The articles gathered in this special section explore the complex and layered relationship between meat and the nineteenth-century city. For urban historians interested in food provisioning, meat represents a critical juncture because no other food item was so deeply and, in so many ways, tied to urban modernity. This introduction outlines five central themes of the urban meat nexus: city and country relations, geography and urban space, technology and infrastructure, government and regulation, and changing nutritional standards. The four articles speak to these larger issues in specific and novel ways. They advance the existing scholarship by opening up new questions and approaches, focusing on hitherto understudied locations, while also collectively covering the entire spectrum of meat provisioning from supply hinterlands to urban consumption.

In the earliest centuries of the Flemish wool cloth industry, the lower-level, preparatory stage of wool processing and spinning was organized by a form of ‘putting-out’ significantly different from later forms in the industry. It took place in and around the cities or smaller drapery centres rather than in rural areas, and women were prominent as middle-level organizers, managers and small entrepreneurs, despite their marginal status in or exclusion from the craft guilds. Using small bits of evidence from Flemish regulations and contracts from the earliest documented period of cloth production, this article analyses lower-level organization through the lens of gender. It shows that the production of yarn was organized by a broad middling level of drapers and small marketsellers, who were women, men and husbands and wives working together. The gendered lens distinguishes this middle level, which was indispensable to the efficient production of wool cloth in medieval Flanders.

During most of the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the main commercial hub of north-western Europe. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, Bruges lost much of its allure as an economic metropolis. One of the most urgent challenges the urban authorities were facing was the navigability of the waterways in and around the city. While the city government made structural investments to remedy the problems, written sources constantly emphasized how important it was that Bruges remained accessible from the sea. During the same period, the earliest preserved maps of the city and its environment emerged. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that these visual representations were informed by the same commercial ideology. Despite, or exactly because of, the city's decreasing maritime accessibility, they conceived Bruges as a place that could easily be reached by trading ships and where merchants could trade in the best possible circumstances.

This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.

Meat consumption increase since the nineteenth century is a good indicator of the key stage of the so-called nutrition transition. This article is based on primary sources, predominantly municipal slaughterhouse bookkeeping data, and examines the changing patterns of supply, distribution and consumption of different types of meat, in order to avoid the risk of an over-simplified historical view. Long-term analysis shows that between 1740 and 1840, a period of economic and demographic growth, meat consumption levels dropped dramatically. After that time, the liberalization of agriculture and the new rail network boosted the supply of meat. Other sources and spatial analysis help us examine the ways that the city was supplied with meat, the meat retail distribution within it and the changing diet of the different urban social strata.

The economic and political dimensions of guilds in medieval Flanders, especially medieval Ghent, have been well studied for generations. It is often noted that guilds were more than work organizations, and that their religious and social activities made them very like confraternities, but exploring the cultural and ideological side of guilds can be hampered by less surviving evidence. The present article attempts to address this lacuna by using poems written by/for the masons’ guild in fifteenth-century Ghent, taking an interdisciplinary perspective to examine ideals of community, hierarchy and the sacralization of labour from an urban perspective.

Shopping during the eighteenth century is increasingly viewed by scholars as an important leisure activity, and an integral part of wider schemes of urban improvement. However, the physical evidence in the form of standing buildings is rarely considered. This article will demonstrate how a detailed examination and reconstruction of the urban landscape of York can illuminate how these practices were performed. The use of building biographies also allows owners to be identified and linked with specific shop types and surviving fabric. This enables exploration of how the physical environment influenced perceptions of the streetscape and the experience of interior retail space.

Civic pride is rarely studied at the individual level. The journals of Dr John Deakin Heaton provide a unique insight into the motivations of a man linked to many institutions and civic sites of Leeds, celebrated by historians as a progenitor of its famous town hall and the city's first university. This article uses those journals to investigate the matrix of family honour, Anglicanism and professional identity, tempered by self-interest, underpinning Heaton's desire to improve his native town. Its conclusions further justify the recent historiographical emphasis on associational culture and ritual in the study of urban governance.

