This article examines how the civic authorities of six English towns responded to competition from new markets, regional fairs, informal trade and each other during the period 1250–1400. It argues that the civic authorities adopted an aggressive strategy based on developing a good reputation for their town, in order to show that the town was well governed and that its merchants and artisans maintained high standards of quality. This article focuses upon how a credible reputation was developed through the creation and enforcement of market regulation, and examines its appeal to citizens, foreign merchants and the crown and nobility.

London historians marvel at London's population growth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but never at how those hundreds of thousands of people got housed. It did not just ‘happen’; building tens of thousands of houses required marshalling land, money, materials and labour, and directing them at specific building sites. The task was performed by a myriad of small-scale builders from most walks of life, projectors who used contracts to have work done they could not perform themselves. All this was done in an environment of considerable risk in building new houses because of royal prohibitions against doing so, and facing large fines, sometimes imprisonment, and their new houses pulled down.

During the nineteenth century, police, magistrates, reformers and the press noticed a rising tide of juvenile crime. Child-stripping, the crime of stealing young children's clothes by force or deception, was an activity of this type which caused alarm among contemporaries. As the century progressed, improved policing, urbanization and Irish migration, allied to growing social concern, caused more cases of child-stripping to be noticed. Accounts by Dickens, Mayhew and others characterized child-stripping as an activity indulged in by old women who were able to make money by victimizing the weakest strata of society. However, research in the British Library's digitized newspaper collections as well as in parliamentary papers conclusively demonstrates that child-stripping, far from being the domain of Dickensian crones, was actually perpetrated by older children, notably girls, against children even younger than themselves. Despite widespread revulsion, which at times approached a ‘moral panic’ prompted by the nature of the crime, progressive attitudes largely prevailed with most child-stripping children being sent to reformatories or industrial schools in the hope of reforming their behaviour. This article thus conforms with Foucauldian notions of the switch from physical to mental punishments and aligns with the Victorians’ invention of children as a category of humanity that could be saved.

This article explores the regulation of prostitution in nineteenth-century Cambridge by an appraisal of the committal books of the university prison. Each evening in term-time the university proctors arrested and imprisoned local ‘streetwalkers’ in an attempt to protect the students’ morals. This research offers insight into the ways in which Cambridge's geography and its dual system of governance influenced the policing of prostitution in the town centre. The former compelled students and townspeople to share the same crowded space and the latter enabled the university to enforce traditional patterns of class and gender to control sexuality in the town.

During the 1880s, a massive speculative boom occurred in the Roman real estate market. Its subsequent crash left a lasting mark on the structure of the city and triggered a nationwide banking crisis. This article analyses the causes of this boom and bust by showing how a small but cohesive lobby managed to bypass and bend to its own advantage formal regulation by exploiting institutional conflicts and political divisions at both national and local level.

The article considers the impact of new arterial roads on the mobilities of the wealthier inter-war Londoner, and argues that they occasioned an emergent form of automobility that was modern, sensational and exciting for the metropolitan driver, but was also highly dangerous, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists living in suburban homes near these roads.

The Poulson affair is central for the agenda of post-1950 British urban history. Particularly, it suggests that corruption is a key facet within the politics of planning and the rebuilding of Britain's urban environment. Poulson provides a useful route into an examination of the place of corruption because of the scale of his activity both in terms of volumes and types of constructions he planned. His networks and the geographical concentrations of his work also provide a regional dimension. Perceptions of Poulson have been fashioned by investigative and satirical journalism and television. A re-evaluation in light of official government sources and Poulson's autobiography raise important issues concerning the ethics of public officials and private businessmen; and the consequences of the interaction of public and private markets. Poulson's business was driven by the twin engines of government funding and the activity cycles of the construction industry. The fluctuation in his planned commissions provides a useful barometer of the planning environment. Poulson's demise exposed the complex relations between business, civil servants, ministers and local councillors contributing to growing public distrust of the workings of government. Finally, it is suggested that the affair was a critical factor in re-shaping central–local government relationships.

Since the path-breaking work of prominent North American historians such as Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, as well as more recent roundtables in Europe, urban environmental history is now a mature research field, at the intersection of various related approaches. Time has passed since a leader of environmental history, William Cronon, could write that ‘cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received’. In this field, urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science and engineering. Urban environmental historians, as they are referred to here, have duly established the importance of studying the relationships between ‘nature’ (including non-humans) and humans in and around cities. This ‘nature’ is a complex and shifting entity: recent doctoral studies have, for instance, documented rivers transformed by human action, weeds growing in the spatial and social margins of cities and tidal wetlands progressively filled in and built upon. The recently completed Ph.D.s reviewed in this essay see the built environment more as a hybrid of natural elements, like water, plants, animals and human action. Aided by the environmental lens, the scope of the urban historian has also been broadened by studying the ways in which residents’ lives were transformed by the invention, spread and environmental impact of new technologies, as well as the political responses to environmental crises.