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.

This article analyses London's street markets in the years between 1850 and 1939. It shows how this was a period of significant growth for street markets, with both steeply increasing numbers of markets and a steady increase in the number of stalls overall. These markets were informal and unauthorized for much of the period under discussion; the administrative/local government context was complex, and competing authorities (the City of London, London County Council, metropolitan boroughs and national government) hesitated in regulating the organic growth of street market trading, while also recognizing the contribution it made to bringing cheap food and commodities to the population of London. It will be argued that the street market, far from being merely the survival of a primitive form of retail, flourished in response to modernity in London. It should be analysed alongside other developing forms of retail, and considered for its contribution to the culture and material culture of the city.

This article examines the decisive role of the pneumonic plague epidemic of 1904 in re-shaping the racial geography of Johannesburg after the South African War. The panic which this epidemic evoked swept away the obstacles which had blocked such a step since 1901 and saw the Indian and African inhabitants of the inner-city Coolie Location forcibly removed to Klipspruit Farm 12 miles outside of the city as a health emergency measure. There, the latter were compelled to remain, even after the epidemic had waned, making it henceforth the officially designated site for their residence. In 1963, now greatly expanded, it was named Soweto. From small germs do mighty townships grow.

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.

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 examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

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.

The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English-speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg's black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial considerations determined the council's provision of leisure facilities.

The absence of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars. However, there is also no satisfactory consensus on the exact meaning or contents of medieval ‘urban historiography’. Some were ‘official’ city chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their towns. We propose an analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.

This article examines multiplex cinema development and its close association with shopping centre expansion programmes in Australia. The article argues that while multiplex cinema construction in Australia echoed international developments, it also resulted from coalescing interests between local retail developers and film exhibitors, was guided by planning legislation and shaped by escalating institutional investment in the retail industry. Data mapping the emergence, growth and consolidation of multiplexes in Sydney, Australia's largest city, is used to illustrate this development, contributing to urban histories of the city and understandings of the ways in which its contours have been reshaped by consumer capitalism.

Urban history stands at a point of unprecedented opportunity. This paper is designed to outline the nature of that opportunity and to initiate a discussion on the manner in which urban historians can make important intellectual and cultural contributions to current debates. To understand this situation it is necessary to examine the origins of the urban history which dominated the 1960s and 1970s, and then to show how the political and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s provided first challenge and then opportunity to those who believe that the study of towns and cities, of urbanism as such is a worthwhile activity.

This article explores some of the ways in which the closely regulated layouts and property boundaries within Scottish medieval towns may have influenced the form and character of domestic buildings during the late medieval and early modern periods. Drawing together strands of scattered evidence from archaeology, morphology, history and architecture, it re-examines how plot boundaries, main thoroughfares and subsidiary access passages acted as site constraints in relation to the design and configuration of individual structures or groups of buildings, focusing in particular on building frontages and so-called ‘encroachments’ such as booths, stairs, galleries and arcades.

The descriptions of small towns in John Leland's Itinerary provide valuable evidence about their economic functions and fortunes in a period often categorized as one of urban decline. Leland described markets, ports, industries, buildings and transport links. He identified examples of small towns expanding, through new commercial and industrial opportunities, notably cloth manufacture, as well as others in decline, and suggested that investment by entrepreneurs and benefactors had enabled some small towns to prosper. These experiences reflected both the particular functions of individual towns and their role in wider regional economies.

This article sets out the incidence of clandestine marriage in Restoration London. Analysis of parish registers of large suburban parishes suggests that such private unions peaked twice in the capital's history, immediately after the Restoration and again in the first half of the eighteenth century. Understanding the phenomenon is important since the increase in private weddings on the scale encountered was unique to London. Historians have failed to explain the growth in such unions satisfactorily. The practice is unlikely to be explained by the growth of religious dissent, by a desire to save money or to circumvent parish or parental control over choice of spouse. The custom's popularity can be explained more convincingly by reference to wealthier Londoners′ traditional predilection for private weddings, which was sanctioned by the church, and to emulation of the habit by those lower in the social scale. Adoption of the practice was further facilitated by increasing levels of disposable income and by the commercialization of the wedding ceremony after the Restoration.

The concept of civil society provides a useful means of evaluating the social and political relationships of British towns. Civil society refers to the non-prescriptive relationships that lie between the state and kin. Such relationships are associated with the existence of the free market, the rule of law and a strong voluntary associational culture. Both theoretical analysis and historical evidence link civil society with the nature of urban places, their complexity, their function as a central place and their operation as a focus for flows of information. Between 1780 and 1820 the agencies of civil society in Britain provided an arena for making choices, for reasoned informed debate and for the collective provision and consumption of services in an open and pluralist manner.

After years of concentration on the working class, social historians of nineteenth-century urban Britain have recently rediscovered the upper and middle classes. Various writers have recognized these groups, and elites within them, as significant subjects in themselves and as major influences in urban society generally.

Summoning the popularity and prestige of cinema, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) invented the image of Baghdad for Iraqi audiences as the sight/site of oil modernity in the 1950s. In other words, oil urbanization, or the modernization of the city as shaped by the petroleum industry and its revenues, in Iraq cannot be understood apart from the representation of Baghdad as visible evidence of petroleum's promise to benefit the national population. The British-controlled oil company in Iraq produced a programme of at least two-dozen sponsored films and cine-magazine episodes between 1951 and 1958, which this essay examines as an emblematic case of neo-colonial film, constituting an archive of media practices that bridge the categories of colonial film on one hand, and industrial film on the other. After World War II, the Atlantic Charter reinforced the right to democratic self-rule as a global norm and the British state developed creative tactics to abet its continued control over strategic resources in its colonized territories. Oil above all became central to this story and, as this essay will show, British oil companies played a fundamental role towards reinventing the imperial project in the post-colonial context of Iraq. Through a contextualized analysis of the IPC films, I argue that the company public relations office utilized the conventional approaches and standard formats of colonial and industrial film – including montage, scripted voiceover and staged b-roll – to narrativize the association between neo-colonialist practices of oil extraction and national development as causal, inherent and positive.

For much of the 1970s and early 1980s historians using an urban focus to analyse social class, social stratification and political conflict led the field. The work of John Foster, Geoffrey Crossick, Robert Gray, Patrick Joyce and others helped set an agenda to which all social historians responded. Today research of a similar type can easily be found, but even whilst this shows a high degree of conceptual sophistication and empirical rigour it seems less central to the discipline and to the broad concerns of social history than was the case even a decade ago. In this speculative paper I reflect on some of the reasons for this and consider the contemporary prospects for studies of the relationship between urban history and social class.