To all appearances the Victorian city is now virtually a thing of the past. The actual city, the physical monument, that pile of solemn but exuberant shapes that has been for so long and for so many people the very emblem of urbanity is at last melting away. Those massive realities that once commanded the ground in such numbers are being furiously singled out as trophies by conservationists or reduced to rubble by property developers. The urban past has never had a very secure future. The ponderous and everaccumulating mass that no Victorian generation could perceive as complete has remained intact, it now seems, for only the first two post-Victorian generations. Only now therefore can we be conscious of the whole cycle. We can even sense the shape of some of the things to come. The technologies that underpinned these first cities of the industrial era are being superseded by others with quite different implications, and the processes that built up such high densities in those cities may even be going into reverse. For the urban mass no longer generates forces of attraction directly proportionate to its density. Density, though susceptible to almost limitless engineering possibilities, is no longer a necessary condition of urban intercourse. No human settlement in Britain lies beyond the city's range. The perspective we get of the Victorian city from the ground is therefore a finite, tentative, historical one.