This article explores the significance of mobility in the everyday structures of political life through a case study of political space in mid-eighteenth-century Stockholm. Analytical in approach, the study focuses on political action in public space, in its spatial negotiations of inclusion and exclusion, and investigates three particular places: the city itself, the central square Riddarhustorget and the city's wine shops. It shows that temporary political density and geographical proximity during meetings of the Estates of the Realm, when a large influx of people upset the corporate social division of the city, gave the lower orders the opportunity to cross thresholds into elite places. In addition, mobility between sites and the use of many places, rather than the mastering of one particular site, was a means for these orders to take part in political life. Results show that a unified ‘public sphere’ was not a prerequisite for extra-parliamentary politics. Instead, participation was made possible by moving between places, and learning how to navigate many different social and political boundaries.

Portraiture has accurately been identified as one of the many harmony-inducing, commemorative devices employed in the celebratory culture of the London liveries in the century after the Reformation. But a closer examination of the developing tradition of livery company portraiture shows its use to be considerably more complex, and sometimes more divisive, than previously recognized.

Belfast's civic portraits provide an unbroken narrative of the city's municipal identity dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Their layers of meaning can be understood within the context of the social, political and cultural concerns of the period in which they were produced and presented. An examination of these complex and coded works of art is revealing about the political and religious tensions, as well as the personalities, of mid-Victorian Belfast's intricate urban landscape.

During the negotiations with their Flemish subjects, the Burgundian dukes generally asked for taxes or military aid, while their subjects demanded the confirmation of privileges and the political and economic stability necessary for trade and industry to flourish. In this analysis of the institutionalized bargaining sessions between cities, rural districts and the dukes in Flanders, it will be shown that a specific political discourse developed among the Flemish delegates, that can be considered ‘corporatist’ or ‘communalist’.

This article deals with the importance of religion as a factor influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners from – and inside – the guilds in eighteenth-century Strasbourg. We consider the different notions of the étranger as socially constructed and circumstantial. Together with factors such as social status, family ties, gender, systems of patronage, wealth, language and the citizenship rights of a town, religious and denominational boundaries constituted a major factor for influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners in the early modern society. The construction and preservation of such boundaries are explored here through the examples of the carpenters' and the shipmen's guild found in the eighteenth-century multiconfessional city of Strasbourg.

Using case studies of city halls in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, this article contributes towards the creation of an iconographic reading of this building type. This article argues that the symbolic aim of the city hall was to express the burgher's pride and values, and to symbolize the local and national history. To understand the multifaceted architecture of a city hall in a capital city, one must also understand the ideas behind nation-building in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The second part of the article analyses how European, national and local narratives were used in the city halls.

This article forms a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of an English urban renaissance. We draw on Schwarz's designation of residential leisure towns to explore the spread of leisure and luxury through a broad range of towns. Our analysis reveals that leisure facilities and luxury service and retail provision were widespread, but that residential leisure towns appear as qualitatively different places, the status of which was contingent upon social profile and cultural-economy, rather than demographic, political or socio-economic make up. We conclude by arguing that urban typologies based on specialization should be tempered with older-established and more subjective categorizations based on the status of the town.

Open to both aristocracy and middling rank, pleasure gardens fashioned a spectacle of order out of a heterogeneous crowd. They have been seen as uniquely British spaces, demonstrating how Britain juggled commerce, politeness and liberty. Yet these resorts had imitators abroad, especially in Paris. Far from being a case of Paris emulating London, they created a playful fantasy that shuttled visitors between the two cities – helping them imagine the ideal metropolis, polite yet policed.

This article examines the development of the Nottingham Arboretum (1852), the centrepiece of one of the most ambitious schemes of urban enclosure and improvement in mid-Victorian Britain. It contends that the provision for parks and green spaces in the town was inspired by local naturalists and sanitary reformers as well as cultural emulation and civic rivalry with other urban centres such as Derby and Manchester. Analysis of the design and management of the Arboretum and green spaces and local controversies about funding and access reveal major local disagreements concerning uses of such spaces reflecting continued divisions in Victorian urban society beneath the public rhetorical and celebratory façade.

The ‘Labour and the Poor’ investigations of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, which charted social conditions in towns outside London in 1849–51, subjected Irish migrants in Britain to a hostile journalistic gaze. In the case of the iron-manufacturing town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, the minority Irish ethnic identity was defined by observers in terms of exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture and in opposition to the native working class. This early investigative journalism deployed some conventions of the contemporary novel that were familiar to its mainly middle-class readership to root social identities in material conditions.

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

The early nineteenth-century manufacturing town was a diverse and transient environment that inspired a varied canon of printed imagery. Alongside folio engravings and souvenir prints, one of the most prevalent genres of urban imagery was the commercial advertisement. This article demonstrates the value of early pictorial advertisements in accessing contemporary attitudes to urban manufacturing and to provincial urbanization in general. It argues that in a climate of urban rivalry, artists and publishers inherited and invented new visual formulae with which to promote manufactories and commercial premises to tradesmen, consumers and tourists. It concludes that the resulting imagery throws into question the prevalent historical caricature of the early nineteenth-century manufacturing town as a place of deprivation, disorder and decay.

This article examines the ambivalent relationship that San Francisco and Darwin developed with Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand they presented themselves as gateways that facilitated trade with Asia. On the other hand they acted as sentinels that protected Europeans from Asian immigration. This quirky behaviour is encapsulated in the quarantine regulations that were applied in both ports to Asian commodities and people. The two case studies suggest a broader paradox in the history of port cities. Their prosperity and vitality rested upon the free flow of goods and people, but those flows generated enormous frictions.

The retreat from bold reconstruction planning in Britain's blitzed cities is now well established, although there are two notable exceptions: Coventry and Plymouth. While the circumstances in Coventry have been fully researched, the narrative in Plymouth remains untold. The aim of this article is therefore to evaluate the main formal measures required to embark on the comprehensive redevelopment of Plymouth's heavily blitzed core area and whether, despite Whitehall's failure to deliver the necessary legal and administrative powers in a timely and co-ordinated manner, the city maintained its faith in bold plans and planners.

A small group of urban historians met informally at the annual conference of the Economic History Society in 1962. In 1963, H.J. (Jim) Dyos, very much in charge of the enterprise, began circulating a subscription newsletter. The early issues of the Urban History Newsletter (the ancestor of this journal) reveal the slow and hesitant way in which the Urban History Group formed, growing rapidly in membership but reluctant to develop into a formal society and determined against the establishment of a conventional journal. There were after-dinner talks in 1966 and 1967 but only in April 1968 was a full-day meeting established in a pattern still followed 40 years on. This light-hearted account is based on Dyos' ‘editorials’ in the Newsletter and personal memories of the man himself.

The inauguration of New Delhi in 1931 represented a complex vision of the late colonial state where liberal political reforms intended to pacify Indians simultaneously bound them more closely to the British Empire. These conciliatory reforms focused Indian attention on provincial local self-government while the centre remained firmly in British hands. New Delhi, as the pre-eminent symbol of this imperial centre, crucially disseminated this double narrative of promised liberation and continued colonial dependency. The new capital may have projected imperial power and permanence, as many scholars have noted, but it also symbolized the underlying strands that connected British political reform with the reinforcement and reaffirmation of continued British rule.