During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain's cultural life reached its most glorious stage. This ‘Golden Age’ was distinguished by a great variety of civic ceremonies and religious festivities that were performed in towns and cities. Economic and cultural factors encouraged the development of urban space as a spectacular arena for these rituals. The town became a permanent stage on which the identity of social groups and institutions was displayed. This paper examines the characteristics and development of festivals during this period and also the relative contribution of ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ culture to these celebrations.

This article analyses the urban structure of nineteenth-century Bristol through the analysis of property surveys. Examination of a machine-readable version of a property survey for 1837 demonstrates that Bristol exhibited modern patterns of urban development as the city's medieval form was supplanted by processes associated with the segregation of class and economic activity, a functional change from a mercantile centre to one broadly based on manufacturing and services. The longitudinal implications of this change are examined using subsequent surveys for 1851 and 1871.

This article takes up recent concerns with languages of mid-Victorian reform and relates urban space to the workplace, with reference to Nottingham hosiery and lace. The article considers, first, official enquiries into lace manufacture, and second, the hosiery conciliation system. Attempts to map and to fix the boundaries of employment are characteristic of both these developments. Gender dimensions are emphasized, as is the contribution of these debates to liberal narratives of industrial progress. This is related to the formation of a wider culture of liberal reform.

The physical forms of England's inter-war suburbs are examined, concentrating on those created by private enterprise. Attention is given to the contrasts between inter-war suburbs and those created before the First World War, and the timing of the adoption of architectural styles and other aspects of built form characteristic of the inter-war period is considered. In places, houses in Edwardian styles continued to be built well into the inter-war period. The dominant characteristic of the period was the creation of garden suburbs. The Tudor Walters Report was more an endorsement of such suburbs than a stimulus to them and many of its recommendations were not adhered to.

It is a daunting task to recover a usable Mumford from his vast body of writing, myriad ideas and public career over a span of seventy years. These four books make a substantial contribution to that end. Their shared virtues are clarity and thoughtfulness supported by firm scholarship. Useful perspectives are provided on modernization, social ecology, community planning and the human condition. Novak assembles and illuminates a historically important body of letters. Spann narrates an interplay of strong intellects with politics of social change in the 1920s and 1930s. Luccarelli and Wojtowicz cut an impressive swath through the entire scope of Mumford's thought and experience in the contexts of regionalism and architectural criticism. While all the books draw attention to men and women often forgotten but worth knowing about, Mumford is conspicuous for brilliance and charisma in the battle to reconcile urban growth with healthy environments and communities. His arsenal of values, shared by many supporters past and present, supplied articulate standards for change.

Historically speaking, women's purposeful activities have contributed significantly to the uses and meanings of urban spaces and have been a key part of the texture of social and economic relationships in town and city as well as the countryside. A good deal of the scholarship which underpins this conclusion has called for the detailed study of particular historical situations: the domestic economy in industrializing Montreal, dairying in mid-twentieth-century Denmark, gossip in the back yards and closes of inter-war Manchester. Methods of inquiry such as oral history or the close examination of census data necessarily lend themselves to the case study approach. This kind of detailed investigation has encouraged re-examination of some of the overarching meta-narratives of historical change more characteristic of earlier historical studies of women and work, notably that of Tilly and Scott.

Returning to the pattern of previous years, this review provides a broad overview of recent unpublished doctoral theses from both Britain and the United States – mostly completed in 1997. Employing a broad interpretation of ‘urban history’ which includes both the history of, and history in, urban areas, it consists of brief summaries based on abstracts published in the Aslib Index to Theses [ASLIB] and Dissertations Abstracts International[DAI]. The thirty-nine dissertations explore subjects ranging chronologically from the third millennium BC to the 1990s, with the majority covering the late nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries, with another smaller concentration focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spatially most cover British (15) and North American (10) subjects, though there are studies of elements of urban history in France, Germany, China, Venezuela and Cape Colony, as well as studies comparing British cities with similar places in France and Holland, Ireland and the United States. Though many different types of urban settlement are represented in the theses under review – including some of the earliest in Syro-Palestine – the British selection is dominated by work on London (7) along with a smaller number covering Belfast and Liverpool, whilst American studies include four exploring aspects of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Chicago and two on Caracas, Venezuela, in the same period. In terms of subject, ‘space’ – the theme of the recent Urban History Group conference in Oxford – features prominently, as does cultural politics ranging from a redefinition of the meaning of ‘misrule’ in the medieval period to two studies of the importance of culture in the American Civil Rights Movement and the eighteenth-century British and Irish port town. These newer organizing concepts and locations feature alongside the more usual subjects such as the law, policing, leisure, gender and ethnicity and a revival of interest in London, especially in the early modern period.