Quantitative studies of nineteenth-century cities have made rapid advances in the last decade in terms of both the complexity of techniques and the range of sources to which techniques have been applied. Simple representations of material from the census enumerators' books like graphs and pie diagrams have been superseded by location quotients, indices of segregation and factor analyses. Synchronic descriptions of urban structure have been supplemented by assessments of change (for example, of residential persistence and mobility) and analyses of relationships (for example, journeys to work and marriage patterns). Researchers have ventured beyond the census to examine other nominal listings—in directories, electoral registers, ratebooks and church records—often using record linkage techniques to check or supplement information from one source with another. Our enthusiasm to apply new techniques to new sources has often left us exposed to Anderson's criticism that ‘we have been paying too little attention to the question of why we are measuring what we are measuring’. Many quantitative historical geographers justify their enterprise as the testing of modern theory on such subjects as migration and modernization. Some such theories, particularly those concerned with Sjoberg's and Burgess' stereotypes of pre-industrial and industrial cities and the ‘transitional’ nature of Victorian cities, are little more than rough generalizations and some urban historians have been more than sceptical about them. Certainly the retrospective application of the methods, concepts and theories of contemporary social research is a critical issue. In this paper we consider the significance of ‘what we are measuring’ for a particularly contentious concept, that of ‘community’. We assess the usefulness or relevance of more sophisticated methodological techniques to the identification and investigation of communities in Victorian cities.

‘There is still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes are not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the same families; and those who command are not more secure of perpetuity than those who obey—At any moment a servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that condition’. This view of social mobility in North America by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840 has been the predominant perception almost to the present. Only after the Second World War did two basically different arguments emerge. On the one hand, historians of social mobility in nineteenth-century American and European cities, such as Boston, Marseille, and Bochum came to the tentative conclusion that rates of upward social mobility were in fact higher in the United States than in Europe and that this was especially true for upward mobility from the working-class into non-manual occupations. In effect, their assessments corroborated the assertion which Tocqueville had made more than a century ago. The explanation for these differences, historians argued, was to be found in the values of the European working class: a strong traditional commitment to the occupational heredity, or the beginnings of class consciousness, kept European workers from using chances of social ascent into non-manual occupations much more than American workers. On the other hand, Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix have claimed that social mobility becomes similarly high in all societies, once a certain degree of industrialization and economic expansion has been reached. The idea behind this argument is that rates of social mobility depend on economic development and changes of occupational structure, which both follow the same basic pattern in Europe and North America. Whilst the empirical evidence for this assessment depends on post-1945 studies of social mobility in America and Europe, there are grounds for projecting the argument back to the late nineteenth century. First, if economic development does lead to similar mobility rates, this effect should have emerged by the end of the era of industrialization. Secondly, studies of the trend of social mobility in the United States as well as in various European countries show the same long term stability of rates of social mobility since the late nineteenth century. Hence, if rates of social mobility were similar after the Second World War, and if the long term trend was similar too, mobility rates at the end of the era of industrialization cannot have differed much.

Anyone glancing into a bookshop window in the Federal Republic of Germany today might get the impression that urban history is currently one of the most important and widely published historical disciplines. Such an impression would mislead, however. Most of these richly illustrated and expensively produced volumes have almost no academic significance. They are the product of a wave of nostalgia which certain astute publishers have managed to catch thanks to their unerring appreciation of market demand. For instance, a whole generation over the age of fifty wants to be reminded of the undamaged towns of its pre-war childhood. Post-war redevelopment, too, has had its effect, and the insecure citizens of our often featureless towns require a means of self-representation and identification. Demand for such publications has also been generated by the growing consciousness of the environment, which has made the expression ‘Heimat’ (heritage) respectable again, and strengthened the call for the conservation of a world rooted in the past. However, modern urban history is only just beginning to function as an independent specialism in the Federal Republic (and the same applies to its eastern neighbour). It has made gradual progress in the last few years, but even so, in comparison with the sustained and varied urban history research pursued in countries such as Britain and the United States of America, Germany is an underdeveloped country. In fact, the Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik (DIFU) acknowledged as much when, as recently as April 1980, it organized a review of the field. The Federal Republic's handful of specialists were invited to Berlin for a colloquium on ‘Problems in the writing of urban history’. The aim of the conference was just as much to examine the current difficulties of urban history as to stimulate further research.

Twenty-five years ago, when Jean Delumeau published his study of sixteenth-century Rome, contributions to the social (as opposed to the institutional) history of early modern towns were still rare events. Since about 1960, the trickle has become a flood. Historians from different countries have contributed to this development to varying degrees and in different ways; the French, with a shelf of massive doctoral theses; the Italians, with multi-volume histories of specific cities; the Germans, with symposia on small towns, and so on. The virtually simultaneous publication of three monographs on provincial English towns, one of them by an American scholar (J. T. Evans), prompts a question about the place of Anglo-American research in this picture. Are there distinctive English and American schools of preindustrial urban history? If so, is this because the towns studied are different, or the historical traditions of the students?

The Hand-list compiled by the late Professor Herbert Finberg and myself was completed in September 1971, revised during 1972, and published in August 1973. Its aim was defined in the Introduction as ‘providing, for the first time, a gazetteer of places which in their day were reckoned to be boroughs’.

A major trend in European urban history research, during the past few decades, has been the increasing attention given to town plans and topographical conditions. Even in the 1930s, little attention was paid to the physical aspects of urban development, and it was not uncommon for town plans to be totally absent from works on urban history. A turning point was reached in two classical studies, viz. Fernand Vercauteren, Etudes sur les civitates de la Belgique seconde (1934) and F. L. Ganshof, Etude sur le développement des villes entre Loire et Rhin au Moyen Age (1943). The Stadtkernforschung begun in postwar Germany, when bomb damage enabled archaeological investigations of central city areas to be carried out on an entirely different scale than had been previously possible, was also of great importance for continued development.

The peasant continues to be the favourite subject for research in India, but urban history has made considerable progress in the last few years. In 1969, when the Yearbook was a slim Newsletter, I had contributed a bibliographical essay on ‘Urban History in India’ which also indicated the abundant raw material available and suggested possible lines of enquiry. The present report will cover briefly issues raised in writings and at seminars in the last few years.

In two of its aspects the writing of architectural history has as long a pedigree as any kind of historical scholarship. In the first place, the urge to study buildings has been provoked by the sense of loss at their destruction, from the time of the Reformation onwards. The shocked response to the sight of monastic ruins was a spur to recording their past, so producing some of the earliest achievements in historical research and writing. John Aubrey's plea—‘I wished monastrys had not been putte downe, that the reformers would have been more moderate as to that point’—underlines the sentiment that led his contemporaries Sir William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth to compile their Monasticon Anglicanum (3 Vols., 1655–73), as well as the publication of more purely architectural works such as Dugdale's History of St. Paul's Cathedral (1658) and Anthony Wood's Antiquities of Oxford (1674). Three hundred years later it is easy to observe the same kind of impulse in the countless books written from a sense of outrage at the destruction of buildings by war and redevelopment. Architectural history derives much of its energy, and its wide popularity, from the desire to preserve tangible reminders of the past.