In the late medieval period several English cities claimed the distinction of being a royal chamber: London and York referred to themselves as the ‘king's chamber’, whilst Coventry called itself the ‘prince's chamber’. Examining the meaning of the metaphor of the chamber, this article provides a new perspective on the way in which cities negotiated their relations with the crown and shows how the chamber became an important aspect of corporate urban identity from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

This article offers a case study of urban improvement in Dundee, where the unco-ordinated efforts of different interest groups were largely adequate for the needs of the town in the first half of the nineteenth century, after which a more centralized approach evolved to address urban problems on a new scale. The Dundee case offers some explanations for this shift, which was mirrored in many other British towns.

From the 1850s in Britain, concerns were growing about the role of animals in transmitting disease to man, whether through the food chain or through infection. While London is often seen as providing a model for public health reform, it was the great provincial cities that initiated veterinary involvement in public health in the closing years of the century. The emergence of this new strand of public health activity is the subject of this paper.

There are well-known reconstruction plans for various UK cities produced during and after the Second World War, but little attention has been paid to those towns suffering little damage, or whose plans were not drawn up by the usual eminent consultants. This paper explores the process of preparing such a plan for Wolverhampton, in the English West Midlands. Here, a ‘technocentric’ plan is evident, typical of the 1940s reconstruction plans, but one with roots stretching back a decade into the middle 1930s; one whose key impetus was the Borough Surveyor, but which was prepared for a major programme of public involvement and consultation. Although this plan was not carried out in this form, it set the agenda for the next forty years of development in planning thought and in changing urban form. It was pivotal in the history of the town and its restructuring from the middle of the twentieth century.

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression of the twentieth, Montreal was transformed from a small colonial town into Canada's leading metropolis. Waterworks, telephone, gas and electrical systems were laid, the Lachine canal was widened and deepened, and the port installations completely rebuilt and greatly expanded. The Victoria Bridge crossing the mighty St Lawrence River was completed in 1860 and the transcontinental railways spanned the nation by the late 1880s, which opened up the west and created new markets. People flocked into the city from the countryside to work in the burgeoning industries, to be joined by ever increasing numbers of immigrants.

‘Urban historians’, we are told, are ‘obliged to be more eclectic’ than other scholars of the city. The volumes covered by this review certainly speak to the rich diversity of urban history making.* While the others can take a ‘well-defined disciplinary perspective’ – as sociologists, geographers, etc. – only we are expected to ‘study the interaction of the urban fabric on the social fabric’ in its ‘unique spatial setting’ across social, economic and political boundaries (and of course through time). This is a rhetoric – an ideal, perhaps – with which most of us, doubtless, are already familiar. But how does it translate into practice? In our everyday imperfect world of time constraints a nominal commitment to eclecticism can instead spawn specialization, and thus a lack of cross-disciplinary ‘cohesion’, so that the ‘umbrella’ of diversity instead becomes an agency for introversion. To be truly eclectic, therefore, presumably urban historians need to be not only better read (and/or brighter) than other academic colleagues, but also better resourced! Yet before we all rush to our respective departmental heads to make a claim, we need to ask, too, whether this declaration of eclecticism is little more than yet another ‘idealized’ story that we tell about ourselves: part of our identity, of how we would like to be seen, an affirmation of our self-view. Is it as ‘imagined’, for example, as other forms of identity – a construct to serve a purpose? Is it there to make us feel special, valued and privileged?

The nightmare (or is it challenge?) that surely all reviewers face at one time or another is to be provided with a set of books that have little or nothing in common. Conversely, the nightmare that review editors face is to have these books collect dust in the same proportion as their conscience grows. The challenge is to reduce the proportion of guilt and dust in sufficient measure whilst at the same time avoiding posing an impossible task for the hapless reviewer. Though all have their merits to a greater or lesser extent, in this case the reader is left to judge for him- or herself whether there is much, if any, coherence to the books under review.