This article explores the visibility of the cyclist in Dublin from the 1930s to the 1980s. This visibility is explored in three ways: how the historian can and has apprehended the figure of the cyclist within the city, how the cyclist made him or herself visible within the urban environment and how cyclists were seen within techniques and conventions of urban planning. I suggest that a close examination of the place of the cyclist within the city provides a suggestive tool for understanding the implicit assumptions of urban change at mid-century.

Oaths of office are generally well preserved for many English towns and cities and they can tell us a great deal about the theoretical and (perhaps to a lesser extent) practical duties of office-holders. In the light of recent scholarly interest in oaths in the context of investiture ceremonies, this article examines the rhetoric of oath texts to highlight some aspects of the political cultures of urban office-holding elites and their attempts to maintain stability.

In investigating urban culture, historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made and the modern, and have paid less attention to the role of nature and the past, which seem the opposite of what the town stands for. This survey, which takes as its case-study England, argues that nature and the past have always been part of urban life, but as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, they became if anything an even more important element in city and town culture.

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

The article considers the impact of new arterial roads on the mobilities of the wealthier inter-war Londoner, and argues that they occasioned an emergent form of automobility that was modern, sensational and exciting for the metropolitan driver, but was also highly dangerous, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists living in suburban homes near these roads.

Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long shadow cast by mining and the urban metropoles, with their centripetal pull on labour and the state, making the company town an archetypal urban form on the rural periphery.

The adoption of non-traditional housing by local authorities is customarily explained in terms of economic factor shortages or a nationally determined policy discourse. This underestimates the significance of distinctly local understandings of civic responsibility. Based on Leicester and Nottingham, this article argues that those influences frequently used to predict outcomes – like party political allegiance – mattered less in decision-making than a city's intrinsic view of itself. Such perceptions were grounded in subtle constructions of civic community, perceived need and political reinterpretation. Particularly important was the role of the local press. Even cities with similar problems, therefore, could be represented, and subsequently see themselves, in very dissimilar terms and act accordingly.

De-industrialization and the rise of the service sector have formed the basis of recent attempts to develop a new metanarrative of economic change in twentieth-century Britain. Their effects have been taken as writ through labour market statistics or aggregate measures of gross domestic product. However, by focusing on particular micro-economic spaces, a different story emerges. Using the inner areas of Liverpool as a case-study, this article shows how the city's social and economic problems were underwritten by the decline of the service sector, located around the port. By reading the effects of social and economic change through accounts of the physical environment, it demonstrates how urban decay and dereliction provided material resonance to Liverpool's economic decline. The city's landscape of urban decay and dereliction encompassed the infrastructure of everyday life – housing, roads and even trees – as well as that of economic activity, including the docks and warehouses. Taken together, this article shows how this landscape of urban decay and dereliction came to be constituted as an agent within Liverpool's continued economic decline in the 1970s rather than simply being a reflection of it.

Historians have argued that American social welfare reformers looked to Europe for examples of successful programmes. This article provides a counter-case where a progressive American state, Massachusetts, developed public health reforms prior to their British counterparts. Social concerns about reducing cases of tuberculosis in Massachusetts' cotton manufacturing cities led to the transference of the public health discourse from the urban living environment to the workplace. This same relationship could have been applied within the Lancashire industry. Instead, the urban public health discourse focused on living conditions. In both countries, local and state political structures influenced health campaigners' actions.

Most evidence for leasing in medieval towns is episodic and unquantifiable. An exceptional Norwich source has been used to estimate the scale of demand for rented accommodation and to assess the resulting multiple occupation of freehold properties. The way in which a growing population was housed at Norwich and the physical and social consequences is examined. Much of the demand for rented property was met by landlords who were both secular and private, suggesting that in this respect fourteenth-century Norwich resembled Bristol rather than Oxford. Finally, the response of institutional landlords to an apparently growing demand and the behaviour of rents is considered. Falling rent receipts from the late 1330s may be an indicator of economic rather than population decline.

Urban icons were common in the Roman world, with monuments, cityscapes and personifications all used as metonyms. Yet an icon for the most important city of all is not easily identified. Rome was always sui generis, too large to be easily captured visually. Filled with innumerable wonders, no single structure or artwork stood for the whole. Representing the collective, as well as the great extent of the empire, the city could not be encapsulated in a single image.

Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Those living in naval sailortowns were geographically and culturally marginalized from the centres of economic and political power and their relationship with the civic and naval authorities was one which varied between compromise and resistance.

