A new opportunity, and a new challenge, presents itself to urban historians. In order to obtain a deeper understanding of historical urban space and spatial relationships, the contributors to this Special Issue deploy new techniques of spatial analysis using mapping tools to explore the density, frequency and proximity of various features of towns and cities. The contributors focus on case-studies at various urban scales – from major commercial centres (New York, Rome, Paris and London) – to smaller towns in the urban hierarchy. They also range across the tenth to the twentieth centuries and so challenge a common assumption that mapping the town is essentially an approach best suited to the modern period. Individually and collectively, the authors demonstrate how the urban morphology of the city developed and how durable that spatial patterning can be.

This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagined in post-war Britain. From the ethnographers and street photographers who emerged in Bethnal Green in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the planning concept of ‘streets in the air’, to modern geodemographics, the street has been a way of thinking through shifting ideas about civil society and collective social life. Imagined as a space of spontaneous community when set against the rational, contractual operations of both the market and the state, the street has been a means of articulating hopes for and anxieties about social change.

From the 1850s in Britain, concerns were growing about the role of animals in transmitting disease to man, whether through the food chain or through infection. While London is often seen as providing a model for public health reform, it was the great provincial cities that initiated veterinary involvement in public health in the closing years of the century. The emergence of this new strand of public health activity is the subject of this paper.

This paper examines the relatively neglected topic of municipal public health expenditure in the inter-war period, and emphasizes two neglected dimensions: the political and the geographical. After justifying the importance of the topic and the approach and giving some details of municipal public health provision, a quantitative analysis of expenditure in the urban county boroughs is presented. In general, the analysis tends to argue against conventional wisdom in stressing the political dimension instead of the economic dimension in explaining the pattern of expenditure, giving a positive answer to the question posed in the title.

Quantitative studies of nineteenth-century cities have made rapid advances in the last decade in terms of both the complexity of techniques and the range of sources to which techniques have been applied. Simple representations of material from the census enumerators' books like graphs and pie diagrams have been superseded by location quotients, indices of segregation and factor analyses. Synchronic descriptions of urban structure have been supplemented by assessments of change (for example, of residential persistence and mobility) and analyses of relationships (for example, journeys to work and marriage patterns). Researchers have ventured beyond the census to examine other nominal listings—in directories, electoral registers, ratebooks and church records—often using record linkage techniques to check or supplement information from one source with another. Our enthusiasm to apply new techniques to new sources has often left us exposed to Anderson's criticism that ‘we have been paying too little attention to the question of why we are measuring what we are measuring’. Many quantitative historical geographers justify their enterprise as the testing of modern theory on such subjects as migration and modernization. Some such theories, particularly those concerned with Sjoberg's and Burgess' stereotypes of pre-industrial and industrial cities and the ‘transitional’ nature of Victorian cities, are little more than rough generalizations and some urban historians have been more than sceptical about them. Certainly the retrospective application of the methods, concepts and theories of contemporary social research is a critical issue. In this paper we consider the significance of ‘what we are measuring’ for a particularly contentious concept, that of ‘community’. We assess the usefulness or relevance of more sophisticated methodological techniques to the identification and investigation of communities in Victorian cities.

The ceremonial life of the early modern town has emerged as an important area of study for urban historians. Ever since the publication of Charles Phythian-Adams' innovative study, attention has focused on the elaborate series of processions, pageants and rites of passage which were a constant feature of the yearly cycle of town life. In the wake of his work other studies of the ceremonial life of late medieval and early modern towns have added to the urban historian's awareness of the importance of ritualized forms of behaviour as a symbolic thread which helped bind together the social fabric of the townscape. The research done thus far forms one of those areas of scholarship in which the cross-fertilization of the interdisciplinary approach, so beloved of the ‘new’ urban history, has proved particularly fruitful. It might be surprising then that London, the largest of English towns, has yet to receive similar treatment. There have been, of course, several important studies of the capital in the early modern period, and they have something to say about the ceremonial life of the city. These have largely concentrated on topics such as the structure of government, the nature of London's ruling elite, and social mobility within the city's craft organizations. While providing important sidelights on ceremony, these treatments have tended to place ceremonial events in the background, as the ‘icing on the cake’. At the same time there have been many important studies by art and literary historians of ceremonial occasions such as coronations, royal entries or the Lord Mayors' Shows, but these have tended to concentrate on ceremony as an expression of dynastic propaganda or as a development in dramatic form rather than as part of the social history of the city. The object of this article will be to attempt to rectify this gap in our knowledge by applying some of the framework bequeathed by Phythian-Adams, and so try to assess the relevence of his conclusions about urban society in this period to the particular case of London.

