In the mid-1940s a conflict arose – the battle for Bankside – between two plans for a contested space on London's South Bank. The electricity industry planned to rebuild Bankside power station to alleviate a critical shortage of electricity, whereas the County of London Plan envisaged redevelopment of the area as public gardens, flats and offices. This article examines these plans and their entanglement in the planning system as then constituted; it argues that the significance of the planning principles escalated the arguments from a local issue to the highest level of government. The roles of key actors who manoeuvred to influence the decision-making process are explored. The article demonstrates that the power station approval was crisis driven and imposed ill-considered conditions with long-term implications. Elements of the County of London Plan were realized through deindustrialization and the transformation of the long-derelict power station into Tate Modern in 2000.

The relationship between changes in the local economy of the town and region of Colchester are explored in relation to women's employment opportunities. Economic decline and technological change in the woollen industry, as well as diminishing agricultural work for females, provided a ‘push’ factor for women to move to Colchester. In the town, urban rejuvenation meant expansion in the service sector. Yet Colchester was unable to absorb all the labouring women who moved there. Employers introduced new types of industry, characteristically by expanding from retailing to manufacture. The sweated trades produced silk, shoes and ready-made clothes. A process of re-industrialization was, then, engendered by the availability of cheap female labour.

In keeping with past experiences, 2005 produced a rich range of 70 theses that address urban history topics. Equally, as in past years, the topics the theses address are marked by diversity that itself is reflective of the nature of the urban experience. As usual the theses reviewed here are drawn from the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, which now also features Irish theses, and Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/dissertations. This year's crop of theses has proved somewhat easier to categorize than has been the case in previous years and has seen the emergence of some new topics. In particular there is a noticeable interest in what might be called the urban environment and its functioning, which leads to interest in the infrastructural aspects of the city. This is not a new agenda for urban historians but it does also reflect the growth of environmental history and seems to represent an intersection of the two areas. It is also a consequence of the dominance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in urban history, which of itself tends to bring infrastructure to the historian's notice. Another interesting area of study that is emerging as the result of the opening of Soviet era archives is that of city planning, reconstruction and history in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries. Theses from American universities continued to predominate with 68 per cent being drawn from their institutions. The proportion from Great Britain dropped to 21 per cent but the percentage from other countries, predominantly Canadian universities, increased to 11 per cent. The earlier production of this article may be the reason for the reduction in the British proportion rather than a real decline in numbers. There were noticeable clusters of theses coming from Stanford University (7.6 per cent of the total), with the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University each producing 6.1 per cent of the theses produced. In Britain there was a small cluster that emerged from the Open University and among the ‘other’ group, Toronto University was the only institution to produce more than one thesis.

This article makes use of memoirs, autobiographies and oral interviews in order to consider the relations between the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant communities in the Gorbals. While there was considerable variation in individual experience, there were also particular occasions where inter-ethnic relations were all too predictable, almost following a ‘calendar of conflict’. The article shows that, while there was a degree of anti-Semitism in the area, integration between the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the district was facilitated by a number of factors. Ultimately, anti-Semitism was mediated through the sectarian rivalry, which was the dominant religious conflict in the city.

In the last ten years, a significant development in the study of urban history has allowed French historians to begin to consider some of the problems which have preoccupied their foreign colleagues, notably in Britain and the United States, for some time. The attraction of the town for the French historian is due, clearly enough, to two main factors. On the one hand, the town's growing dominance over the location of employment and population is bound to attract attention—in 1980 80 per cent of the population of France live in towns, exactly reversing the distribution of 200 years ago. On the other hand, this same distension of the town demands historical attention. It places the town at the centre of a very long-term development in which the urban criterion becomes increasingly dominant, defining a particularly appropriate field for the measurement of the linking mechanisms which regulate relationships between the different levels of social reality. Urbanity, in short, brings together the whole gamut of questions posed by the development of our system of civilization over the centuries. To reconstruct its history is to indulge in nostalgia for a past which appears all the richer in comparison with the drabness of our own day. It is also to dream of a city of the future, capable of reconciling community and social control, nature and culture. In France the history of towns is inseparable from a long process of examination which began with the humanist enthusiasm for the city, continued through the speculations of the Enlightenment and the tentative researches of nineteenth-century local anti-quarians, and has recently been supplemented by the more precise discoveries of the urban historian.

Museums of contemporary art tend to be exclusive landmarks of great capitals. We are used to finding art galleries in the most prominent of locations, either in old palaces, or in purpose-built museum buildings. For the special case of galleries of contemporary art, however, it is also a common policy to provide space at the middle of an out-of-town park, or else into the heart of an urban renewal area, using modern arts as ‘flagships’ of city regeneration. This article strives to show that today's dilemmas and choices about the siting of galleries of art are a legacy of the nineteenth century, recalling the lively controversies concerning the urban setting of the Parisian Musée des Artistes Vivants and its London equivalents. The different national cases are explored, to reveal several distinct models of gallery formation.

The case for art in urban regeneration is widely promoted. Some local authorities and development corporations see it as a means of access to an international cultural map; others see it as enabling the construction of identities for communities. The case remains speculative. The model of post-Enlightenment cities is one of exclusion and confinement, whereby ‘awkward’ aspects of the city, such as the insane or vagrant, are excluded from view and confined in institutions. This compartmentalization of the city extends into policies for single use zoning and a general retreat from public space. If there is a role for art in urban renewal, it is in reclaiming the decorative as an aspect of public space, not in replicating monuments which affirm the dominant, divisive culture.

