Urban History Group Meeting

Extract

This was the tenth anniversary meeting of the Urban History Group though only the sixth occasion on which there had been a formal programme of papers. So many came – over 160 – that we felt for the first time the loss of the old intimate, bantering style of discussion, and slipped instead into more formal speeches pitched for the most part on a rather more general level than we have had before. It was possible this year to miss people altogether in the corridors and even in the bars. At any moment one expected to come across a knot of specialists earnestly planning a splinter group, as we had done ourselves one lunch-time at the Sheffield conference of the Economic History Society in 1963. It was an opportunity to reflect on the implications of growth in other ways, for the University Bookshop had arranged an exhibition of some 500 books on various aspects of urban history to celebrate the last decade of print, to which the Standing Conference on Local History added a hundred titles more from their recent exhibition on the publications of local organizations in this field.