From Dyos to Daunton: The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III

Abstract

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.