Urban archaeology offers distinctive readings of urban histories: we have too few of those to ignore fresh insights. Half a dozen recent books offer a sample from a fertile field. The pressures of modern urban development, with the fundamental incompatibility of today's foundations with the ‘soft fill’ of archaeological deposits, have obliged urban archaeology to be a public discipline. Urban archaeology has stayed in the limelight, not only through sympathetic coverage on television and radio over continuing crises, like the recent unpredicted discoveries at the Rose Playhouse site, but also through popular books — like Richard Hall's glossy paperback on York's Coppergate excavations. Much of this material, however, does more than demonstrate how far passion can make urban excavations into journalistic copy. Methodologies, research priorities and interpretations are all subject to argument. Urban archaeology offers an approach to the urban past, but it is also an urban phenomenon in its own right.

Urban historians have recently shown an increasing interest in the development of England's provincial centres and smaller market towns. Although they lacked a strong manufacturing element and did not expand at the same rate as the emerging industrial centres of the north and the midlands, towns like Canterbury, Ipswich, Lutterworth and Ludlow played a fundamental part in eighteenth-century urban history. They acted as distribution points for an increasing range of agricultural goods and manufactured products. They helped to stimulate the expansion and diversification of England's traditional crafts. They fostered the development of urban culture and in doing so they attracted large numbers of immigrants and casual visitors. There were occasions when even the smallest market town opened its doors to a large contingent of outsiders, be it for one day in the week when the market was held or at an annual fair, whilst people attending court or the fashionable season would temporarily ‘swell’ the population of centres like Bath and Bristol or of cathedral and county towns like Gloucester and Canterbury. Some of the people who were drawn ‘townwards’, and these are the people we know most about, eventually became integrated into the community and set up their own homes and businesses. But there were other groups too, groups which tend to get neglected for they feature so rarely in our records. There were the men and women who disappeared without trace after quartering in a town for a night or a couple of weeks and whom we only learn about by chance.

For more than two hundred years after the Glorious Revolution, the British aristocracy gained control of ‘every aspect of government, both executive and legislative. They dominated the Cabinet, the highest ranks of the armed forces, the civil service and, to a lesser extent, the judiciary’. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a shift in their centre of gravity from that of a rural elite, to a group whose influence was mediated increasingly through the manipulation of the levers of power embedded in the urban system. This urbanization of their consciousness was coupled with, and partly responsible for, a scale jump in their collectivity. By 1850 it was no longer true that ‘society’ owed its allegiance to the local ‘county’ circles. Bush suggests that for the aristocratic class there developed in the nineteenth century a nationwide, shared ethos and culture. This was fostered on the proverbial playing fields of the nascent public schools, but it is the thesis of this paper that the spatiality of the West End of London was also a major factor in what amounts to a process of class formation for the disparate social factions which were eventually moulded into a coalition of the British ruling classes. Such was the binding quality of the social cement manufactured in the West End that it was able to withstand the aggressive solvent of industrial capitalism for something approaching a century.

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been ‘reading’ streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were ‘reflected’ in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volume The Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade after The Victorian City's first publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

Feminist historians have expended a good deal of energy on delineating the cultural concept of the Two Spheres This curious cultural phenomenon emerged in the wake of the evangelical revival and the Industrial Revolution, and caused people to believe that the world was divided into two to match the two sexes. The male part was the world of public affairs, commerce, business and, of course, the defence of the realm. The female centred on the private domain: home, family and children. The problem that this imposed on women has never yet been successfully resolved: the sexual division of labour and the domestic location of women's work. In Britain in the nineteenth century, as the population moved into the cities and standards of living rose (if patchily), the physical form of the modern urban environment took shape in ways which perpetuated the continuance of the Two Spheres. This was particularly true for middle-class women, whose lives in suburban retreats had little physical connection with the rest of the city. Of all the pressures which dictated the form of nineteenth-century cities, there was not one related to finding new ways for women to live in modern cities outside a rigid interpretation of the Two Spheres.

Urban history stands at a point of unprecedented opportunity. This paper is designed to outline the nature of that opportunity and to initiate a discussion on the manner in which urban historians can make important intellectual and cultural contributions to current debates. To understand this situation it is necessary to examine the origins of the urban history which dominated the 1960s and 1970s, and then to show how the political and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s provided first challenge and then opportunity to those who believe that the study of towns and cities, of urbanism as such is a worthwhile activity.