This paper aims to provide a transferable methodology suitable for mapping the spatial development of medieval urban landscapes. Using the technique of ‘plan analysis’ the paper discusses some new evidence relating to the origins and development of Coventry, one of medieval England's more important provincial centres which rose to prominence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The case study provides an opportunity to show how the plan analysis technique works and how it is of benefit to urban historians, as well as archaeologists and geographers.

This article looks at ways of relating together two concepts of early modern urban life: the urban renaissance and the consumer revolution. Nottingham passed through a process of urban renewal between c. 1688 and c. 1750, and it is argued that in the absence of any public funding this must have been privately pioneered by the town's ‘middling sort’. Using probate inventory material the members of this social group are identified, and their habits as consumers examined. We speculate that it was this consumer-conscious middling sort which promoted urban change.

Apart from a few obvious exceptions, the definition of a ‘leisure town’ in eighteenth-century England remains problematic. Using a list of the employers of manservants registered for taxation in 1780 this paper isolates the fifty-three ‘residential leisure towns’ outside Middlesex and Surrey where there were thirty or more such employers. It is suggested that the employment of manservants is, within limits, a useful indicator of a certain type of gentility and that the spread of such towns outside the Home Counties was very limited at this time.

This article calls for greater attention within urban history to the ‘civic economy of the book’. By means of a case study of the Manchester Free Public Library and its context, examining the internal workings of the library system and its impact on the broader cultural life of the city, it is argued that the nineteenth-century public library, if not an especially successful disciplinary institution, may yet have been a significant mechanism of cultural disempowerment.

London's cultural and social life is the focus of four recent books which, with the exception of a few forays by Manley, concentrate mostly on the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century.

It is over thirty years since E.P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class (1963) pushed culture – seen as an active process of coping with and shaping collective experience – higher up the historians' agenda. The waves made by the late twentieth-century ‘turns’ towards culture and language are still being felt. This highly diverse movement has also been shaped by theorists such as Foucault and Bourdieu, whom Thompson would undoubtedly have regarded as being suspiciously ‘continental’ but whose work has made an exciting contribution to the historian's repertoire.

One of the attractions of medieval urban history is the fact that major conceptual problems in the field continue to be debated. In a stimulating review article by J.H. Mundy, ’Philip Jones and the medieval Italian city-state‘, J. of European Economic History, 28 (1999), 185–200, one distinguished scholar is taxed for holding views now dismissed by some, but of which he is by no means a unique surviving representative. One of these views assumes a clear distinction between the antique city, supposedly a bureaucratic centre with limited economic functions, and the medieval city, as the home of industrious artisans and nascent capitalism. The image of the non-profit-making ancient town may be overly indebted to the nature of the literary sources and to the prevalent interests of classicists; but, although many would now agree that both the elements in the above equation need qualifying, a more focused comparison is presently lacking, and a fine book is still waiting to be written on the transition from the ancient world to the middle ages in urban history.