Calcutta celebrated its tercentenary in 1990. The city rose to the occasion handsomely with floats, exhibitions, seminars, the usual flurry of publications and some soul-searching. So it has been an exciting year for Indian urban historians. A decade has elapsed since Narayani Gupta reviewed the state of current research on urban India, and after a brief examination of writings on colonial cities, attention is devoted here to a more extensive survey of works on Calcutta including those published on the occasion of the tercentenary.

The ways in which the organization of local government and the practice of political power locally have changed over time has attracted heightened interest from urban and administrative historians over recent decades. Much of this burgeoning interest has paralleled the concurrent decline in the status and powers of local government since the 1980s. In recent years, a shifting focus from government to governance has allowed the historian to re-conceptualize approaches to urban political power. Urban governance denotes a wider system of government by encapsulating the complex range of actors, interests and resources, which straddle the public, private and voluntary sectors, each with a vested interest in the way that political power is organized and practised locally. By broadening their approach to urban political power, urban historians have, since the late 1980s, elicited new perspectives on municipal administration, reattaching it with the national and juridical frameworks of analysis from which it had been fractured. In general, this growing number of local, regional and cross-national historical studies hints at a more complex and interesting municipal dimension which transcends previously impermeable divisions between the private and the public spheres, between political democracy and administrative bureaucracy, between the central state and municipal administration, and between national and transnational contexts of administrative thought and practice.

Portraiture has accurately been identified as one of the many harmony-inducing, commemorative devices employed in the celebratory culture of the London liveries in the century after the Reformation. But a closer examination of the developing tradition of livery company portraiture shows its use to be considerably more complex, and sometimes more divisive, than previously recognized.

The collapse of the Liberal party was arguably the most dramatic feature of British urban politics in the modern period. Many have argued that a major reason for the party's rapid decline was the defection of its suburban support to the Conservatives. By drawing on examples from Manchester, it is argued here that this process was not universal or inescapable. Liberal ideology could still have a strong appeal to the social and educational aspirations of the suburban middle class and their desire for a more genuinely meritocratic society.

Twentieth-century voluntary social work organizations became accustomed to altering the emphases of their work in response to changing legislation or shifts in funding priorities. The House of Charity for Distressed Persons in Soho, founded in 1846, provides a nineteenth-century example of a similar phenomenon. The history of its first 70 years suggests that the intention to serve ‘selected deserving persons’ was outweighed by the need to ensure the spiritual well-being of its benefactors through opportunities for Christian service. Its primary purpose was thereby subverted, and the energies of its workers were diverted from raising funds to support ‘selected deserving persons’ to casting round for ways to fill the space in the House and to continue to give the benefactors a role.

Urban development corresponds with economic shifts. In the second half of the twentieth century, when traditional forms of industrial production declined in many western cities, this posed new kinds of challenges. Cities were in need of a new economic base and at the same time had to cope with the abandonment of industrial sites. This article highlights the agency of local societies in shaping this process of deindustrialization and redevelopment. It interprets deindustrialization and redevelopment as a process of transformation which was open-ended and a matter of intense negotiation between diverging interests at the local level. In analysing the highly contentious case of the disused Stollwerck chocolate factory in Cologne, the article traces a complex set of site-specific factors of deindustrialization and redevelopment.

In the spring of 1938, Strasbourg's Jewish youth organizations inaugurated the Merkaz Ha’Noar, the community's first Jewish youth centre, which aimed to provide a safe, healthy and controlled environment for the development of young Jews in a rapidly transforming city on the border between France and Germany. The centre offered a unique location from which to reimagine Jewish and French history on the eve of World War II, and illustrates the power of the built environment of the city and its physical structures to forge new kinds of communities, identities and politics.

The city of Milan during the second half of the nineteenth century is the field of observation for this study, which focuses on urban policing and social control in a situation that ultimately caused problems for the whole country. The case of Milan, which has not received enough attention in this regard, is particularly interesting, given its status as the northern metropolis. It was the second largest population centre in Italy and the most important economic one, a leader in the late struggle for political independence and an opponent at that time of the centralizing policies of the nation-state.1

Civic improvement in Georgian Britain required significant amounts of capital. Tontines were an important means of financing projects. This article provides new evidence based largely on local newspapers that demonstrates their local and national importance for mutual assurance and building. Shifts in profitability depended on the price of Consols and this explains why building tontines increased in importance. Tontines were used to fund new leisure spaces, workhouses, prisons, bridges, streets and other improvements. Their popularity waned in the later nineteenth century but until then they were an important means of funding civic improvements.

Suburbs are significant to any understanding of Australian urbanization as they have been the dominant organizational element in the morphology of metropolitan areas. A case-study of suburban growth in Adelaide, South Australia, in the period from 1850 to 1930 suggests that dominant accounts of Australian suburbs of the era, as places of tranquillity, leisure, home and family, whose growth was driven by aspiration and social mobility, are largely illusory. Suburban growth was instead driven by speculation and economic opportunity. Accounts of commercial, recreational and industrial activity in Adelaide's suburban municipalities of the time suggests economically and socially diverse communities. Whereas the desire for the quarter or half acre block in the suburbs was most often due to its productive potential rather than bourgeois aspirations for seclusion and semi-rural tranquillity.

During the sixteenth century, antiquarians increasingly developed a self-conscious identity as a professional group with specific social, intellectual and artisan skills. Their activity was not linked to a particular place though: antiquities surfaced from the earth both inside and outside the city walls and were traded in streets, squares, private houses and gardens. Using the Stampa brothers as a case-study, this article investigates the role and commercial strategies of antiquarians and their ability to cross the boundaries of social groups, since they had to deal with artisans, peasants and artists on one side, and cardinals and gentlemen on the other.