The industrial towns of northern England have been largely overlooked during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article examines newspaper advertising, directories, public building and improvement in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield and identifies a middling, consumerist society, where urban culture was firmly rooted in the localities in which it developed. The nature of this culture challenges simplistic understandings of metropolitan dominance and questions the utility of national models of consumerism and ‘politeness’ that ignore the importance of regional variation and provincialism.

This article examines the relationship between gender, occupation, illiteracy and economic development in Leicester from 1760 to 1890. Although Leicester's economy was at a proto-industrial stage of development, heavily dependent on domestic and workshop-based industries, interesting comparisons may be made with industrializing factory towns. There was similar reliance on child and female labour, and the industries appeared to develop in a climate of illiteracy. This new local case study is especially important for previous research concerning gender, occupation, illiteracy and economic development has tended to focus on urban market towns or newly developing factory towns.

This article explores the ways in which a young woman who migrated from Londonderry to London in the 1930s acquired and used spatial knowledge of the city. Using detailed diary evidence the article maps everyday action spaces, and examines themes such as the use of visual cues in the accumulation of spatial knowledge, the use of maps and signs, the influence of previous travel experiences and the organization of search and exploration strategies in the city.

The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and the landscape of regulated prostitution that resulted, are read as part of a mid-nineteenth-century crisis of government. Ultimately, the political and discursive construction of Chinese racial/cultural difference reveals the limits of ‘imperial governmentality’ as much as the ambition of colonial sexual discipline.

In September 1896, a virulent plague epidemic broke out in the colonial port city of Bombay. Central to existing interpretations of the epidemic has been the pervasive assumption that colonial policies aimed at suppressing the disease were principally informed by ‘contagionist’ etiological doctrine. However, this article argues that long-standing ‘localist’ etiological theories continued to exercise a critical influence over colonial policies. It thereby highlights the explicit ‘class’ bias that informed the colonial state's anti-plague offensive, which was largely directed at the urban poor.

Defining what constitutes urban history has always proved challenging; however, employing this review's usual wide definition has resulted in the identification of theses from a range of disciplines. This review covers theses produced in 2003 and drawn from the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/ and Dissertations International located at http://wwwlib.umi.com/ dissertations. This year for the first time it has become necessary to limit coverage in the face of what can only be described as a boom in theses addressing aspects of urban life. This blossoming of interest should not be unexpected given the increasing urbanization of the world's population, leading to a curiosity about the origins and nature of urban life. Consequently this year's review again includes shorter summaries in an attempt to allow coverage of 53 theses.