This article investigates a devout society centring on the household of Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509) at Collyweston in Northamptonshire and St Katherine's guild in the neighbouring market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. The discussion unveils Margaret Beaufort's place at the heart of a vibrant devotional community, whose members, among them a core group of lay and religious townswomen, were united by their geography and shared devotional interests. Ultimately, this article sheds new light on the overlapping spiritual networks of an important market town and the household of a highly influential noblewoman, whilst also demonstrating how Margaret's sponsorship of the society informed her self-fashioning as a pious matriarch of the house of Tudor.

This article explores how the publisher Cornelis vander Plasse managed to promote the literary career of the Dutch playwright Gerbrand Bredero (1585–1618) by using Amsterdam as a place. It is concerned with the way in which this Amsterdam-based publisher took decisions both to comply with Bredero's work and to derive maximum benefit from its publication. One of his strategies was to deploy the city as a recognizable trademark to Bredero's work. By using the advantages that the ‘place’ of Amsterdam offered him, he proved himself an expert in marketing and advertising, laying the foundation of Bredero's reputation as both an Amsterdam-based and national author in the centuries to follow.

A pictorial postcard condenses a cityscape into one iconic image, which claims to summarize the place, usually in a highly aestheticized version. If that is the case, how does one present an industrial city: with factories and worker housing or rather with churches and the palaces of industrial tycoons? Using four digitalized collections (over 700 postcards) this article analyses images of industrialized cities from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War. The main argument is that this idealized depiction does not focus on industry, but rather taps into the imagination of the European city.

The Rookery of London's St Giles-in-the-Fields became the city's most notorious slum by the eighteenth century. This article asks why? Why there, why then and why for so long? Building on existing research about urban development and the failure of local government, by considering the geography, economics and legal influences acting upon the space and the people who interacted with it over the long durée, it becomes clear that the Rookery of St Giles-in-the-Fields was always high risk because of happenstance of geography, but that a lack of leadership from its owners and a system of urban upkeep that distributed responsibility too widely led to its longevity and the depth of its misfortune.

This article analyses a case of female patronage in Edwardian Leicester, a drinking fountain surmounted by a statuette dedicated to a female Anglo-Saxon ruler. The bequest, by Edith Gittins (1845–1910), is contextualized within the nineteenth-century perspectives on the past that identified the roots of the English people in the Anglo-Saxon period. The article explores the cultural, social and gender implications of Gittins’ intentions behind the bequest both for women's rights and for the use of the past in the construction of civic identity. These have not hitherto received sufficient attention. In order to address these questions the article exploits the potential of a 3D visualization of the urban setting where the fountain was intended to be erected to help frame the historical inquiry.

The article focuses on the actions of the High Council for Immovable Historic Works and Monuments (HC), which was active from 1951 to 1983 as the sole decision-maker in issues of historic preservation for all historic structures and sites in Turkey. The HC archives reveal a historical and political framework for understanding the context within which the HC operated. Expert knowledge, especially in the conservation of historic cities, has been a powerful instrument, although the use of this instrument depended on the political context. The HC extended its authority in the 1950s, operating under a conservative autocratic government. In the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, when central power was lacking and society was dominated by political violence, chaos and economic instability, the HC could reinforce and exercise its power to raise standards in historic preservation in line with the international conservation movement.

In 1927, the Nationalist government launched an ambitious project to transform Nanjing into a modern capital. During this reconstruction process, private lands were seized in the name of public interest for the construction of public works. In the face of opposition from affected landowners, Nationalist leaders shifted the emphasis from ‘public interest’ (gonggong liyi) to ‘public obligation’ (shimin zeren), stressing the duty of urban residents to support capital reconstruction and stigmatizing opponents as anti-development. This article examines compulsory land expropriation in Nationalist China and shows how the government turned discourses of public interest and public obligation into modern land laws.

This article analyses the role of LaClede Town, a nationally lauded housing development in St Louis (USA), in metropolitan and national contests over race, segregation and urban equity from the 1960s to 1990s. Built on the site of a massive slum-clearance project, the federally supported complex gained widespread fame for its startlingly heterogeneous racial mix and ostensibly colour-blind lifestyles. As the article argues, the quasi-utopian language applied to the neighbourhood illustrates the contours and limitations of a 1960s racial liberalism that sought to overcome structural inequalities through face-to-face neighbourly contact. Yet the project's 1990s demise signals that older ideology's supersession by a newly dominant urban neoliberalism.