‘Small-scale Toy-towns and Trumptons’? Urbanizations in Britain and the new Cambridge Urban History

Abstract

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.