Alexander Pope unwittingly offered valuable solace and encouragement to students of urban morphology when he observed, in An Essay on Man, ‘A mighty maze! but not without a plan’. The search for guiding principles shaping morphology, for the formative, generative and adaptive processes operating in space and through time, is a major goal in the field of urban investigation. Every settlement consists of a number, or a mosaic, of distinct morphological units. These units can be classified on various dimensions such as period of development, building style or functional use. The units vary in size and complexity, or heterogeneity, of elements. On occasion, complexity was incorporated into the original design, as in the case of the Georgian New Town of Edinburgh. More commonly, complexity emerged as a result of subsequent adaptation, alteration and partial or total replacement of elements such as plots, blocks, frontages or townscapes. A fundamental, though rather neglected, concern of the morphologist is the identification of formative, generative and adaptive processes and the establishment of a relational model incorporating all of the interactive components, i.e. factors, processes, morphological elements and agents involved in the decision-making process.

London is one of the best recorded of medieval cities. Yet the very bulk of the sources has in the past inhibited systematic enquiry, so that for many periods and aspects of its history the capital remains the unknown element in English urban affairs. The greatest quantity of records concerns property-holding, and one way of making sense of this forbidding mass of information is to reconstitute it in the form of histories of the properties to which it refers. Since the early eighteenth century this way of using urban records has been adopted from time to time in antiquarian studies which have thrown valuable light on conditions in English medieval towns. In particular H. E. Salter's work on medieval Oxford inspired the present author to apply similar methods in a study of Winchester, which is now complete. Winchester pointed the way to London and to a means of remedying our great ignorance of that city.

Swift's poetic jibe was aimed at the ever-friendless literary critic; but there were many others who shared in the polymorphic business of ‘giving directions’ to the unwieldy town. Some very literally so: the makers of the early directories provided names, addresses, and occupations of leading urban residents, plus staple information about transport services, posts, banks and miscellaneous local offices. Itemizing and classifying a complex urbanity took a certain confidence. ‘I have taken upon me the arduous Task of compiling a Complete Guide, for the easy finding out of every inhabitant of the least Consequence…’, asserted Elizabeth Raffald, publishing the Manchester Directory in 1772, while confessing the difficulties of the task. Not everyone may have been convinced by her computation that the significant citizens numbered only 1,500 men and women, in a growing conurbation of over 30,000 residents. But that was not the point. A directory offered immediacy rather than complete accuracy or comprehension. Indeed, most compilers were careful not to claim too much. ‘Errors and Deficien- cies must unavoidably appear in every Work of this Kind, from the extreme Difficulty of procuring Information in some Things, and the fluctuating Variety of others’, as A Directory of Sheffield explained firmly in 1787. Many compilations made a caveat of this sort, and indicated a willingness to accept corrections and additions for future editions.

Directories have had a somewhat chequered history, both in terms of their original production, and also in their subsequent use as sources of information. To a large extent these two aspects are closely related, as is illustrated by the reluctance of some urban historians to use directories because of doubts over their reliability. A further factor determining the extent to which directories have been utilized, has been the availability of other information. In Britain it has been the relative abundance of small area census data that has had an important effect on directing research in urban history, by drawing much attention away from the exploration and use of other sources. This is certainly the case with directories, which for many researchers have served only as a ‘stop-gap’, being used when nothing else was available and then often with a sceptical attitude. Recently, some of these views have started to change as a growing number of urban historians make more use of directory material, particularly in the study of urban systems and changes in commercial structures.

E. H. Carr once admitted his envy of medieval historians who have a manageable body of evidence to deal with but found consolation in the belief that their competence was, in a sense, based on ignorance. Students of the English town in the later middle ages may soon be in the ‘enviable’ position of having no reliable sources at all with which to judge progress of urban life. The use of the statistical evidence of lay subsidy returns of 1334 and 1524 and the lists of admissions of freemen to late medieval towns as indicators of the prosperity of England's towns in the later middle ages has been questioned and the meaning of these sources is open to doubt. Yet much of the evidence for urban decline comes from impressionistic sources, sources which were often compiled by townsmen with a vested interest in pleading poverty in order to obtain financial relief. The value of this evidence has also been challenged.

New Zealand's national myths have emphasized the rural frontier. The archetypal and most commonly celebrated colonist has been the backblocks settler, the cow cockie, and to some extent the gold miner. New Zealanders have never seen much glamour in their towns. Yet from the very beginning New Zealand has been a mainly urban society. Many towns were founded in the early stages of European settlement, and New Zealand has exhibited in modified form the tendency to ‘metropolitanism’ characteristic of other countries that were settled in the mid-nineteenth century. The urban historian could have a very important role to play in helping New Zealanders to come to terms with, and absorb into their sense of national identity, this major aspect of their national existence.