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.

When the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, many commentators noted that in their short lives, the towers had come to represent many things: American-led global capitalism, the United States and, most of all, New York City. Their brief role as a shorthand way of saying ‘New York City’ provoked us to ask about ‘urban icons’ more generally. But we did not need such cataclysm to provoke us to consider the topic of icons and their functioning in contemporary global culture. To help illuminate the usefulness of the concept of ‘urban icons’ we held an international conference in order to determine whether the category can be used as a conceptual grid for studying the intersection of visual culture and urban history.

City gates and walls were among the most striking features of the pre-modern city, yet we still know relatively little about their impact on daily life and what it meant to enter a city at that time. The present article explores precisely these questions. The first section outlines the general significance of city gates and walls in pre-modern times. In the second, I examine the four distinct functions of city gates in the early modern period. The third and main section presents a detailed description of the various practices, procedures and problems that accompanied the entrance to a city. Finally, and to conclude, the history of city gates is viewed in conjunction with the broader history of the early modern city and its transformation in the transition to modernity.

One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban centres and the continuity of working-class institutions helped shape and maintain morale during the critical period of 1940–41

In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant and apathetic demographic black holes.

Variations in the fortunes of six late medieval ports in Sussex are considered using data derived from archaeological excavations. Several indicators are used to assess differences in urban fortunes and to critique the concept of urban ‘decline’. The interpretive framework of assemblage theory is then used to examine why the fortunes of these ports varied. The article argues for a turn from discussions of decay and decline towards considerations of changes, continuities and transformations in urban life in late medieval England.

The industrial towns of northern England have been largely overlooked during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article examines newspaper advertising, directories, public building and improvement in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield and identifies a middling, consumerist society, where urban culture was firmly rooted in the localities in which it developed. The nature of this culture challenges simplistic understandings of metropolitan dominance and questions the utility of national models of consumerism and ‘politeness’ that ignore the importance of regional variation and provincialism.

The 1910 International Town Planning Conference is rightly seen as a major moment in the development of modern urban design. It drew together more than 1,000 architects and planners from across the world. At first sight, the conference consequently appears to provide further evidence for the importance of transnational town planning networks in this period. This article, by contrast, highlights the domestic agendas which underwrote the event. It shows that the conference was considerably less successful and less international than has previously been argued. It thus stresses the limitations of the town planning movement: underscoring the continued importance of national differences and national debates.

Recent analysis of the public-private dichotomy in the eighteenth century has portrayed the London household as the locus of architectural innovation as elites distanced themselves from their domestic servants, so implicating it in a fundamental component of modernity, the ‘growth of privacy’. The master-servant divide allegedly widened over the course of the eighteenth century, trickling down from the nobility to the middling sorts. But the testimony of domestic servants demonstrates that much architectural innovation (like back stairs and servant bells) can be found in London houses well before the orthodox model allows, and their cultural transmission is by no means simply one of trickle-down. Continuity and complexity, rather than paradigmatic shift, are much more apparent, bringing into question the use of probate inventory or architectural evidence alone in charting cultural change.

This article explores the transformation of the city of Dalian from a colonial export port to an industrialized core city of the Japanese wartime empire and finally a model production city of the People's Republic of China. These shifts in the economic and political function of the city also resulted in complex identity issues for Dalian's urban residents. Dalian's rise reminds that there were trajectories of urban development and modernity in China which were different from that of Shanghai. Dalian provides an important, local view of the transition from empire to nation in this strategically important part of Manchuria.

Travelling through a city was (and remains) a routine experience for many people, but direct information on such movements is hard to uncover for the more distant past. This article uses selected diaries to explore the ways in which urban residents interacted with and responded to the spaces through which they travelled in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It is argued that while some types of travel and associated environments did generate strong responses that diarists felt worth recording, for the most part urban travel was unproblematic and unremarkable and was therefore rarely remarked upon in life writing.

This special issue addresses the changing role and later history of physical, face-to-face markets for goods, which in modern cities all over the world are mainly or wholly used by individuals and families for consumption purposes. Our focus is on the urban market as a specific urban place and its shifting relationship with important alterations in the governance, society and economy of modern, industrial cities (until c. 1970). The main intention of this collection is to move beyond traditional (western) views of the so-called ‘decline’ of these urban marketplaces. In the history and theorization of the type of cities that came into being all over the world in the wake of economic and political transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘markets’ are usually thought of in terms of their institutional meaning. They are referred to as abstract notions of commerce and exchange, be it in commodities, labour, cash or shares. Seldom are they studied as real, physical marketplaces within cities; as entities that take up space; function in changing production and distribution chains and evolve as a result of changes in wholesaling, retailing, consumption and the political regulation of urban space, society and economy. Indeed, it is often argued that ‘marketplaces’ in this spatially delimited and concrete sense ceased to be of importance once modernization took hold of urban landscapes all over the world. That this is not the case is amply demonstrated by the articles gathered here: markets continued to be vibrant parts of a wide variety of towns and cities across the globe.

