This study highlights the simultaneous existence of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ forces in an incorporated borough and their relevance to civic society and governance in a spatial context. Loosely organized networks of men and women of different ages and status were evidenced in credit arrangements, small-scale dealings and sociability in markets, streets and residential houses. These public and private spaces were also subjected to a civic government which attempted to integrate uncontrolled activities into the society of freemen. It is argued that the actions and decisions taken by informal groups and associations were constitutive of the progress of civic society in early modern England.

When the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, many commentators noted that in their short lives, the towers had come to represent many things: American-led global capitalism, the United States and, most of all, New York City. Their brief role as a shorthand way of saying ‘New York City’ provoked us to ask about ‘urban icons’ more generally. But we did not need such cataclysm to provoke us to consider the topic of icons and their functioning in contemporary global culture. To help illuminate the usefulness of the concept of ‘urban icons’ we held an international conference in order to determine whether the category can be used as a conceptual grid for studying the intersection of visual culture and urban history.

This article provides a detailed study of the Liber Albus, a London custumal compiled in 1419 by John Carpenter, Common Clerk of the City, under the direction of the mayor, Richard Whittington. It explores how the manuscript demonstrated a growing conservatism in early fifteenth-century London government, especially in relation to the regulation of the food trade and matters of public order, linking this to memories of late fourteenth-century turbulence in the City and poor relations with the Crown.

This article explores the statutory limitations faced by the metropolitan commissioners of sewers. It is largely based on an analysis of judicial decisions in cases involving the commissioners and their taxation policy from 1812 to 1845. It argues that the commissioners pursued a potentially radical agenda for sewers financing and taxation, but that their agenda was resisted by ratepayers and thwarted by a generally though not completely hostile judiciary. This article thus contributes to the ongoing revaluation of the metropolitan commissioners of sewers and illustrates the constructed nature of statutory limitation.

Urban icons were common in the Roman world, with monuments, cityscapes and personifications all used as metonyms. Yet an icon for the most important city of all is not easily identified. Rome was always sui generis, too large to be easily captured visually. Filled with innumerable wonders, no single structure or artwork stood for the whole. Representing the collective, as well as the great extent of the empire, the city could not be encapsulated in a single image.

This article uses the concept of ‘improvement’ to examine the experiences of five burghs in Angus – Dundee, Montrose, Forfar, Brechin and Arbroath – in the later Georgian era. Designed as a contribution to British history in a comparative sense, and using the five burghs as case studies, it seeks to identity distinctively Scottish, as well as common, British elements in Scottish urbanization during a crucial phase in its development. Existing studies of Scottish urban society in this period focus very heavily on the impact of industrialization on large towns and cities, especially Glasgow. Partly as a result, other themes have been neglected or obscured. A second main aim, therefore, is to offer an alternative framework for understanding the development and experiences of the smaller towns in which most of the Scottish urban population lived prior to 1830.

This article analyses the problems encountered by municipal authorities in containing social unrest in the aftermath of World War I. Focusing on the Peace Day disturbances of 1919, the article examines how the civic elite failed to respond to the challenges of the post-war period and instead reverted to a Victorian model of governance that emphasized civic ritual and deference. It will explore how the towns that experienced the most severe disturbances were governed by elites who were unable to appreciate the significance of changing demographics, new political landscapes and the popular dissatisfaction with municipal traditions that the war had ushered in.

Venetian printmakers in the sixteenth century were enthusiastic participants in what became a project of civic self-promotion as they looked beyond the local market to an international one. In response to the fascination of foreigners who marvelled at the city's singular topography and its reputation for liberty and licentiousness, the bird's-eye view and images of local social types – such as the doge and courtesan – became transmuted into icons of the city's urban identity. The medium and modes of representation used to reproduce the republic's social and physical organization on paper are crucial here, for it was the repetition and sedimentation of visual conventions that forged iconicity. Venice was redefined as a centre in which all the world could be seen. And the mechanisms for this redefinition, as this article argues, emerged, in part, out of print, for it was because the city could be seen from the eye of a bird, on paper as an image, by foreigners – that it could be re-envisioned from the outside in.

The provision of space for burial is a common but rarely discussed feature of urban existence. Shifts in cemetery aesthetics reflect changing views on what might be thought appropriate landscapes in which to bury the dead. This article, for the first time in a UK context, describes and analyses the introduction of the lawn cemetery in the twentieth century, and gives the rise of cremation a central place in explaining the need to ‘reinvent’ the cemetery aesthetic.

This article traces the evolution of the idea of degeneration in urban Britain between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rejecting approaches that reduce this richly eclectic, though savagely negative, world-view to a random bundle of prejudices underpinning the emergence of the ‘science’ of eugenics, the article focuses on distinctive environmental, medical and anti-urban determinants. Strong emphasis is also placed on shifting interactions between moral and medico-environmental values and prescriptions which served as legitimation for the racially inflected view that residual elements of the inner city working class might soon be doomed to physiological and hereditary extinction.

By investigating the historical evidence for the Parisian department stores' campaigns of property acquisition in the nineteenth century, this article argues that not only was an increase in physical scale desired by managers to enlarge their businesses, but that the space of the store was deliberately moulded into a particular cultural form associated with the monument. The economic decisions involved in leasing and acquiring land, and the negotiation of the preferences for building form implied by building regulations, reveal more about how department stores constructed an image for themselves to embody the myth of a new order of commerce.

A huge clock, made at Whitechurch by Messrs. J. B. Joyce and Co … has been sent to Shanghai, for the new Chinese Maritime Customs House. The clock, weighing nearly 30 tons, will probably be the Big Ben of the Far East.

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.

What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.

Uwe Johnson

This article analyses the spread of public utilities and urban development through a wide-ranging comparison of European cities. It considers variables that are not simply demand-based to explain the diffusion of the telephone. The article explores the relationship between variables, city size, position in the urban hierarchy, urban growth and the function of the city in relation to the spread of the telephone. It concludes that the scale and the function of the city, together with the terms of concession and management strategies, were crucial for the diffusion of the telephone throughout Europe's cities.

From the influence of the Chicago School of sociology upon studies of black and white relations in England and Wales during and since the early 1940s, to the role of the Ford Foundation in funding research into inter-ethnic problems in Britain's cities during the 1950s and 1960s, the framework for British studies of urban race relations was primarily based upon American points of reference. This American contribution was benign, as was further evidenced in the relationship of urban research to race relations policy in Britain after 1965.

Taking the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum as a case study, this article examines the historical relation between crime storytelling and the myriad local struggles for spatial control that animate urban life. Modern Europe's most staggering art heist left city officials and police wholly clueless, and inspired a two-year outpouring of explanatory narratives from Parisians of virtually all social strata. This article shows how, in ostensibly making sense of the ‘impossible’ theft, the city's inhabitants imaginatively wove it into the social fabric of everyday life, thereby bringing the event to bear on a broad range of spatial tensions and rivalries. As they re-fashioned mass press versions of the theft to fit local concerns – both public and intimate – contemporaries understood crime stories as a tool with which to shape the city as they knew it.

Architectural historian P. Reyner Banham (1922–88) is widely known for his numerous writings on the modern built environment, including the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). In the BBC television film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Julian Cooper, 1972), he concretized his earlier insights about the importance of mobility in the Southern California metropolis by employing the proclivity of the cinematic medium to represent movement. While traditional notions of the urban icon commonly understand it as a static monument or landmark, in these two works Banham challenges the suitability of this view to a city as inflected by automobility as Los Angeles and proposes the motorway and the experience of driving as its most characteristic iconic forms.