The urban hierarchy of an English region in the period 1300–1540 is defined, using both documentary and archaeological evidence. The part of the East Midlands studied – Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland – contained twenty towns. ‘Benchmarks’ for placing towns in the hierarchy are explored, including population, topography, social structure, occupational diversity, marketing and migratory networks, administration, and civic and material culture. The conclusion emphasizes the common urban characteristics of all of the towns studied, the compatibility of written and unwritten evidence, and the stability of the urban system.

Water was essential to the commerce, sustenance and cleansing of medieval London and its inhabitants. The paper reviews technologies of supply, access and control, and the uses and risks associated with water during the city's formative period. It surveys the pleasures of water around the city, the paradoxes they involved, and the public supply as an expression of a growing civic culture. It emphasizes the interaction between natural environment, technology and institutions as a fruitful theme for medieval urban history.

This paper seeks to extend the knowledge of small-town structures and of conflict in late medieval urban society by utilizing the unusual survival of a variety of sources for the English small town of Lydd in Kent. The main focus is an analysis of conflicts over capitalizing enclosure in Lydd in the mid-fifteenth century from which it then seeks to generalize, and to implicate towns in the feudalism to capitalism debate previously overwhelmingly confined to rural society.

This article investigates the socio-economic and morphological aspects of how the city of Cork, having lost the salient elements of its medieval character in the early 1600s, transformed into a prosperous Atlantic port city during the period of renaissance it experienced between 1660–1700. Despite the political upheavals caused by the expulsions of the Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s, the city increased in size and population from the early 1660s onwards as it began to thrive on the provisions trade to the colonial plantations of British America. In the process, Cork assumed a higher rank in the general European urban hierarchy.

A content analysis of the Leiden Sketchbook (1577–85) addresses two major issues. First, how a stereotype of an Ottoman town was created by sixteenth-century travellers and second, how the social organization of space and integration of formerly Christian towns into the Ottoman system during the period of its greatest expansion was perceived. The comparison of visual sources with travelogues and historiography confirms the historicity and trustworthiness of the drawings. The drawings are revealing when interpreted in the context of the approach of historical anthropology: they illustrate the travelogues and testify to the sensual experience of their author.

‘This city has a circular form, and such a marvellous roundness is the sign of its perfection. A trench of surprising beauty and breadth surrounds this city and contains, not a swamp or a putrid pool, but living water from fountains stocked with fish and crayfish.’ For friar Bonvesin de la Riva at the end of the thirteenth century, as for most of his successors, glorifying Milan consisted of singing the praises of its running water. Abundant, regular, gushing water was everywhere; it was ‘marvellous to drink, clear, healthy, within reach of the hand’.This praise is evidently for the geographical situation of Milan, which brought it harmony and wealth. But it is also for the Milanese themselves, who brought running water from the rivers to the Lombard capital. Milan, after all, was naturally ‘Medio-Amnium’, at an equal distance from the two rivers (the Ticino and the Adda) that flowed around it. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was at the centre of the most immense system of navigable rivers in Europe, and it owed this condition to three centuries of effort during which the communal power, but also private initiatives, had dug the canals and connected the streams. Water became the vital element in the economy, and the development of Milan multiplied the concurrent, sometimes rival uses of it. How could stagnant water from trenches be reconciled with that of the navigable rivers? How could it be ensured that the water that irrigated the garden would also supply the needs of the paper mill? There were many economic contradictions that could be resolved only by an equitable and measured sharing of the water. At the same time, the growing strength of the seigniorial and territorial state sought to appropriate the management of the water to itself. If the prince succeeded in guaranteeing a supply of clean water, which flowed constantly for the good of the whole community, he would have found the best way not only of participating in the development of his city but also of ensuring that his own power was retained.

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.

This article is concerned with the Cotton Famine affecting the towns of north-west England between 1861–64. It examines charitable responses to the Famine and especially the impact of the charity relationship between recipient and donor. Understanding the complexities of this relationship, based on a reciprocal arrangement and establishing behavoural norms, leads to a wider appreciation of the role of charity in determining class cohesion and in managing the urban environment.

This paper examines the extent to which the Midland Railway workforce in nineteenth-century Derby constituted some form of occupational community. Evidence for this paper is drawn from Midland Railway Company (MR) records combined with census data and other documentary and textual material. It explores the social and domestic world of employees at the Midland Railway Company's headquarters and critically examines the construction of community in both functional and symbolic terms.