For more than two hundred years after the Glorious Revolution, the British aristocracy gained control of ‘every aspect of government, both executive and legislative. They dominated the Cabinet, the highest ranks of the armed forces, the civil service and, to a lesser extent, the judiciary’. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a shift in their centre of gravity from that of a rural elite, to a group whose influence was mediated increasingly through the manipulation of the levers of power embedded in the urban system. This urbanization of their consciousness was coupled with, and partly responsible for, a scale jump in their collectivity. By 1850 it was no longer true that ‘society’ owed its allegiance to the local ‘county’ circles. Bush suggests that for the aristocratic class there developed in the nineteenth century a nationwide, shared ethos and culture. This was fostered on the proverbial playing fields of the nascent public schools, but it is the thesis of this paper that the spatiality of the West End of London was also a major factor in what amounts to a process of class formation for the disparate social factions which were eventually moulded into a coalition of the British ruling classes. Such was the binding quality of the social cement manufactured in the West End that it was able to withstand the aggressive solvent of industrial capitalism for something approaching a century.

This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.

The article considers the relationship between the middle class and urban place in England. Using the concept of identity, it examines changes in the meaning of the term ‘middle class’ between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century and how these changes were related to the configuration of urbanity. In the earlier twentieth century, it is argued, state and nation replaced the urban as the principal referent for middle-class identity.

Copenhagen is today praised as a truly bicycle-friendly city. The Danish capital earned its reputation as a ‘bicycle city’ early on. The network of bicycle infrastructure developed in the first half of the twentieth century was a result not least of a thriving cycling culture and the efforts made by cyclists’ organizations. In the following car-centric decades this network made cycling a more resilient practice than elsewhere, before cyclists and their lobby organizations managed, again, to pressure policy makers to renew supportive measures for cyclists. The article thus highlights two concepts: road users as potential co-producers of the mobility system as well as the obduracy of infrastructure and its capacity to preserve habits and cultures of the past.

This article examines the impact of post-war urban renewal on industry and economic activity in Manchester and Leeds. It demonstrates that local redevelopment plans contained important economic underpinnings which have been largely overlooked in the literature, and particularly highlights expansive plans for industrial reorganization and relocation. The article also shows that, in practice, urban renewal had a destabilizing and destructive impact on established industrial activities and exacerbated the inner-city problems of unemployment and disinvestment which preoccupied policy-makers by the 1970s. The article argues that post-war planning practices need to be integrated into wider histories of deindustrialization in British cities.

London is one of the best recorded of medieval cities. Yet the very bulk of the sources has in the past inhibited systematic enquiry, so that for many periods and aspects of its history the capital remains the unknown element in English urban affairs. The greatest quantity of records concerns property-holding, and one way of making sense of this forbidding mass of information is to reconstitute it in the form of histories of the properties to which it refers. Since the early eighteenth century this way of using urban records has been adopted from time to time in antiquarian studies which have thrown valuable light on conditions in English medieval towns. In particular H. E. Salter's work on medieval Oxford inspired the present author to apply similar methods in a study of Winchester, which is now complete. Winchester pointed the way to London and to a means of remedying our great ignorance of that city.

This article traces the evolution of the idea of degeneration in urban Britain between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rejecting approaches that reduce this richly eclectic, though savagely negative, world-view to a random bundle of prejudices underpinning the emergence of the ‘science’ of eugenics, the article focuses on distinctive environmental, medical and anti-urban determinants. Strong emphasis is also placed on shifting interactions between moral and medico-environmental values and prescriptions which served as legitimation for the racially inflected view that residual elements of the inner city working class might soon be doomed to physiological and hereditary extinction.