The idea that professional football clubs and their supporters are material and cultural expressions of the local has assumed axiomatic status in the academic literature without anything like the depth of empirical evidence that might be expected. Moreover, social trends and changes in the organization of professional football have gone some way to severing these sorts of links between football clubs and their localities. This article presents detailed historical evidence of the complex and multiple local identities surrounding the production and consumption of professional football in Portsmouth, England, in the late 1940s and early 1950s – a period commonly regarded as the ‘golden age’ of football in Britain.

From the influence of the Chicago School of sociology upon studies of black and white relations in England and Wales during and since the early 1940s, to the role of the Ford Foundation in funding research into inter-ethnic problems in Britain's cities during the 1950s and 1960s, the framework for British studies of urban race relations was primarily based upon American points of reference. This American contribution was benign, as was further evidenced in the relationship of urban research to race relations policy in Britain after 1965.

The long hold of the idea that ‘India is the land of villages’ on the imaginations of politicians, policy makers and scholars alike was a result not just of the numerical preponderance of the village, but because it represented the space of an organic, unsullied authenticity. Needless to say, in many accounts, well into the late twentieth century, the authenticity was only made possible by relinquishing a claim to the turbulence of history, and indeed on ‘modernity’ itself. The Indian city in the period of colonial rule, on the contrary, became a heaving, undisciplined monster, the site of a corrupting modernity, illegitimate and even unauthentic in its form. Apart from the monumental cities of Delhi or Lucknow, and some attention to ‘temple’ towns, most monographs on modern Indian cities written in the last 60 years remained without a legible past and were the work largely of geographers or sociologists. Those early pioneers who explored the history of the modern Indian city on its own terms, such as Narayani Gupta, Mariam Dossal or Veena Oldenburg, were lonely outcrops in a vast field of historical works that were largely rooted in the countryside. The peasant and the village, rather than the worker and the city, occupied centre-stage in the most important phases of post-independence Indian historiography. Since the history of Indian nationalism gripped the scholars of the immediate post-independence years, and economic history powered by Marxism informed the next phase of writing (both of which were enormously productive lines of enquiry), the Indian city was embedded in works that traced either the fate of anti-colonial nationalism or the broader trajectories of labour and capital. The innovative approaches of the Subaltern Studies collective from the early 1980s drew historiographic attention once more to the rebellious peasant and rural communities or mentalities.

This article explores the changing urban form and society of waterfront Liverpool in the last generation of the city's role as a traditional general cargo seaport. Deriving much of its evidence from a collaborative public history project, it demonstrates the continuing vitality of the near waterfront zone into the 1960s, and interprets the subsequent sudden collapse of the district with the closure of the south docks in 1972. Interviewees identified sites of memory that cast light on both the routine working of the district and the nature of its fall into dereliction and abandonment.

In April 1980 a group of urban historians and political scientists met at the University of York under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council to pool what they knew about the changing relations between central and local government and to identify areas for future research. The initiative had come from the political scientists whose interest in the subject had been stimulated by recent government policy. Those who attended from among the historians had to confess that this was not a subject that had recently been much discussed among them. When I was invited by the editor of this Yearbook to contribute an article on a neglected aspect of urban history, it seemed a good opportunity to draw the attention of the urban history group to the subject. What follows is an amended version of the paper that had originally been written for the SSRC seminar.

This article examines the thriving lodging house sector in early modern Venice, arguing that such spaces of temporary accommodation offer a valuable key to understanding how mobility and migration shaped the daily lived experience of the city. Lodging houses were important both to the many Venetian residents who profited from renting out rooms, and to the people who stayed in them, and found there companionship, conversation and access to social and professional networks. Considering the kinds of encounters, conflicts and exchanges that unfolded in these shared spaces, the article offers new insight into the functioning of a pre-modern multicultural metropolis.

It seems likely that historians in the past have seriously underestimated the number of English townsmen in the early fourteenth century. In London alone there may have been 80–100,000 around 1300. The population of Norwich in the early fourteenth century was higher than used to be thought, and it was growing: Rutledge proposes 17,000 for 1311 and 25,000 for 1333. Keene's estimate of about 10,000 for Winchester in the early fourteenth century can serve as a basis for estimating the population of other towns in the same period. Those whose taxable value in 1334, and whose contribution to the poll tax of 1377, was at least as great as Winchester's, probably had a population equal to Winchester's or greater around 1300. By this argument about fifteen towns, including London, are likely to have had 10,000 or more people at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and perhaps 5 per cent of England's population lived in towns of this rank. Estimates taking account of smaller towns are much more precarious, but it is possible that all told 10 per cent of England's population lived in towns of over 2,000 inhabitants and that a further 5 per cent lived in small boroughs, some with as few as 300 people. Even this estimate does not take account of many small market towns, not described as boroughs, that had elementary urban characteristics.