Scholarship on provincial towns and cities has thus far overlooked their role as centres of painting in the early modern era, leaving the false impression that painting, and art itself, remained the preserve of London. Chester proves a vibrant centre for such activities in the era 1590–1640. This article shows how and why the distinctive characteristics of Chester and its wider hinterland encouraged and shaped its production of portraiture. It also places Chester in the wider context of painting activity in other such provincial centres.

When John Leland toured England in the 1540s, he observed water conduits in several towns, including a number of smaller urban centres. Subsequent historians and archaeologists, however, have seriously understated the number and importance of piped water systems in English towns. This article uses studies of individual towns, together with civic records and Leland's Itinerary, to examine the sources and technologies of urban water supplies, the origins of civic piped water systems, their relationships to other local systems, finance, management and oversight. It will argue that the growth in piped supplies by civic bodies in the later Middle Ages reflects the importance of charitable provision and the efforts of civic authorities to establish, maintain and regulate them. An appendix lists medieval English towns known to have provided public access to piped water supplies by c. 1550.

Between 1411 and 1416, Gdansk was the scene for a complex conflict between town population, council and landlord, eventually resulting in violent riots. The peculiar character of these riots becomes apparent when the Gdansk chronicles are compared to the historical accounts from other, better-known conflicts, particularly sources depicting the Lübeck Knochenhauer rebellion, the Hamburg brewer's rebellion of 1481 and the 1449–53 Gentse opstand. A key difference is the extent to which chroniclers understood and portrayed the ritualized action that occurred in the urban uprisings. Comparing the contemporary chronicles of the Gdansk events with the town's urban historiography 100 years later also shows that this early conflict with the landlord later played a significant role in urban self-definition.

This article examines some key issues relating to the emergence of political consciousness and political activity amongst the commons in the towns of Northern Atlantic Spain in the late medieval period. In the fifteenth century, a partnership between the urban business elite and the craft guilds successfully petitioned the monarchy on behalf of the commons, which resulted in municipal reforms. The resolution of issues achieved in the north was radically different from the situation in other cities in the kingdom of Castile, where the commons’ petitions and conflicts with urban oligarchies led to what became known as the ‘Revolt of the Comuneros’ in 1520, which marked the decline of the commons’ assemblies and the end of medieval urban rebellions in the interior of the kingdom.

Based on so-called Excise court records, this article argues that in eighteenth-century urban Sweden much of middling women's work took place in the interstices between households, as ‘help’ given to other women, often across social divides. These forms of work are often difficult to track in the historical records and, consequently, they have remained unnoticed, creating the erroneous picture that women did not contribute to their households through paid work. The lack of attention to these kinds of work has also overemphasized the closed character of early modern households which were, in fact, both flexible and permeable units.

For a quarter century, the term ‘class’ has been anathema for most writers of premodern urban history. The term's associations with discredited forms of analysis – forms often dubiously but persistently associated with Marxism – continue to hamper its reintroduction. In the absence of ‘class’, or a term like it, however, meaningful discussion of ‘horizontal’ divisions in urban society has dwindled. The present article suggests that ‘class’ can and should be reintroduced into our analysis, but that this should be done in an informed way, which takes into account the principal possible meanings of the term. To this end, we analyse the ways in which urban historians have employed the term ‘class’ and find four principal usages. Two of these are ‘material’ and two are ‘institutional’. It is further suggested that certain institutions, such as the nobility and town governments in Europe, can be ‘class determining’, insofar as they channel economic and productive differences into effective political, legal and ideological ‘classes’. This insight, and the typology it is based upon, open the possibility for integrating ‘class’ analysis with recent work in both European and Global contexts.

This article examines the origins of a red-light district in a French provincial city before the implementation of official regulation. It aims at redefining the role of prostitutes, police and society in the development of ‘reserved districts’. Based on the study of judicial archives over a 60-year period, the mapping of the spatial distribution of prostitutes in Nantes reveals the spread of prostitution in most of the city's districts. However, the migrations and movement of prostitutes within the city show a gradual clustering over two districts: this was motivated by economic rationales and was initiated by the prostitutes and, only later in the century, encouraged by the police and community.