When John Leland toured England in the 1540s, he observed water conduits in several towns, including a number of smaller urban centres. Subsequent historians and archaeologists, however, have seriously understated the number and importance of piped water systems in English towns. This article uses studies of individual towns, together with civic records and Leland's Itinerary, to examine the sources and technologies of urban water supplies, the origins of civic piped water systems, their relationships to other local systems, finance, management and oversight. It will argue that the growth in piped supplies by civic bodies in the later Middle Ages reflects the importance of charitable provision and the efforts of civic authorities to establish, maintain and regulate them. An appendix lists medieval English towns known to have provided public access to piped water supplies by c. 1550.

The medieval period is often regarded as part of the statistical ‘Dark Ages’ in English history before the nineteenth century. The figures which are available were mostly collected for immediate administrative or fiscal purposes far removed from the future needs of historians and by a state lacking the comprehensive administrative organization of a census-taking modern government. Medieval man in particular is usually thought to have had little concept of the meaning of high numbers. In 1371, for instance, the English parliament believed that there were 40,000 parishes in the country when in fact there were less than 9,000. Again, ‘when the pope was assured by his advisers that the Black Death had cost the lives of 42, 836, 486 throughout the world, or the losses in Germany were estimated at 1, 244, 434, what was meant was that an awful lot of people had died’. Estimates of total populations have of course been a famous source of controversy. ‘Medieval man like classical man before him was little interested in figures. Neither showed any desire to formulate a precise estimate of population, and when figures were called for they hazarded only the wildest guesses.’ Even for England, where more promising evidence survives than for any other country, Professor Postan concluded that it was not possible to measure the total size of the population at any given point of time. For 1086 for example, estimates of total population could have a ‘heroic’ margin of error of up to 150 per cent. Historians, he decided, should rather be concerned with the dynamics of medieval population than with global numbers.

This essay explores the concept of collective memory as a component of political culture in pre- and especially post-Reformation provincial towns. Pre-Reformation political culture depended heavily on a collective memory shaped by traditional religious experience and institutions. When so many of these were destroyed by the Reformation, it became necessary for the ruling elites of provincial towns to create alternative cultural forms, and thus to refashion a usefully legitimizing political culture. Three forms of this refashioned and legitimizing collective memory – civic regalia, civic portraiture and historical writing – are examined as they applied to the provincial urban milieu in the years c. 1540–1640.

Existing research in urban environmental history is often characterized by a narrow viewpoint or limited material reflecting the rationalist approach typical of white, middle-aged, middle-class and educated men. This orientation risks overlooking the viewpoint of the majority of urban dwellers: ordinary men, women, children, the elderly and different ethnic groups. The article focuses on the urban environmental history of children, because childhood forms the foundation for our relationship with nature. Environmental reminiscences offer fruitful material for the study of children's urban environmental history as well as children's contemporary relationships with the urban landscape. The article integrates aspects of urban history, environmental history and evolutionary psychology.

As an administrative tool of police reform, the introduction of house numbering in eighteenth-century Geneva was the result of a broad desire for urban transparency that resulted in the production of a new ‘regime of visibility’. This article examines how the logic of ‘number’ transformed the way in which urban space was conceived, organized and governed. As a political technology, the spatial practice of house numbering enabled governmental officials to divide, count, identify and classify urban populations in order to regulate the spaces of circulation in the modern city. Although the city's house-numbering system is taken for granted by most of the town-dwellers today, the current study illustrates how these police techniques encountered considerable resistance when they were initially imposed during the latter half of the eighteenth century.

This essay examines the nature and role of mythical histories in English medieval towns. Myths concerning the origins and special destinies of particular cities were widespread and long-lasting. For contemporaries they acquired meaning through their interaction with changing historical circumstances. Evidence for their circulation in both elite and popular domains is reviewed. Their significance was not unambiguous; they were, rather, contested territory, a means through which townspeople articulated their particular views about the nature and purpose of urban society. Their effect, therefore, could be to assist both in the formation and in the transformation of that society. Issue is taken with the argument that the early modern period saw a weakening of the potential force of such myths.

This article explores how notions of African authenticity informed urban planning in post-colonial Africa. It examines an attempt by Tanzania's ruling party to build a new national capital in the sparsely populated region of Dodoma. Paradoxically, Dodoma's planners sought to build a modern African city based on the social principles of the traditional African village. This vision of African village authenticity legitimized Tanzania's ruling party by linking its authority to a purely African, rather than colonial, past. At the same time, it allowed politicians to criminalize urban poverty by attributing it to racial betrayal rather than broader structural failures.

The paper investigates the activities of the eight London Commissions of Sewers during the period 1800–47. It is argued that the criticisms of the Commissions made by Edwin Chadwick and later historians are undeserved. The Commissions were efficient, innovative and honest, and successfully kept pace with the ever-changing sanitary needs of the capital. Although they operated under severe statutory constraints, they constructed many miles of sewer and can be seen as the true instigators of the nineteenth-century sanitary revolution.