes are associated with the three great shocks to church–state relations: the Reformation, the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the reform period of the 1830s and 1840s.

This article uses data extracted from General Register Office mortality registers to map the localization of infant mortality in Dublin city from 1864 to 1910. It traces how late nineteenth-century social inequalities were deeply rooted in the city's history. In order to contextualize the high infant mortality rates, we draw on a range of approaches to provide an overarching view of the causes of the public health problems cities like Dublin experienced.

Both the house and the household have been subjects of growing interest amongst historians of pre-industrial society, but mostly in isolation from each other. Studies of social structure conventionally treat the household as an entity independent of its physical surroundings. Ten years ago, Peter Laslett bewailed the fact that ‘we know little in general about the effects of buildings on the structure of domestic groups’, and this statement still appears to be valid; while on the other side of the Channel it has been echoed by Jean-Pierre Bardet:

Information on the material environment, undoubtedly important, is diffused to serve the perspectives of a wide variety of studies: the history of architecture, urbanism, geography, sociology etc.

The debate about the comparative performance of the British and American economies around the turn of the century has involved most industrial sectors. In the case of the railways, the argument goes back at least to 1887, when a critical analysis of English railway operations compared to those of the United States was published. For British railway companies, the years after 1900 were a particularly difficult time especially in the capital market, and many new investment projects were abandoned, although not solely because of adverse conditions in the capital market. A substantial number of these projects were probably of a marginal nature but the eighteen-year period between 1890 and 1908 also saw the development of a new type of railway – the urban rapid transit system. This was in response to two very different factors – the continuing growth of cities and the application of electric power in a form suitable for railway use. The spread of these systems in Britain paralleled their expansion in the United States.

Interpretation of the role of religion in the cities of Europe and America during the last one hundred and fifty years has been dominated by a single issue: the relationship between urbanization and secularization, which recent writings continue to amplify.

In tracing a theoretical history of modernity peculiar to Imperial Berlin after 1871, the urban themes developed in the writings of the German social theorist, Georg Simmel, have proved to be particularly pertinent. The exhibition of 1896 provides Simmel with a major site of investigation into the visible effects of the commodified urban sphere upon the individual city dweller which finds one of its most spectacular forms in the rise of the mid-nineteenth-century ‘World Exhibition’. The paper outlines aspects of Simmel's theories of the differentiation of the individual in the capitalist metropolis as a background to an investigation into the various functions assigned to the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition both by its organizers and by Simmel.

By investigating the historical evidence for the Parisian department stores' campaigns of property acquisition in the nineteenth century, this article argues that not only was an increase in physical scale desired by managers to enlarge their businesses, but that the space of the store was deliberately moulded into a particular cultural form associated with the monument. The economic decisions involved in leasing and acquiring land, and the negotiation of the preferences for building form implied by building regulations, reveal more about how department stores constructed an image for themselves to embody the myth of a new order of commerce.

This article explores the understudied riots which occurred in Aberdeen in mid-October 1785. It charts the climate of politicization that characterized the burgh's civic life in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and before the outbreak of the equivalent process in France. In doing so, it challenges interpretations of the socially exclusive nature of the Scottish reform movement, the dynamics of continuity and change between this phenomenon and later political ‘radicalism’ and the role of Aberdeen as a ‘provincial’ metropolis in the Age of Revolution.

This article addresses the morphological and functional implications of the railway as an urban boundary, by studying seven towns in Romania, connected by the First Transylvanian Railway (1868–70). The research highlights similarities and differences as to the initial railway insertion, the subsequent growth patterns and the differentiation appearing between areas adjoining the railway tracks. The article argues that although a ‘wrong side of the track’ did not emerge everywhere, the segregation and lack of urban amenities affecting the areas which could be thus labelled is rooted in the failure to render the railway barrier permeable and to generate complementarity rather than subordination between the two sides of the track.

If a rural historian who has few credentials to undertake the current review may begin this essay with a point from his own field of research: there is a view of Scottish rural history which argues that far too much attention has been paid to the Highlands. A similar view could be advanced about concentration on Glasgow in Scottish urban history; in addition to the volumes under consideration have been numerous other recent titles. As Professor Morris has noted in a recent review article in this journal, however, other Scottish cities, especially Aberdeen and Dundee, have recently been subjected to variants of the ‘urban biography’ approach. Aberdeen, in particular, has come under intense scrutiny with a two-volume history sponsored by the local authority and taking advantage of the rich resources of the city archives. Edinburgh, by contrast, and notwithstanding the recent culmination of Professor Rodger's extensive researches, remains the poor relation of Scottish urban history: aside from the classic account of the creation of the New Town by A.J. Youngson and the late R.Q. Gray's account of nineteenth-century social history, the existing historiography of Scotland's capital city remains interred in the pages of unpublished theses and scholarly journals.