In the nineteenth century, meat production underwent radical changes, turning into a mass-scale and industrial process that was based on the new norms of hygiene and veterinary medicine. Anthropologists and cultural historians have pointed out that, in a western European context, this also entailed the marginalization of the slaughterhouses, which were excluded from urban life and made anonymous and invisible. This article examines the case of the Moscow public abattoir (1886–88) and argues that, instead of being marginalized, it emerged as one of the city's landmarks due to its important symbolic role in the Russian discussions on modernization and ‘Europeanness’.

In the mid-1940s a conflict arose – the battle for Bankside – between two plans for a contested space on London's South Bank. The electricity industry planned to rebuild Bankside power station to alleviate a critical shortage of electricity, whereas the County of London Plan envisaged redevelopment of the area as public gardens, flats and offices. This article examines these plans and their entanglement in the planning system as then constituted; it argues that the significance of the planning principles escalated the arguments from a local issue to the highest level of government. The roles of key actors who manoeuvred to influence the decision-making process are explored. The article demonstrates that the power station approval was crisis driven and imposed ill-considered conditions with long-term implications. Elements of the County of London Plan were realized through deindustrialization and the transformation of the long-derelict power station into Tate Modern in 2000.

This article analyses how the Fountain of the Innocents appeared and also how it was used and perceived as part of the Paris cityscape. In the 1780s, the plan to transform the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery into a market cast doubt on the Fountain's future; earlier perceptions now shaped discussions over reusing it as part of the transformed quarter. The article documents how the Fountain was dismantled in 1787 and re-created the following year according to a new design, explaining why it was created in this form. Finally, the article considers what contemporary reactions to the remade Fountain reveal about attitudes toward the authenticity of urban monuments before the establishment of heritage institutions and societies.

A municipal boundary dispute between Dublin's nationalist city council and its independent unionist suburbs in the early twentieth century was symptomatic of a much deeper disagreement over national identity within the United Kingdom. Considering urban councils as the link between the state and local civil society (or subscriber democracy), and using theories proposed by Graeme Morton, R.J. Morris and Norton E. Long, along with illustrative contrasts from municipal behaviour in Edinburgh, this article examines these relationships in Edwardian Dublin. It argues that the modernization of Irish municipal government in 1898 empowered Dublin in unforeseen ways. By amplifying existing divergent identities, and providing a platform for the nascent Irish state, municipal government reforms contributed significantly to the break-up of the UK in 1922.

Post-war planning and rebuilding of Britain's towns and cities led to rapid changes in medieval building stock, topography and character, as well as below-ground archaeology. Two case-studies of large, industrial, bomb-damaged yet important former medieval towns are examined in this article: Southampton and Coventry. Together, they illustrate the range of local responses to protecting what we now term the ‘historic environment’ in the period 1945 to 1955 at a time when a limited protection mechanism was introduced through the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The responsibility for compiling lists of protected buildings and providing resources to protect them largely fell to local solutions. Using previously unpublished archive material from both national and local sources, this article offers an alternative ‘bottom-up’, local, organized grass-roots viewpoint to most official ‘top-down’ accounts.

The article discusses the dramatic history of the Tsaritsyno Park and museum-reserve. By the mid-2000s, it had become one of Moscow's iconic places and a zone where urban public culture was shaped. The authors trace the history of this architectural ensemble and park in terms of their role in сity culture and analyse changes in the historical culture of contemporary post-Soviet Moscow. The Tsaritsyno Park and museum exemplify these changes. An unfinished country residence of Catherine II, with a Grand Palace that had stood as a ruin for over 200 years, it has been radically renewed by the Moscow city authorities in what came to be labelled ‘fantasy restoration’. The palace was finished and now serves as the core of the museum, organized according to a controversial historical policy. Tsaritsyno as a whole became a cultural oddity featuring historical attractions for the public, effectively an ‘eighteenth-century theme park’.

This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.

During the inter-war period, the formation of amenity groups marked a new phase in the way place was conceived and shaped and their establishment and relationship with newly empowered local authorities remains an under-examined aspect of the management of towns and cities at the time. Focusing on the motivations for group formation in Birmingham and Norwich, we explore how complex relationships of attachment to place, or topophilia, entered into dialogue with professionalizing approaches to urban development and shed new light on attitudes to urban conservation and planning in the inter-war period. The article also adds a historical perspective to work on affective relationships with place.