The appearance of the Urban History Yearbook marks an important and exciting stage in the development of its subject, not only in this country but wherever it is studied. The study of the urban past is no new thing but what has been so striking about it in the course of the last decade or so has been the almost overwhelming growth in the numbers of scholars taking part in it and the immensely wider range of topics and techniques they have been pursuing.

This was the tenth anniversary meeting of the Urban History Group though only the sixth occasion on which there had been a formal programme of papers. So many came – over 160 – that we felt for the first time the loss of the old intimate, bantering style of discussion, and slipped instead into more formal speeches pitched for the most part on a rather more general level than we have had before. It was possible this year to miss people altogether in the corridors and even in the bars. At any moment one expected to come across a knot of specialists earnestly planning a splinter group, as we had done ourselves one lunch-time at the Sheffield conference of the Economic History Society in 1963. It was an opportunity to reflect on the implications of growth in other ways, for the University Bookshop had arranged an exhibition of some 500 books on various aspects of urban history to celebrate the last decade of print, to which the Standing Conference on Local History added a hundred titles more from their recent exhibition on the publications of local organizations in this field.

The interdisciplinary approach to the study of urban history has considerable potential for the examination of communites of manageable size. Yet, as Professor Dyos has pointed out, it is by no means clear that the proliferation of more and more case studies is a particularly useful exercise unless communities in question contain an element of typicality and are informed by the broader social and historical tendencies relating to urbanization as a major force of social change. “We know so little yet about a number of obvious things,” he once wrote. “Small towns that never grew big nor got stuck in amber as a neighbour did tend to remain unseen. There are too few studies of such towns.” (H. J. Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History [1968], 38.) Our study, of Kendal in Westmorland, seems well justified.

Although reviews of university lectures and courses have appeared in recent years in student newspapers on some of the more ‘progressive’ campuses of Britain and the U.S., one hopes that the practice will spread no further. Valuable though the occasional frank comment may be, nothing would normally persuade an academic to pronounce publicly on the content and presentation of a colleague's course. It was therefore with much hesitation that I agreed to follow the Open University's new course on Urban Development, and for a long time I was uncertain of my own ethical position in attempting to ‘review’ it. That this article should appear at all is the product of two considerations. Firstly, a course which is freely broadcast on radio and television can perhaps make less claim to confidentiality than a traditional university lecture course. Secondly, and this is much more important, the Urban Development course is generally so impressive that I have little but good to say of it, and with the Open University still something of a dirty word in traditional university circles, its successes deserve to be acknowledged.

In the stately progress of the Oxfordshire V.C.H.this is the ninth volume to appear, since volume IV is still in preparation*. Although one of the smallest counties in England, covering barely 480,000 acres, Oxfordshire has thus produced more volumes than any other county except Wiltshire, which has also produced nine but is nearly twice its size. County, city, and university all deserve praise for their financial partnership in this splendid achievement. At present, alas, the University of Oxford stands almost alone amongst educational institutions in its ability to afford enlightened patronage of this kind. The volume is in the customary format and displays the high standards of scholarship that have become a sine qua non of the V.C.H. under the present general editor.