When presenting the evolution of medieval and early modern cities, historians often focus on how infrastructure, open spaces, fortifications, palaces, and planning projects shaped the urban landscape. The tissue filling that picture—houses, workshops, industry, and walled-in orchards—does not enjoy the spotlight so often. Buildings inhabited by lower merchant classes, the middling sort, and the urban poor are usually absent, taking the majority's domestic life out of the discourse. Chris King's work responds to this situation by taking a methodical and precise look at archaeological and documental remains of houses in Norwich—the first English city to obtain a rebuilding statute in 1534—to study their “wide-ranging themes of continuity and change” (7) and the “shifting contexts of public and private within the household” (7) across four critical centuries in European history.

This endeavor is built upon four kinds of sources. King first looks at the architectural remains of houses conserved today. Surviving medieval undercrofts and great halls occupied by the urban elite are articulated in terms of their conservation or abandonment in favor of flint-and-brick rubble walls, timber-framed street ranges, and humble dormers under jettied roofs, showing how material change followed the flow of political and social meanings. King visited and photographed these houses himself, backing his arguments with ad hoc produced images. For houses that were demolished, the author resorts to archaeological sources, mainly from the Norwich survey performed between 1971 and 1978 (52), presenting a selection of architectural plans and intriguing catalogs of objects such as metal tools, ceramic kitchenware, and North Holland “cockered” bowls. Disappeared buildings are also supported with early 1900s illustrations ceded by the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and the extensive record of old houses photographed by George Plunkett between the 1930s and 1950s (55). These images come accompanied by a wide array of documental sources, including medieval property records, early modern landgable returns, wills with household inventories, and abundant probate inventories from 1580 to 1730 (57).

From these testimonies and the larger conceptual framework presented in chapters 1 and 2, King builds a methodological approach that falls somewhere between archaeology, architectural history, urban history, public history, and the history of material culture. The book follows with a survey of merchant's houses divided into two stages, medieval houses in chapter 3 and early modern houses in chapter 4. Spaces that survived both periods are highlighted in this section, arguing how their roles and meanings changed over the years. This is further discussed in chapter 5, expanding the narration to institutional buildings such as the mayor's council chamber rebuilt in 1534–7 (151) or the transformation of the Dominican friary church into the Common Hall in 1540 (165). In chapter 6, the focus changes to the middling sort, discussing how medieval properties were modified, expanded, and subdivided by wealthy landowners to house tenants. Chapter 7 brings the houses of the middling sort further into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on dormers, attics, and roofs. Finally, the eighth and final chapter deals with the urban poor through some of the boldest and more engaging arguments in the monograph. This group includes the immigrant population of Norwich, many of whom were textile workers living in the poorest parts of the city (273). Most of their households were small cottages and clay-walled buildings from which almost no architectural evidence remains (251). The few examples featured are single-cell buildings that may have been rented to less privileged citizens or even subsidized by charity foundations (254).

The conclusive section wraps up the narrative, showing the author's ability to weave sources of different natures into a strong and convincing argument. However, the chapters leading to this point do not display this same dynamism and often fall into repetition. The lack of footnotes and/or endnotes is noticeable in this regard, as they would have proven useful to take out from the main text the abundant load of reminders and references between chapters. In contrast, the book is at its most brilliant when presenting plans and carefully curated images. The single axonometry included proves the potential of this topic for further graphic exploration, synthesizing complex constructive and stylistic descriptions that may present a challenge to the untrained reader.