This article begins with an examination of how rural and urban society in India were conceptualized in relation to one another at different moments during the twentieth century, arguing that rapid urbanization during the middle decades forced important changes in those conceptualizations. If in an earlier period analysts saw the world of the village dweller as radically separate from that of the urban dweller, then rapid urbanization destabilized this idea and forced analysts to entertain the implications of there being a kind of ‘sliding scale’ between the two. This discursive shift helped produce a new object of concern in mid-century urban sociology – that of the ‘villager in the city’. While this sociological object formed the core of numerous mid-century (and later) studies of existing large cities, it played a more determinate role as a priori grounds for planned new towns than it did for perhaps any other model of urban growth. The article argues that proponents of planned new towns favoured their conservative potential: namely, the new town promised to nurture ‘inherited tendencies and habits’ in first-generation urban migrants, rather than produce wholly new modes of urban subjectivity.

The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English-speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg's black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial considerations determined the council's provision of leisure facilities.

The absence of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars. However, there is also no satisfactory consensus on the exact meaning or contents of medieval ‘urban historiography’. Some were ‘official’ city chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their towns. We propose an analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.

This article examines multiplex cinema development and its close association with shopping centre expansion programmes in Australia. The article argues that while multiplex cinema construction in Australia echoed international developments, it also resulted from coalescing interests between local retail developers and film exhibitors, was guided by planning legislation and shaped by escalating institutional investment in the retail industry. Data mapping the emergence, growth and consolidation of multiplexes in Sydney, Australia's largest city, is used to illustrate this development, contributing to urban histories of the city and understandings of the ways in which its contours have been reshaped by consumer capitalism.

The concept of civil society provides a useful means of evaluating the social and political relationships of British towns. Civil society refers to the non-prescriptive relationships that lie between the state and kin. Such relationships are associated with the existence of the free market, the rule of law and a strong voluntary associational culture. Both theoretical analysis and historical evidence link civil society with the nature of urban places, their complexity, their function as a central place and their operation as a focus for flows of information. Between 1780 and 1820 the agencies of civil society in Britain provided an arena for making choices, for reasoned informed debate and for the collective provision and consumption of services in an open and pluralist manner.

Estimates of urban population before the Black Death have been hampered by a lack of suitable data. Although it is common knowledge that many towns reached a physical size in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that was not exceeded until the early-modern period, little definite is known about the gross urban population at this date. Where attempts have been made to estimate urban populations these have traditionally depended on multiplying from one arbitrary sector of the community, such as property owners, taxpayers or freemen, or on back projections from the late-fourteenth-century poll tax returns. The problem with such an approach is not only that there is little independent basis for the multipliers used, but also that the relationship between any such arbitrary sector and the urban population as a whole may alter from town to town as well as from time to time within the same community. An exception to this approach has been the recent work of Derek Keene, who has used other indicators of population size and pressure, namely land values, the extent of the built-up area and density of settlement, to estimate the early-fourteenth-century populations of Winchester and London. It may be significant that this method has produced considerably higher population figures than had been reached by the more traditional approach. In this uncertainty, any source that purports to record the whole of a demographically defined section of the population is of considerable interest. Norwich is fortunate in the survival of such a source in an early-fourteenth-century tithing roll for the leet of Nedham and Mancroft (hereafter Mancroft), one of the four leets of the city.

Urban history stands at a point of unprecedented opportunity. This paper is designed to outline the nature of that opportunity and to initiate a discussion on the manner in which urban historians can make important intellectual and cultural contributions to current debates. To understand this situation it is necessary to examine the origins of the urban history which dominated the 1960s and 1970s, and then to show how the political and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s provided first challenge and then opportunity to those who believe that the study of towns and cities, of urbanism as such is a worthwhile activity.

This article sets out the incidence of clandestine marriage in Restoration London. Analysis of parish registers of large suburban parishes suggests that such private unions peaked twice in the capital's history, immediately after the Restoration and again in the first half of the eighteenth century. Understanding the phenomenon is important since the increase in private weddings on the scale encountered was unique to London. Historians have failed to explain the growth in such unions satisfactorily. The practice is unlikely to be explained by the growth of religious dissent, by a desire to save money or to circumvent parish or parental control over choice of spouse. The custom's popularity can be explained more convincingly by reference to wealthier Londoners′ traditional predilection for private weddings, which was sanctioned by the church, and to emulation of the habit by those lower in the social scale. Adoption of the practice was further facilitated by increasing levels of disposable income and by the commercialization of the wedding ceremony after the Restoration.

