David Reeder, who has died aged 74, made a major contribution to the understanding of two academic fields: urban history, and the history of education. The son of a railway fireman, David was born in Hull in 1931 and evacuated during the war from the family's council house first to Rawcliffe, near Goole, and then to York in 1942. There David attended Nunethorp Grammar School, where he was head boy, and won a scholarship place to Durham University, graduating in 1952. David Reeder began a 50 year association with the University of Leicester when he embarked upon a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education course in 1952. Heavily influenced by his National Service experience as an RAF Education Officer (1953–56), and by his spells successively as a teacher and superintendent of the Evening Institute in Leicester (1956–59), lecturer in history at Westminster College (1959–62) and as Head of the Faculty of Education at Garnett College, Roehampton (1962–66), David initially established a reputation in nineteenth-century British history by publishing general historical syntheses.

Using case studies of English county towns, this article contributes towards the creation of a geography of scientific culture in England, 1750–1850. It argues that although emulation of the metropolis was important, provincial scientific culture had its own distinctive identity often concentrated through the lens of county town sociability and associations. The second part analyses data on literary and scientific institutions from the 1851 census in order to determine whether county towns continued to retain their importance in scientific culture by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The publication in 2000 of the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain presented British urban historians with an ideal opportunity to take stock of the current state of research in their discipline. For Welsh urban historians it raised a number of particularly thorny issues. Whilst it contained some important chapters focused exclusively on the history of Welsh towns, it also identified Wales as one of the most under-researched areas of urban Britain. This special issue, dedicated specifically to Welsh urban history, has been conceived in part as a response to that finding. It also represents the collective efforts of scholars, new and established, whose research on urban Wales was presented at a conference on ‘Understanding Urban Wales’ at the University of Wales Swansea in September 2003. The event demonstrated the existence of a healthy ‘critical mass’ of scholarship, at both postgraduate and postdoctoral level, on Welsh towns and their development.

This article is a case study of the racially mixed, seigniorial borough of Ruthin (modern Denbighshire) in the early fourteenth century. It seeks to explore material inequalities and social aspects of the integration of English and Welsh burgesses in an urban setting. It concludes that whilst a disproportionate quantity of wealth did lie with the borough's English residents, Welsh burgesses enjoyed nearly comprehensive access to the community's wealth-generating and status-affirming activities. And, the behaviour of Ruthin's elites was more strongly dictated by their socioeconomic strata than racial background.

The aim of this article is to study how the Swedish cities Linköping and Norrköping treated new working-class suburbs during the period from 1860 to 1890, by looking at the extension of piped water supply. The author concludes that working-class suburbs were located in poor, geographically unfavourable and unsanitary places, to which extensions of water could be technically demanding and expensive, which led to frequent urban inability or unwillingness to help. It is also suggested that by denying water cities separated spatially between city and suburb, thereby underlining already existing environmental and even spatial injustice between the two.

Although it is widely acknowledged that urban oligarchy pre-dominated across medieval England, oligarchy's foundations are only partly known. This article argues that part of oligarchy's success derived from close social interaction between oligarchs and the rest of the citizens. A case study of social networks and arbitration within the city of Wells demonstrates how the elite insinuated themselves into the town's social web, establishing and securing their influence and power. Moreover, such a social role brought the oligarchs together often and helped to define the elite. Such power encouraged a more benevolent form of oligarchy than later prevailed.

This article examines the level of expenditure on health care provision in English and Welsh county boroughs during the inter-war period. It focuses in particular on key individual services such as maternity and child welfare to show that while there was a general trend to increased municipal health care expenditure, when this is disaggregated significant variations emerge between services, between boroughs and over time. It is argued that such analysis is of itself revealing, previously neglected and necessary for further qualitative analysis of the as yet little understood inter-war municipal medicine sector.

