This article provides a detailed study of the Liber Albus, a London custumal compiled in 1419 by John Carpenter, Common Clerk of the City, under the direction of the mayor, Richard Whittington. It explores how the manuscript demonstrated a growing conservatism in early fifteenth-century London government, especially in relation to the regulation of the food trade and matters of public order, linking this to memories of late fourteenth-century turbulence in the City and poor relations with the Crown.

This article uses the concept of ‘improvement’ to examine the experiences of five burghs in Angus – Dundee, Montrose, Forfar, Brechin and Arbroath – in the later Georgian era. Designed as a contribution to British history in a comparative sense, and using the five burghs as case studies, it seeks to identity distinctively Scottish, as well as common, British elements in Scottish urbanization during a crucial phase in its development. Existing studies of Scottish urban society in this period focus very heavily on the impact of industrialization on large towns and cities, especially Glasgow. Partly as a result, other themes have been neglected or obscured. A second main aim, therefore, is to offer an alternative framework for understanding the development and experiences of the smaller towns in which most of the Scottish urban population lived prior to 1830.

The provision of space for burial is a common but rarely discussed feature of urban existence. Shifts in cemetery aesthetics reflect changing views on what might be thought appropriate landscapes in which to bury the dead. This article, for the first time in a UK context, describes and analyses the introduction of the lawn cemetery in the twentieth century, and gives the rise of cremation a central place in explaining the need to ‘reinvent’ the cemetery aesthetic.

This article traces the evolution of the idea of degeneration in urban Britain between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rejecting approaches that reduce this richly eclectic, though savagely negative, world-view to a random bundle of prejudices underpinning the emergence of the ‘science’ of eugenics, the article focuses on distinctive environmental, medical and anti-urban determinants. Strong emphasis is also placed on shifting interactions between moral and medico-environmental values and prescriptions which served as legitimation for the racially inflected view that residual elements of the inner city working class might soon be doomed to physiological and hereditary extinction.

From the influence of the Chicago School of sociology upon studies of black and white relations in England and Wales during and since the early 1940s, to the role of the Ford Foundation in funding research into inter-ethnic problems in Britain's cities during the 1950s and 1960s, the framework for British studies of urban race relations was primarily based upon American points of reference. This American contribution was benign, as was further evidenced in the relationship of urban research to race relations policy in Britain after 1965.

Taking the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum as a case study, this article examines the historical relation between crime storytelling and the myriad local struggles for spatial control that animate urban life. Modern Europe's most staggering art heist left city officials and police wholly clueless, and inspired a two-year outpouring of explanatory narratives from Parisians of virtually all social strata. This article shows how, in ostensibly making sense of the ‘impossible’ theft, the city's inhabitants imaginatively wove it into the social fabric of everyday life, thereby bringing the event to bear on a broad range of spatial tensions and rivalries. As they re-fashioned mass press versions of the theft to fit local concerns – both public and intimate – contemporaries understood crime stories as a tool with which to shape the city as they knew it.

In keeping with past experiences, 2005 produced a rich range of 70 theses that address urban history topics. Equally, as in past years, the topics the theses address are marked by diversity that itself is reflective of the nature of the urban experience. As usual the theses reviewed here are drawn from the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, which now also features Irish theses, and Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/dissertations. This year's crop of theses has proved somewhat easier to categorize than has been the case in previous years and has seen the emergence of some new topics. In particular there is a noticeable interest in what might be called the urban environment and its functioning, which leads to interest in the infrastructural aspects of the city. This is not a new agenda for urban historians but it does also reflect the growth of environmental history and seems to represent an intersection of the two areas. It is also a consequence of the dominance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in urban history, which of itself tends to bring infrastructure to the historian's notice. Another interesting area of study that is emerging as the result of the opening of Soviet era archives is that of city planning, reconstruction and history in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries. Theses from American universities continued to predominate with 68 per cent being drawn from their institutions. The proportion from Great Britain dropped to 21 per cent but the percentage from other countries, predominantly Canadian universities, increased to 11 per cent. The earlier production of this article may be the reason for the reduction in the British proportion rather than a real decline in numbers. There were noticeable clusters of theses coming from Stanford University (7.6 per cent of the total), with the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University each producing 6.1 per cent of the theses produced. In Britain there was a small cluster that emerged from the Open University and among the ‘other’ group, Toronto University was the only institution to produce more than one thesis.