This article considers the relationship between landed culture and the emergent middle classes in a rapidly expanding urban context substantially removed from the more familiar examples. The port of Grimsby expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, displaying many facets in common with other industrial centres and boasting a substantial middle-class presence from a relatively early stage. At the same time the extent to which Grimsby's middle classes assumed a leading role in the town's development is questionable and subject to qualification.

This article analyses different aspects of illicit artisan work, especially in early modern Lübeck. It was a significant political problem especially for the guilds, because in their view it was a severe encroachment on their corporate liberties. In particular, the social control of clandestine artisans was a controversial issue: while the guilds regarded the right to carry out visitations as a central part of their privileges, this practice clashed with other civic liberties for example the protection of the ‘house-peace’ (Hausfriede).

The social relationships of housing tenure shape urban life. One of the most peculiar tenure regimes emerged in the towns of East and Central Africa during the colonial period. In accordance with the colonial policy of trusteeship, employers and municipalities were together responsible for housing all permanently employed Africans, who constituted the majority in most urban centres. Contemporaries noted that employers and municipalities commonly failed to do their job, a judgement that historians have endorsed. In fact, their contribution varied greatly from place to place and, though generally insufficient, was still substantial. This paternalistic tenure regime created dependency and open-ended commitments that could not be met.

The building industry's organization has been relatively invariant down through history due to housing's unique characteristics: durability, fixity in location, complex co-ordination of various trades on site and financing its great costs. That organizational form has allowed speculative development to flourish periodically during large increases in urban population, despite considerable risk. The same building and speculative processes occurred in ancient Rome and cities in England and the US at greatly different periods of time but those histories do not acknowledge the similarities of development processes that each reports. A separate ‘housing literature’ that steps back from particulars possibly explains why these accounts are so alike.

This article examines the delicate relationship between the civic privilege of wine retailing and the constitutional emphasis on order in a city republic. Burghers appreciated the revenues from beverage sales, while urban authorities worried about destabilizing effects. In the context of state formation, Bern claimed control over public houses throughout its territory, but closer analysis suggests that socio-economic and political interests were constantly renegotiated, not only within the capital but also between centre and periphery.

The history of suburbs has received so much scholarly attention in recent decades that it is time to take stock of what has been established, in order to discern aspects of suburbs that are still unknown. To date, the main lines of inquiry have been dedicated to the origins, growth, diverse typologies, culture and politics of suburbs, as well as to newer topics such as the gendered nature of suburban space. The vast majority of these studies have been about particular times and places. The authors propose a new perspective on the study of suburbs, one which will begin to investigate the transformations of suburbs after they have been established. Taking the entire era from the mid-nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century as a whole, it is argued that suburbs should be subjected to a longitudinal analysis, examining their development in the context of metropolises that usually enveloped them within a generation or two of their founding. It is proposed that investigation of these ‘transitions’ should be undertaken in parallel with the changes that occur in the life-cycles of their residents. It is suggested that an exploration of the interaction of these factors will open a broad new research agenda for suburban history as a subfield of urban history.

The regulation of public space was fundamental to the achievement of ‘urban stability’ in the early modern period. As such, this article analyses the resolution of two tavern conflicts in eighteenth-century Lyon. Although the city council as well as royal representatives had an interest in administering peace within the city walls, the case studies demonstrate that public order depended upon a complex process of negotiation between different institutions and that townspeople themselves played prominent roles in the regulation of public affairs.

Shortly into his path-breaking study of The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London, Peter Guillery remarks that ‘houses are principally interesting because people live in them’ (p. 10). To urban historians the observation might seem unexceptional, even banal. To many architectural historians his comment would be incomprehensible. Therein lies the difficulty for the urban historian with a concern for housing, public buildings and planning. There is a wealth of serious academic studies of architecture, but the majority are written in a language which can seem arcane to the uninitiated and address an agenda which appears little interested in those who inhabited the buildings. At the heart of the problem lies the requirement to treat the built form primarily as a work of art, so that what is studied has to justify itself as an object worthy of aesthetic consideration, and has to relate to an established stylistic canon and chronology. Judged in this light, considerations of user and usage are largely irrelevant, and can appear an invitation to slip into the sort of popular architectural discourse, common in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, in which dwellings are valued primarily for the celebrities and anecdotes associated with them. People are germane only to the extent that they designed buildings, as architects, or commissioned them, as patrons of the arts. Among the two most influential figures in developing and in particular disseminating the art-history perspective on architecture in twentieth-century Britain were Nikolaus Pevsner and John Summerson. Today their presence is felt not only in the world of scholarship, where it has not gone unchallenged, but also and more importantly in popular perceptions of architecture, as mediated through guide literature, the amenity societies (like the National Trust, the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society) and the conservation movement. It is an influence which has been ambivalent. On the one hand, it has led to a far deeper popular understanding and appreciation of architectural form and its history, and has saved many fine buildings. On the other hand, it is has led to a dissociation of form and human usage, a devaluation of structures and traditions not defined as canonic and a blindness to the subjective and ideological nature of architectural history itself.

