Most evidence for leasing in medieval towns is episodic and unquantifiable. An exceptional Norwich source has been used to estimate the scale of demand for rented accommodation and to assess the resulting multiple occupation of freehold properties. The way in which a growing population was housed at Norwich and the physical and social consequences is examined. Much of the demand for rented property was met by landlords who were both secular and private, suggesting that in this respect fourteenth-century Norwich resembled Bristol rather than Oxford. Finally, the response of institutional landlords to an apparently growing demand and the behaviour of rents is considered. Falling rent receipts from the late 1330s may be an indicator of economic rather than population decline.

Arguably, art history has always had an interdisciplinary vocation, though this was at times underplayed during its establishment as an academic subject. Recent intellectual trends have tended to work in the opposite sense, encouraging art historians to highlight the relationship between visual art and a range of cultural and economic discourses. This has often involved discussion of specifically urban contexts, since cities have been the principal sites for the production, distribution and interpretation of works of art, and their fabric a means by which cultural practices have been allied to political, class and gender interests in modern society. The language and approaches currently adopted for this enterprise are often deeply marked by excursions into literary theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology and urban history and geography.

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the development of oligarchic government was accomplished in many English corporate towns by the introduction of a common council, the exclusion of the commonalty of freemen from participation in decision-making processes, and often their removal from the municipal and/or parliamentary franchise. Resistance to such changes among rank-and-file freemen frequently gave rise to civic strife, factionalism and oligarchic dependence on outside support. But analysis of developments at the town of Rye in Sussex suggests that an alternative (or subsidiary) route to oligarchy, less prone to fostering factionalism and dependency on crown agents, may have existed in towns where it was possible strictly to control freeman admissions and promote rule by exclusive commonalty.

Oddfellows' lodges in mid-nineteenth-century Lancaster and Preston offer fresh perspectives on affiliated friendly societies. These societies combined fraternal good fellowship with a hierarchical organization which operated on the assumption that members were breadwinners supporting dependants in nuclear family households. Despite the skilled or artisan occupational status of many oddfellows, their domestic economies often relied on more than one wage and complex household structures. Since oddfellows' households also clustered in certain neighbourhoods, social associations established by lodge membership overlapped with local networks. By considering these lodges less as bounded institutional entities and more as focuses for intersecting social networks where mores of respectablity and social identity were worked out, relations of gender and community as well as class, can be brought to bear on a historical appreciation of this topic.

Although plans for urban renewal after 1945 were largely based on clearance and redevelopment, the changed circumstances of post-war Britain also favoured a revival of interest in the repair and improvement of older housing. The article looks at the different approaches of Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan, and at the reasons why only limited, if useful, progress was made. It stresses the significance of a repairs backlog in conjunction with the politics of property ownership and political conceptions of the conditions under which public money could be invested in urban renewal. In such considerations repair and improvement presented far greater difficulties than clearance and redevelopment, and this was an essential element in the continuing popularity of the latter method.

Museums of contemporary art tend to be exclusive landmarks of great capitals. We are used to finding art galleries in the most prominent of locations, either in old palaces, or in purpose-built museum buildings. For the special case of galleries of contemporary art, however, it is also a common policy to provide space at the middle of an out-of-town park, or else into the heart of an urban renewal area, using modern arts as ‘flagships’ of city regeneration. This article strives to show that today's dilemmas and choices about the siting of galleries of art are a legacy of the nineteenth century, recalling the lively controversies concerning the urban setting of the Parisian Musée des Artistes Vivants and its London equivalents. The different national cases are explored, to reveal several distinct models of gallery formation.

This paper discusses the treatment of space and social interaction in the emerging modern city, and argues that the notion of ‘reserve’ developed by Georg Simmel blurs the key polarity between secrecy and privacy. Case histories of home visiting and gossip are used to examine how the boundaries between the two forms of blocked communication were constructed and negotiated in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury British city. There was no unilinear transition from open to closed personal contacts, but rather a series of conflicts and anxieties generated by issues of class and political authority. The contingent distinction between privacy and secrecy revolved around the question of trust, which was in turn a function of domestic and corporate prosperity.

This paper examines the relatively neglected topic of municipal public health expenditure in the inter-war period, and emphasizes two neglected dimensions: the political and the geographical. After justifying the importance of the topic and the approach and giving some details of municipal public health provision, a quantitative analysis of expenditure in the urban county boroughs is presented. In general, the analysis tends to argue against conventional wisdom in stressing the political dimension instead of the economic dimension in explaining the pattern of expenditure, giving a positive answer to the question posed in the title.

This paper juxtaposes two key themes: the concept of citizenship and ideas on urban renewal over the past century. The aim is to explore the interaction of cultural changes and the physical environment of cities. The concept of citizenship represents a cultural response to social change which itself has changed dramatically over the past century. Urban renewal has taken many forms. Yet behind all the growing technical expertise in dealing with the physical environment, there are specific social responses to the city which legitimize action. By looking at citizenship and urban renewal together, it is possible to establish a perspective on how the urban environment has been manipulated over the past century, often in ways which have barely interfaced with the social demands of many sections of the community.

An explanation for the formation of the National Gallery of Scotland is proposed which affirms the priority of local conditions of cultural production. In the absence of a fecund tradition of art patronage in Scotland, the modernization of Edinburgh's art field in the early nineteenth century depended on the activities of civic elites. The Scottish model of art museum development resembled the later American model more than it did the earlier French one. What was particular to Edinburgh, though, was a strong form of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. The romantic landscape trope indexed the security of bourgeois power by the 1830s. But its own role was to act as a catalyst in the formation of collection-oriented and professional art institutions, and of a gallery going public in the capital.

This article stresses the need to develop a more systematic approach to data sources in a context of greater European comparative study. The work and initial findings of the European Directories Project to provide a resource guide of one universal European data source, the town directory, are outlined here. Pathways and mechanisms of directory evolution are considered with special reference to Germany. This is succeeded by a discussion of the problems associated with the compilation of a pan-European directory database and the potential difficulties associated with directory use in urban historical research.

Starting with Englander's denial (Urban History, 21, 2 (1994)), that ‘slums are … real only in words, … rather than being rooted in the material conditions of everyday life’, the article draws a distinction between historical analyses of slums, which entail an examination of words, signs and symbols, and analyses of inner-city neighbourhoods which have been overshadowed by slumland representations. It is claimed that this latter task entails a nuanced materialist historicism, attuned to the surviving material and oral culture of actual neighbourhoods, in place of Englander's faith in an older style of historical materialism.