On the basis of an emerging reassessment of the medieval urban experience in southern Wales, this article seeks to challenge the predominant view of Wales as being overwhelmingly rural before the nineteenth century. The study of Welsh towns has been limited by the survival of sources that in other regions have generated a renewed interest in the study of medieval urban society. Employing unusual sources that are available, generalizations are made here from the findings of case studies of two towns, Haverfordwest and Chepstow, in order to contribute to a regional synthesis of the urban experience in southern Wales. From this regional synthesis it will be possible to compare urban society in late medieval southern Wales with other regions in Britain and Europe in order to determine its particular characteristics, and with implications for later developments.

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.

This article analyses the relationship between the port-city of Bremen and its different hinterlands. It examines four determinants of port–hinterland linkages: the political framework; the volume and pattern of trade; the extent and significance of population transfers; and Bremen's contribution to the transmission of cultural innovation. It focuses, in turn, on trade, migration and cultural exchange as distinct, but interrelated, fields of interaction and discusses new theoretical approaches for understanding the historical complexity of port–hinterland relations and the extent to which trading, migration and cultural hinterlands were part of an interactive system.

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.

Although early modern Welsh towns were small by European standards, appearing to follow Clark's model for Europe's northern periphery of localized settlements not closely integrated within a wider urban hierarchy, Welsh towns showing greatest expansion were commercial outlets for specialist produce within the wider commercial matrix of southern Britain. Their smallness indicates a role within this wider, integrated network rather than constriction born of isolation.

The concept of community is frequently used to describe urban ethnic minority groups. What this term actually means to the community members themselves, however, is often left unexplored. Using interviews undertaken with Italian and Greek-Cypriot residents of Leicester, this article analyses how the notion of community is recognized, understood and projected from within. Key findings include the observation that the discussion of community is framed in very particular ways, both historically and spatially; that the concept of community is used as a metaphor for the expression of wider issues of urban ownership and belonging; and that ultimately the real essence of community lies less in the significance of physical structures and more in a series of fluid social interactions, underpinned by a shared code of cultural norms and values.

In this article, the town of Swansea is suggested as an exemplar of pre-nineteenth-century Welsh industrial and urban development. Small in comparison with English towns, Swansea in 1801 had nevertheless risen up the Welsh urban rank-order to stand second only, in terms of population, to the industrial boomtown Merthyr Tydfil. Contemporary descriptions of Swansea as ‘Copperopolis’, ‘the Metropolis of Wales’, ‘the Mecca of Nonconformity’ and ‘the Brighton [or Naples] of Wales’ reflect the range of its functions at this time, and the high regard in which the town was held, both by its inhabitants and by visitors. Such a town inevitably attracted settlers and this article also examines eighteenth-century population change, the scale of immigration and the provenance of the settlers, and attempts to link the influx with the physical development of the town.

Through a case study of Birmingham fire brigade, this article examines the plethora of international networking activities undertaken during the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Birmingham fire brigade, under the control of Alfred Tozer, led British municipal participation in early international fire networks, attending international congresses and exhibitions in Berlin and London, and also visiting continental cities to inspect fire brigades and their appliances. Locating the study firmly within historical debates concerning the embryonic international municipal movement, this article demonstrates that municipal institutions participated in networking activities as part of a policy learning and knowledge-transfer process.

Between 1950 and 1971 Birmingham City Council built 464 housing blocks of five or more storeys. The city pursued parallel programmes of building high-rise flats both in the central areas on slum cleared land and in its suburbs on greenfield sites. Examining Birmingham's post-war suburban housing programme, this article suggests that the use of high-rise in suburban areas represented an important change in the nature of British cities, both in the use of a particular building type on the urban fringe and also in the location of high-density workers' housing far outside of the city core.

This article evaluates the contribution that analysis of local politics and urban elites in the small town can make to urban history in Wales. It is suggested that in the context of the small town, the personality and public persona of the individual, and a discourse emphasizing public service to the town, were as crucial as socio-occupational status in establishing the individual as someone suitable for a position of social leadership. Local politicians were ‘celebrities’ that nevertheless had to negotiate their reciprocal relationship with the electorate and townspeople, and detailed analysis demonstrates the contingency and complexity of local politics in the small town.