From the mid-nineteenth century Glasgow's civic leaders recognized the effect that the rapidly deteriorating urban fabric was having on perceptions of the city, and began to construct a more positive identity, intended to inspire faith in municipal government. The landscape played a crucial part in selling this ideal. Parks were used as visible evidence of civic beneficence, and (deriving much influence from evangelical Presbyterianism) also served as a potent symbol of regeneration. However, while this paper considers the success of public parks in boosting Glasgow's image between 1850 and 1914, it also examines the complex material motivations originally underlying civic involvement, the impact of the environment in determining parks' policy and the influence of other British and European cities in shaping ideas.

According to the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, ‘cities are responsible for 67% of the total global energy consumption and more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and these trends significantly intensify the severity of some of the two great challenges of our time; climate change and energy security’. Moreover, if cities are driving anthropogenic climate change, the effects are felt everywhere on earth, from glaciers to atolls, from oceans to the troposphere. It is no longer simply society that has been, to cite Henri Lefebvre, ‘completely urbanized’. The entire planet and its atmosphere have been subordinated to the metabolic demands of extremely large human settlements.

There are few issues in British history about which so much unsubstantiated assertion has been written as the adverse impact of industrial urbanization upon popular religiosity. Urban history undergraduates are plied each year with the well-worn secularizing interpretation of urban growth which emanated with the Victorians (mostly churchmen) and which has since been reassembled by modern investigators in forms suitable for digestion in ecclesiastical history, social history (Marxist and non-Marxist), historical sociology, and historical geography. This ‘pessimist’ school of thought has reigned virtually unchallenged since the nineteenth century, giving rise in its endless repetition to simplistic historiographical myths. Arguably, systematic inquiry has suffered because modern urban society has been regarded as inimical to religion.

An important start to disentangling the web of confusion has already been made by Jeff Cox in his admirable but underrated The English Churches in a Secular Society, a study of Lambeth between 1870 and 1930. 'In the first and final chapters of that book, Cox commenced the assault on the ‘pessimist’ school, pointing out in necessarily blunt language the illogicality and empirical weakness in the arguments of many historians and sociologists of religion. That book should have a reserved space on every reading list dealing with this issue. The present article attempts to expand on what might be called the ‘optimist’ school of thought concerning the impact of urbanization upon religion: that the churches survived urbanization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Cox adduced from his research on the 1870–930 period that the great decline of the churches had not occurred before then, the following pages shift the focus to a reassessment of of the evidence on the preceding 100 years.

This article is concerned with civic pride in post-war urban Britain. While many of the development projects during 1945–79 proved to be design failures, suggesting the demise of civic pride, the ambitions of local authorities, planners and developers have largely been ignored or dismissed. Nevertheless, the development plans which emerged during this period reveal a desire to rebuild new, modern and vibrant cities. Moreover, the planning and financing of these new projects highlights the structure of local governance in post-war Britain, with a shift towards new partnerships consisting of the council, the technocrat and the developer. As such, civic pride continued to be evident in the post-war period, both as an aspiration for urban development and as a symbolic form of power.

This article evaluates the inherent ambiguity of the landmark Park Hill housing estate in Sheffield, England. Incorporating Foucault's theories on governmentality and biopolitics, this article explores how techniques of power and control radically affected the way this building was both used and viewed. It shows how conflicting discourses about human needs and desires influenced the way that subjects were housed, managed and regulated in Sheffield during the supposedly homogeneous welfare-state years.

By examining the development of pickpocketing by juveniles (jaguda in Yoruba) in the later colonial era, the paper provides important information on popular urban society in the most populous city in Nigeria and tropical Africa: Ibadan. Representations of the urban experience for a group of criminally-minded citizens are detailed through explorations of street-life, public order, citizenry and neighbourhood reactions. It contributes to the emerging literature on urban patterns in colonial Africa, especially the growth of non-ethnic associations among the lower orders. The resistance of pickpockets to powerful attempts to inculcate conformist modes of behaviour through indigenous and colonial agencies of control and manipulation is highlighted. Both authority systems failed to tackle the problem of street crime beyond the banishment of offenders – a superficial, short-term solution to a well-rooted deviant urban youth culture.

As part of the reconstruction of their built environments at the beginning of the twentieth century, London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago confronted the question of whether to provide public toilets. In comparing the arguments and decisions over this question, this article demonstrates how the male leadership of each city sought to preserve the centuries-old patriarchal tradition of separate public and private spheres and limit women's access to public spaces. It also reveals the gendered dimension of ideas and experiences of the city that underlay the rhetoric surrounding this question.