Walking is a neglected topic in the history of transport and mobility in cities. The four articles in this special section demonstrate the importance of travel on foot in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities in four different countries, and reveal the ways in which pedestrian mobility has persisted despite the development of a car-dominated society. Together they provide important new evidence on a neglected topic and hopefully pave the way for further research on this theme.

This article uses statements made at London's Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) by victims and witnesses of crime in nineteenth-century London to reveal the hidden history of pedestrian movement on the city's streets. It demonstrates that men and women of all ages and social groups walked the streets at most times of the day and night, and argues that walking was not only a normal and taken-for-granted activity, but that pedestrianism could contribute to the development of a community of the street.

This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.

This article offers an analysis of different approaches to control walking in Stockholm in the inter-war period. Various social actors engaged in controlling pedestrians through legislation, police monitoring, educational campaigns and traffic control technologies. But the police, municipal engineers, local politicians and road user organizations differed in their aspirations to privilege motorists over pedestrians. While the inter-war period saw a shifting balance between pedestrians and motorists in Stockholm, the transition in terms of legitimate use of city streets was incomplete. Moreover, taking pedestrians’ viewpoints into consideration, what many observers and motorists understood as rebellion against traffic rules or simply bad manners, many pedestrians found to be the safest way to cross the street.

Generalizations about ‘car culture’ in the United States, and about American's ‘love affair with the automobile’, have concealed persistent values and practices among millions of Americans that do not suit such stereotypes. Car culture and the car's attractions are not denied. American society, however, is a complex of numerous subcultures, including many that resented and resisted the automobile's growing priority during the twentieth century. Such groups’ resistance to automobile domination has been neglected. Persistent advocacy for pedestrians’ interests is illustrated through numerous examples from the 1920s to the 1960s, the decades when ‘car culture’ rose to its apogee.

Few biographical databases exist giving any information about the lives of ‘ordinary’ local leaders. Who Led Leeds? was a public engagement project that aimed to create a biographical collection at the Leeds Central Library, detailing the lives of Leeds city councillors who served between 1918 and 1939. This article describes the project and considers the extent to which the project was successful. It also reflects on how the creation of such archives using existing resources in local studies and family history libraries has the potential to expand and enrich the field of urban history.

This article reflects on the role that urban history can play in contemporary efforts to reduce waste. It is focused on a public history project that uses the history of waste management in World War II as a critical vantage point from which to consider current debates over reduction, reuse and recycling. Placing this project within a broader discussion of public history in the United Kingdom, the article argues that urban history is well placed to encourage a critical understanding of the present.

Using Leicester's de-industrialized St George's area as a case-study, this article discusses three projects, all of which involved an academic team, including urban historians, working with a range of non-academic partners, in order to uncover the history and heritage of this part of the city in order to support the regeneration of the area. The first two of these projects leveraged digital media to engage public audiences, while the third used a more ‘traditional’ set of interpretation panels, removing the requirement for specific technology in order to access information as they passed along the street.

The recreation of urban historical space in museums is inevitably a complex, large-scale endeavour bridging the worlds of academic and public history. BCLM: Forging Ahead at the Black Country Living Museum is a £23m project recreating a typical Black Country town post-World War II. This article uses case-studies of three buildings – a Civic Restaurant, a record shop and a pub – to argue that urban-historical research methodology and community engagement can both create a vivid sense of the past, and challenge pervasive prejudices. It also argues that such a collaborative and public project reveals much about the urban and regional nature of industrial areas like the Black Country in this pivotal historical moment.

During World War II, Hull suffered from an intensity of bombing which made it one of the most heavily blitzed cities in Britain. Air raids fundamentally reshaped the history of the Yorkshire port city. In 2017, 75 years later, Hull's year as UK City of Culture marked another period of change and development. This article explores how one public history project, The Hull Blitz Trail, brought these two moments of urban transformation together, and reflects on some of the benefits and challenges of taking urban history beyond the academy. It outlines how public engagement projects can become more meaningful, more engaging and more ‘impactful’ if we carefully consider the physical and cultural landscape of the city today, as much as the histories themselves. However, combining the urban past and present influences our work in powerful ways, shaping the histories we are able to share, and how we share them.

Urban policy in Japan gained greater significance in the late 1960s. In 1968, a new City Planning Law was enacted, and urban policy was a prominent issue in that year's House of Councillors election. Scholars have regarded the ruling conservative party's fear of a threat to its hegemony as the primary force driving this increased attention to urban policy. This article examines the political factors surrounding the reforms enacted, concluding that politicians actually underestimated the degree of public interest in urban policy and made largely empty political gestures to appease urban dwellers while responding more readily to agricultural interests.