The descriptions of small towns in John Leland's Itinerary provide valuable evidence about their economic functions and fortunes in a period often categorized as one of urban decline. Leland described markets, ports, industries, buildings and transport links. He identified examples of small towns expanding, through new commercial and industrial opportunities, notably cloth manufacture, as well as others in decline, and suggested that investment by entrepreneurs and benefactors had enabled some small towns to prosper. These experiences reflected both the particular functions of individual towns and their role in wider regional economies.

This article explores some of the ways in which the closely regulated layouts and property boundaries within Scottish medieval towns may have influenced the form and character of domestic buildings during the late medieval and early modern periods. Drawing together strands of scattered evidence from archaeology, morphology, history and architecture, it re-examines how plot boundaries, main thoroughfares and subsidiary access passages acted as site constraints in relation to the design and configuration of individual structures or groups of buildings, focusing in particular on building frontages and so-called ‘encroachments’ such as booths, stairs, galleries and arcades.

After years of concentration on the working class, social historians of nineteenth-century urban Britain have recently rediscovered the upper and middle classes. Various writers have recognized these groups, and elites within them, as significant subjects in themselves and as major influences in urban society generally.

This article analyses London's street markets in the years between 1850 and 1939. It shows how this was a period of significant growth for street markets, with both steeply increasing numbers of markets and a steady increase in the number of stalls overall. These markets were informal and unauthorized for much of the period under discussion; the administrative/local government context was complex, and competing authorities (the City of London, London County Council, metropolitan boroughs and national government) hesitated in regulating the organic growth of street market trading, while also recognizing the contribution it made to bringing cheap food and commodities to the population of London. It will be argued that the street market, far from being merely the survival of a primitive form of retail, flourished in response to modernity in London. It should be analysed alongside other developing forms of retail, and considered for its contribution to the culture and material culture of the city.

For much of the 1970s and early 1980s historians using an urban focus to analyse social class, social stratification and political conflict led the field. The work of John Foster, Geoffrey Crossick, Robert Gray, Patrick Joyce and others helped set an agenda to which all social historians responded. Today research of a similar type can easily be found, but even whilst this shows a high degree of conceptual sophistication and empirical rigour it seems less central to the discipline and to the broad concerns of social history than was the case even a decade ago. In this speculative paper I reflect on some of the reasons for this and consider the contemporary prospects for studies of the relationship between urban history and social class.

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

The appearance of Urban History as a journal marks a further stage in the progression from Newsletter to Yearbook and now to a semi-annual periodical. The timing is apt since it coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the first issue of the Urban History Newsletter, and the enthusiasm surrounding the production and publication of Urban History is a continuing sign of the vigour and confidence expressed by H.J. Dyos thirty years ago, and again in 1974, when the Yearbook first appeared. The current academic self-confidence is matched by a commercial one from the new publishers, Cambridge University Press.

This article examines the decisive role of the pneumonic plague epidemic of 1904 in re-shaping the racial geography of Johannesburg after the South African War. The panic which this epidemic evoked swept away the obstacles which had blocked such a step since 1901 and saw the Indian and African inhabitants of the inner-city Coolie Location forcibly removed to Klipspruit Farm 12 miles outside of the city as a health emergency measure. There, the latter were compelled to remain, even after the epidemic had waned, making it henceforth the officially designated site for their residence. In 1963, now greatly expanded, it was named Soweto. From small germs do mighty townships grow.

Advocating a closer relationship between urban and epidemiological history, the paper concentrates, firstly, on a critical overview of the McKeown thesis. It next identifies components from the work of John Landers as a means of constructing a structural model of mortality experienced during the period under review. The paper goes on to examine the manner in which this model might be applied to London during an era in which the classic killing infections of the mid-nineteenth century were gradually replaced by non-infectious causes of death. Returning, by way of conclusion, to the theme of an integration of urban and epidemiological methodologies, attention is drawn to the explanatory potential of a fully historical economy of health and disease.

Based on how notions of civil society and civic virtue were defined in Enlightenment Scotland, this article assesses how far these ideals shaped police development in Scottish towns, c. 1780–1833. It argues that both concepts provided a framework for the development of ‘police’ as a broad mechanism of urban government. Collectively, civil society and civic virtue offered a wide-ranging, intellectual backdrop presupposing ideas on police, improvement and polite society, with the new police model bearing a striking resemblance to how these ideals were imagined and constructed at the time.

This article challenges perceptions about the origins and objectives of the ‘neighbourhood unit principle’ that emerged in 1944, by focusing on the location and purpose of shops. It argues that the positioning of retail spaces was central, but largely overlooked, to the socio-spatial schema that lay at the heart of the neighbourhood principle. Planners saw shops as a hub of face-to-face interaction, through which nebulous objectives like ‘community spirit’ might be engendered. However, planners did not account for the way that their need-based model of shopping might be undermined by the consumer habits of inhabitants and the changing objectives of retailers.