Chichester challenges the orthodoxy of urban decline and a decadent church in late medieval England through the proactive role of the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral as landowner and developer; civic-ecclesiastical harmony; an economic and social environment conducive to wealth creation, entrepreneurial activity, investment and real estate management; productive artisans; and social cohesion. Comparisons with other cathedral cities furthers our embryonic understanding of the urban economy in this genre.

Music – as many of the contributors to this special issue of Urban History point out – is an important component of the urban experience and can play a significant role in the construction of a civic identity, and yet it is a topic that urban historians have tended to overlook. There are some parallels with the case of the fine arts, to which a special issue of this journal was devoted in 1995, both in the causes for this neglect – which similarly include ‘the intimidating traditions of connoisseurship associated with the field’ and the difficulty we have with analysing the ‘aesthetic experience’ – and in the developments which are helping to overcome such inhibitions. So far, the impulse seems to be coming from musicologists and music historians, who, inhabiting a fairly small corner of the academic field, are fully conscious of the need to forge connections with other disciplines and historiographical traditions. The importance of contextualizing and historicizing not only the composition but also the production, transmission and reception of music has been recognized for some time, but so far urban historians have not responded as perhaps the music historians thought they might to the insights and openings that a musical ‘new historicism’ seems to offer. But there is clearly an opportunity – indeed, a pressing need – to develop a broadly-based cultural history of towns and cities in which music will take its place. The aim of this special issue is to promote that objective by illustrating the state of the art and suggesting some of the ideas, tools and methodologies with which it might be developed in future.

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.

Divided into three separate phases, different causative factors are presented for the emergence of urban centres in India from AD 600–1200. Agrarian expansion and the growth of markets encouraged trade, both internal and external, and the foundation of towns owed much to this interplay and to the establishment of religious centres.

This discussion seeks to provide a context for the emergence of so-called ‘urban musicology’, both within nineteenth-century antiquarian endeavour and in response to scholarly trends in the 1970s and 1980s. The strengths, weaknesses and possible future directions of ‘urban musicology’ are also identified.

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.

The city of Laon was a significant commercial and administrative centre in late medieval northern France. Laon's rich and powerful cathedral attracted many to its chapter, which was the largest in the country. In the years circa 1400 its ranks included a number of leading musicians. An investigation into their musical and non-musical duties sheds fascinating light on to the daily life of the cathedral musician and his position in the local urban and rural context.

This article examines the reports written by Gerolamo Vano, a spy working in early seventeenth-century Venice. It concentrates on their form rather than their content in a attempt to assess Vano's story-telling skills. It is also an experiment in historical story-telling, which departs from some of the conventions of academic writing and embraces the melodramatic qualities of Vano's writing. In short, the article's form is used to comment allegorically upon its content.

By examining a major port, a capital and a planned model city, this article links the diffusion of street lighting in nineteenth-century Latin America to changing notions of the night and of technology. In these three cities, lighting emerged as an eminently flexible strategy of modernization. Street lighting attracted urban officials and elite residents, who could economically install it as an antidote to crime, a complement to night life, or an emblem of progress.

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.

Drawing on contemporary musings and references from a variety of civic records, this article will consider music heard in the public spaces of urban England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Negative reactions to performers such as common fiddlers and street traders became increasingly common as the period progressed and were intimately connected both with fears concerning the crowd-gathering potential of such people and with a desire to control the sound environment to enable effective sleep, worship and concentration.

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.

Although urban historians have recently begun to study the city and the senses, relatively few have investigated the aural environment experienced by the ear. To a certain extent, towns are thus characterized as silent societies and sounds of whatever kind are not viewed as an integral part of urban life. This article, based on a small Spanish town called Jaca, aims to describe some of its most notable sounds during the ancien régime and to explore how inhabitants perceived them. Such an approach provides a deeper and more comprehensive insight into the totality of the urban experience of townspeople of the period, and also suggests some new lines of enquiry for future musicological research.

This paper investigates genteel, or middle- and upper-class boarding houses in Melbourne in the first decades of the twentieth century. It argues that urban historians have neglected boarding as a facet of Australian city life, preferring instead to use a limited range of statistical sources to focus on the importance of nuclear families, suburbia and home ownership as defining features of the Australian city. Utilizing archival, literary and oral sources, this paper re-creates daily life in a variety of these genteel boarding houses and calls for a more ethnological approach to uncovering the urban past.

This essay looks at London in the second half of the nineteenth century, when features of musical life associated with a capitalist economy and the consolidation of power of a wealthy industrial bourgeoisie became firmly established. Prominent among such features, which are all closely related to the rapid increase in urban populations, were the commercialization and professionalization of music, new markets for cultural goods, a growing rift between art and entertainment, and the bourgeoisie's struggle for cultural domination.

‘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?

These four exciting books fill in what Sir Peter Hall's monumental Cities in Civilization left undone. To be sure, they do not tell the entire story of China's five (possibly six or more according to the latest archaeological findings) thousand years of uninterrupted urban experience, but together they are a flying start, especially from the perspective of one kind of elite or another.

As all urban historians will know, the 1996 Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History is one of the main resources for those researching the history of cities and towns in Europe and the rest of the world. Analysis of its c. 20,000 entries is revealing. Just over 50 per cent concern urban population, physical, social and economic structure and a further 12 per cent are devoted to transport and communications and politics and administration. Only around 6 per cent of the citations refer to urban ‘culture’ in any form and virtually none concern music in towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe or indeed that of any time or place. In the light of this, it is clear that urban history still tends to be restricted largely to the ‘essentially infrastructural’ and is still considered to be mostly ‘a matter of demography, distributive economics and consequential social arrangements and re-adjustments’.

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.