City gates and walls were among the most striking features of the pre-modern city, yet we still know relatively little about their impact on daily life and what it meant to enter a city at that time. The present article explores precisely these questions. The first section outlines the general significance of city gates and walls in pre-modern times. In the second, I examine the four distinct functions of city gates in the early modern period. The third and main section presents a detailed description of the various practices, procedures and problems that accompanied the entrance to a city. Finally, and to conclude, the history of city gates is viewed in conjunction with the broader history of the early modern city and its transformation in the transition to modernity.

Between 1815 and 1860, Nice became one of Europe's leading health and leisure resorts, annually hosting an international wintering population of thousands. During a period marked by the rise of the nation-state and national sentiment, Nice was celebrated as ‘une ville cosmopolite’. This article suggests that while geographic, historic and economic factors provided preconditions for cosmopolitanism, Nice's emergence as a peculiarly cosmopolitan town in the first half of the nineteenth century owes much to a combination of forward-looking urban developments and long-established traditions of face-to-face elite sociability, directed and shaped largely by women.

While historical interest in the seaside has grown appreciably in recent times, much of the literature remains preoccupied with issues specific to resort towns. This article examines the social dynamics of the seaside town more broadly, through a study of Southend residents in the 1870s and 1880s. It analyses their discussions of working-class tourists and the industries which catered for them, before examining attempts to regulate the use of public space in the town. This is a study of rapid urbanization in a small town, and how social perceptions and relations were reconfigured in this context.

The development of modern water supply systems has varied widely in terms of speed, paths and results, and each supply system has been strongly conditioned by its spatial, socio-economic and cultural context. Barcelona provides a useful illustration of how such a modern system came into being in a particularly dynamic southern European setting. Despite being Spain's leading industrial centre, the driving force behind the introduction of its new water supply system did not come from an industrial imperative but rather from the city's expansion plan, approved in 1859, which gave rise to a proliferation of private initiatives. Later, decisive changes around the turn of the twentieth century led to a concentration of water companies, sewer renewal projects and the entry of water into the domestic sphere, and the extension of the water supply to people's homes. The development of a modern water supply system in Barcelona, however, required a period of a hundred years – from 1867, when the first steam-powered pumping station was built, to 1967, when the water from the Ter River transfer reached the city, allowing new consumption patterns to spread rapidly.

The switch from intermittent to constant water supply in London in the late nineteenth century has attracted little attention. This article argues that this transition, the basis of the modern water system, was a considerable undertaking. System-builders (London's private water companies) faced a permissive regulatory environment and a population that could be ambivalent about constant water. While the water companies tried to encourage standardization through contract agreements and inspection, their lack of domestic access encouraged technical fragmentation. Local socio-political relations influenced the form of the constant water system, with consequences for future consumption practices.

How can a modern concept like Amartya Sen's capability approach be introduced in historical studies? One possibility is to ask how public services were implemented in municipal policy and how these services open up capabilities for the individuals of a city. This article uses Sen's theoretical framework as an analytical tool to explore two Prussian towns, Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main, and their public services (job centres and tramway systems) as examples of social policy at the local level.

This article examines the development and marketing of suburbia through a case-study of the suburb of Ilford, Essex, between 1880 and 1914. It discusses how Ilford positioned itself, the white-collar clerical workers it targeted, its principal developers and the marketing and development strategies it pursued. It is argued that Ilford achieved success through a comprehensive and integrated marketing strategy which involved a policy of clear positioning, alignment with its target market, close co-operation between its principal stakeholders and the implementation of long-term, sustainable policies.

This article examines fire-safety innovations (safety matches, extinguishers and hydrants) from professional engineers and lay inventors in Mexico City from 1860–1910. With a drastic increase in the frequency and intensity of fires in the capital, engineers and entrepreneurs saw fire hazards as business opportunities. Global trends that promoted patenting new technologies spurred entrepreneurs and professionals alike to transform the capital into an epicentre of innovation aimed at making the city safer. Their inventions marked the city with visible signs of technological change and reminded residents that fire was a real threat to urban life.

Accounts of nineteenth-century burial practice in England borrow heavily from French historiography, which describes the way that scientific agendas drove a shift from traditional churchyard use to secular, municipal cemetery management. A challenge to this meta-narrative uses the example of Sheffield. In this highly industrialized city, the nineteenth century did not see a dichotomized translation from churchyard to cemetery; the Church Building Act (1818) was more effective in meeting burial demand than the 1836 General Cemetery; the formal closure of churchyards did not always lead to a cessation of burial; and by the century's end, church burial provision remained substantial.