Readers of English can currently refer to only two works that offer synthetic overviews of the history of European cities from the period of classical antiquity into the twentieth century. We have long had the powerfully argued and highly readable book by the architectural critic, Louis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (1961). Beginning with the earliest settlements in the Near East and continuing through the rise of the suburbs in the United States, Mumford's volume tells a dramatic story in which urbanity at its best (as exemplified by such communities as Athens and Amsterdam) gave way to a succession of assaults, whether in the form of Baroque planning, rampant industrialization, oversized ‘megalopolises’ or automobiles. Continuing in the vein of many earlier critics, Mumford saw the modern big city as a depressing departure from earlier norms of urban beauty and human solidarity, and his view of the future was bleak indeed. Nearly four decades later, Sir Peter Hall offered a similarly large-scale but otherwise very different view of the broad sweep of the urban past, in his Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (1998). He constructed his book not as a narrative but instead as clusters of case studies, in which sixteen cities appear as scenes and agents of various types of exemplary achievement. Focusing on Europe, but not restricting himself to it, Hall presented not only Athens, Florence, Paris, Vienna, London, Manchester and Berlin but also New York, San Francisco and Tokyo as ‘places that [have] ignited the sacred flame of intelligence and human imagination’ (p. 7). It is primarily for this reason that, in Hall's view, the history of great metropolises is inseparable from the history of civilization itself.

During the 1730s, Bristol acquired an unenviable reputation as a city in which sodomy was endemic and rarely punished by the civil power. Although the cause lay partly in difficulties experienced in securing convictions, the resolve of magistrates was exposed to fierce scrutiny. Taking an effusive curate's moral vindication of the city as a starting point, this article examines the social production of sodomy in eighteenth-century Bristol, analyses prosecution patterns and considers the importance of collective moral reputation in the forging of civic history.

In recent years considerable scholarly attention has been given to the nature and significance of the ceremonial entries into important cities by kings and other great people. A prevalent interpretation of these entries sees them essentially as a ‘monarchical institution’ with little significance attached to the role the citizens played in these spectacles. Yet other views are slowly ‘catching up’. A useful – though more descriptive than analytical – contribution to these civic oriented approaches is made by Neil Murphy in his ‘Receiving royals in later medieval York: civic ceremony and the municipal elite, 1478–1503’, Northern History, 43 (2006), 241–55. York was a city that received considerable royal attention, and unlike most English provincial centres, York's civic records are such that information about the pageants, programmes and performances can be obtained. Murphy essentially only considers three royal visits to the city: Richard III in 1483, Henry VII in 1486 and Princess Margaret en route to Scotland in 1503. The most prominent elements which he emphasizes and illustrates are as follows. The organization and control of the procession rested strongly with the merchant elite. The procession was organized to pass through streets largely inhabited by merchants and past the churches specially connected with them. Major episodes were scheduled at sites associated with civic authority: at Micklegate Bar, the Ouse Bridge and the Common Hall, yet Murphy also stresses the relevance of ‘public space’ within these entries. A particularly interesting observation is that considerable trouble was taken to associate ceremonial entries with the city's play cycles. Thus for Henry VII's visit in 1486 the city paid the weavers to put on their Corpus Christi Day pageant. When it was learned that the king planed another visit to York in August of the following year, the Corpus Christi play was delayed until then. Murphy highlights several interesting details, for example the way in which the city was notified of royal intentions to visit; the importance of the scarlet robes worn by all the city's rulers; the means adopted to keep a procession under mobile illumination. Special importance attaches to the gifts normally made to the king, especially a new monarch, or other royal entrants. Thus in 1483 Richard III was given 500 marks, his queen 100 ‘gold shillings’. These were very large sums in relation to the York municipal revenue and reflect Richard III's popularity in the city. Henry VII on his visit in 1486 – several months after Bosworth – agreed to do without a gift. Murphy pays little attention to the possible implications of this point. It is somewhat astonishing that he also fails to analyse the political contents of the pageants staged by the city on this occasion: York went to considerable trouble to stress the city's mythological past.

The writing of this review has been complicated this year due to the fact that it has had to be prepared rather earlier than in the past, which has somewhat skewed the careful construction of statistical comparisons that have been developed over previous years. The problem is compounded by the fact that last year's review was, in turn, also prepared earlier than in previous years, leading to a backlog on 2005 theses to be reported. The change of schedule also means that the British and Irish thesis list, the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, has not yet reported on the 2006 theses, while the American Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/ dissertations has reported many of the 2006 theses. Thus this review is a slightly mixed offering in that it features theses from both 2005 and 2006, but it is hoped that this problem will have been overcome by 2008. It was, however, not difficult to find theses which fit the liberal definition of urban history that has always underpinned this review. For the first time it was necessary to cull severely the identified theses to produce a reasonable coverage of topics and a manageable number of theses to review. This suggests that urban history continues to be a vibrant and productive discipline.