A Small Town Study

Extract

The interdisciplinary approach to the study of urban history has considerable potential for the examination of communites of manageable size. Yet, as Professor Dyos has pointed out, it is by no means clear that the proliferation of more and more case studies is a particularly useful exercise unless communities in question contain an element of typicality and are informed by the broader social and historical tendencies relating to urbanization as a major force of social change. “We know so little yet about a number of obvious things,” he once wrote. “Small towns that never grew big nor got stuck in amber as a neighbour did tend to remain unseen. There are too few studies of such towns.” (H. J. Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History [1968], 38.) Our study, of Kendal in Westmorland, seems well justified.