Such pleas for a variegated and conceptually flexible approach to the world of nineteenth-century cities are as relevant now as when they were first penned and need to be applied to religion in the city as much as to any other aspect of urban life. Indeed the sheer eclecticism of religious life in modern cities seems to defy analytical categories and broad generalisations. No sooner has one set of views established an ascendancy than they are challenged by fresh work based on different methodological frameworks and focusing often on different kinds of city. The nineteenth-century city seems to set up the kinds of problems for historians that post-modernists have identified for the entire historical enterprise. But, in the spirit of the introductory quotation from Asa Briggs, my limited ambition in this chapter is to open up a number of different ways of looking at religion and identity in nineteenth-century British cities.