Interpretation of the role of religion in the cities of Europe and America during the last one hundred and fifty years has been dominated by a single issue: the relationship between urbanization and secularization, which recent writings continue to amplify.

The importance of landowners' influence on the timing, scale and type of development in many large nineteenth-century towns is a platitude of urban history. But the power which it gave a large, aristocratic, urban landowner to influence local affairs – political, cultural, religious and philanthropic – has received much less attention. Most historians would agree with Ralph Nevill that during the nineteenth century ‘the political influence of the English land-owning class must in any case have disappeared with the development of the great towns and the increase in population’. But while that change has been described and investigated as it occurred at Westminster and in the country-side, the actual shift in the balance of power in the towns – from those who owned and managed urban estates to those who lived on them as leasehold tenants – has received much less attention. The purpose of this article is to review the literature at present available on the subject, and to offer some suggestions as to the directions in which future research might proceed.

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the continued and rapid growth of cities had given rise to acute problems of municipal policy on both sides of the Atlantic. America had come to its urban experience relatively late – the population of Chicago at the time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened was 50 people – but between 1880 and 1910 the critical shift had taken place in the United States to a population which was over 50 per cent urban. The fifty million town dwellers in America not merely outnumbered the whole population of the UK, but included a large number of recent immigrants from the poorer, non-English speaking countries.

Urban history in Scandinavian countries has long been practised mainly in the form of individual town histories, a large number of which have been written by local amateurs. Among professional historians, however, local history (including the history of towns, parishes and regions) has been of interest since the late-nineteenth century, and has been especially popular in Norway and Finland. This may have to do with the fact that these two countries did not become independent until 1905 and 1917 respectively. The Swedish-Norwegian union of 1814–1905 had been preceded by Norway's incorporation into the Danish kingdom from 1536 on, and Finland's inclusion in the Russian empire as a semi-autonomous grand duchy between 1809 and 1917 had been preceded by her incorporation into the Swedish kingdom since the Middle Ages. These facts must be kept in mind in order to realize why historical research in Scandinavia has so many topics and features in common. They also explain some of the differences, such as why historians in Norway and Finland to a greater extent than in Sweden and Denmark should have turned to local history both before and after having achieved independence, in order to strengthen the conciousness of national identity in the two countries. Although there was much interest in rural local history, town history also got its share. There are very few towns – if any – in Norway and Finland that have not had their histories written; in Denmark and Sweden urban and local history also became increasingly popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Open University has for some years run an Urban Development Course (DT 201), which Anthony Sutcliffe reviewed favourably in the 1974 Yearbook. His only regret, from an urban historian's perspective, was ‘the almost complete absence of a historical approach’ from the course. He found it depressing that ‘the relevance of urban history to contemporary urban studies is not yet apparent to the great mass of social scientists’. It is therefore good news that in 1977 the O.U. initiated Course A 322, ‘English Urban History 1500–1780’, of which most members of the Urban History Group will be aware from the publicity at Group meetings and from Peter Clark's article in the 1976 Year-book. True, it is an arts rather than a social science course, and so may not entirely meet Anthony Sutcliffe's point; but O.U. policy discourages entry requirements for courses, and A 322 is expected to be taken by social scientists as well as by arts students.

‘The number of marriages in a nation perhaps fluctuates independently of external causes, but it is a fair deduction from the facts, that the Marriage Returns in England point out periods of prosperity little less distinctly than the funds measure the hopes and fears of the money market. If the one is the barometer of credit, the other is the barometer of prosperity, present in part, but future, expected, anticipated, in still greater part.’ This view was expressed by George Graham, the Registrar-General, in his 8th Annual Report for 1845, published in 1848. He argued that the fluctuatiòns in the marriages of a country expressed the views which the great body of the people took of their prospects in the world and noted that the fluctuation could be clearly seen in the towns even when the variations of the annual marriage totals were not considerable in the kingdom as a whole. D. V. Glass, in his study of marriage frequency and economic fluctuations also found that ‘the whole period, 1856 to 1932, showed a close connection between marriage and prosperity’.

Readers of the Yearbook may readily ascertain from its register of research and bibliography that the energy applied to the urban history of Victorian England has not only been substantial but is far from expended. The attraction of huge amounts of raw material, both quantitative and literary, is difficult to resist. However, the challenge of seeking less solidly founded insights with the less abundant and more indirect sources of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries has met with a far less enthusiastic response. In any case the sparseness of eighteenth-century sources is less stark than at first appears. Although by no means as reliable or as widely ramified in content as census data, Anglican parish registers offer considerable scope for anyone willful enough to resist the census honey pot. Particularly when supported by ancillary sources, such as maps and directories, they provide sufficient information for at least a tentative exploration of the beginning and unfolding of an urban process whose mature expression is revealed in the cornucopia of the middle-nineteenth century.