Despite the transformation of English cities by the growth of suburbs in the inter-war years, there is a dearth of reliable information about the processes, and especially the firms, that brought these suburbs into existence. Contrary to accepted wisdom – and paradoxically, in view of the scorn heaped upon suburbs by the architectural literati – architects are shown to have been heavily involved in the preparation of building applications for the construction of suburban houses. In spite of the unprecedented amount of house building in the inter-war period, the geographical spheres of influence of both builders and architects were highly localized. However, unlike in the nineteenth century, there is little evidence of speculative building having been undertaken by people whose livelihood was not primarily derived from house building or house selling.

Professionals and volunteers in inter-war England and France advanced a ‘modern’ health movement, placing particular emphasis on children's physical condition. The use of the urban clinic in this process has been considered. However, the mass relocation of young people to the countryside and attempts to generate intra-urban spaces of ‘nature’ for the young were also integral to this movement. Surprisingly, the pioneers of modern urban healthcare supported a ‘return to nature’ by mobilizing anti-urban and pro-rural discourse. Comparing Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, this article addresses the politics that produced this paradox.

During the 1950s the Conservative Government initiated a policy of private housing in new towns in order to temper the financial burdens of the programme and encourage local electoral support for the party. This enquiry, by focusing on Crawley New Town, argues that the policy succeeded in exposing the contradictions of post-war new town philosophy whilst reflecting the wider economic and social changes that had begun to unfold in Britain by the late 1950s.

This article explores the failure of urban renewal in Bombay city during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It shows how colonial rule structured a class-driven process of uneven urban ‘improvements’ that actually exacerbated the problems of congestion, bad housing and environmental blight. In this process, the new forces of modernity were selectively appropriated to accentuate the differentiation in built forms and urban spaces. Finally, through implicit comparisons with contemporary developments in Europe, it reveals the limitations of urban regeneration in a laissez-faire colonial capitalist environment where the search for quick returns by competing economic actors precluded the adoption of long-term policies and interventionist strategies necessary to create the good city life.

Several recent books provide reason for an extended review of aspects of the development and history of Los Angeles. This city is so prominent particularly in the entertainment media that it is often seen (from outside the USA at least) as the archetypal American city, which gives rise to many misconceptions. There is a great deal still to learn from Los Angeles.

This article focuses on the disparity between two urban reports of the Gómez regime (1908–35). Relying on the theoretical platform provided by European positivism, there is, on the one hand, the erudite ideologists' justification of the material achievements of the dictatorship. On the other hand, there is the critique present in the literary characters of the works written by the young political class, where the parochialism of Caracas served as an excuse to attack the social abuses and cultural obscurity of one of Latin America's longest dictatorships.

The appearance of the three substantial volumes that comprise this heroic enterprise under the banner of Cambridge University Press (only the first two being discussed here) marks a defining moment in the development of urban history since Jim Dyos launched the Urban History Group nearly forty years ago. How pleased he would have been with this collaborative realization of a long-standing dream that more than one of us discussed with him well before 1977! Characteristically, however, it was from then that the torch was carried forward by Dyos' energetic and energizing heir to the urban history mantle, Peter Clark. For him, as General Editor, these volumes mark the fulfilment of a personal odyssey that stretches from a time when he and Paul Slack were framing collections or overviews on English Tudor and Stuart towns some three decades ago, through to his more recent work on small towns and provincial societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To have masterminded and driven forward this immense project spanning urban development since the Roman period to 1950 in the island of Britain, as well as editing the 1540–1840 volume and contributing extensively to it, thus represents a highpoint in a remarkable career in this field. Additionally Peter Clark was shrewd enough to enlist the skilled and dependable editorial aid of David Palliser for the medieval volume and of Martin Daunton for the modern, and to gather around him an Advisory Committee containing many of the more influential figures in the recent development of urban history not only in England but also in Scotland and Wales. Let us hope that detailed notes of their strategic discussions have been preserved for posterity.

It is a work of modern scholarship: on time, comprehensive and rather expensive! But there are 944 pages of this third and final volume of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, which could make it value for money. And indeed, like the preceding volumes in the series, it has amassed a galaxy of authors, twenty-eight to be exact not including Martin Daunton who, as editor, has also contributed a weighty introduction and an epilogue. The whole project gives strong affirmation that urban history has a present and a future, a product of the renaissance in urban studies in Britain over the past decade. The renaissance has been a European phenomenon, as witnessed by the founding of the European Urban History Association, also over the last decade, and the new groups of urban historians in Germany and Scandinavia, in France and Holland and even more recently in Italy and elsewhere. What the Cambridge Urban History vol. III sets out to do is to provide a British perspective on the historical process of urbanization from 1840–1950. In the process, claims are made that urban history can offer a framework for addressing many questions in the field of economic and social history, not exclusively, but often with an insight lacking in more general approaches.