History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the process of urban economic development and the role of housing markets in this process is as essential as it is obvious. In order to make progress towards providing answers to some of the important questions relating to the development of towns, it is necessary to try to obtain more precise information on trends in house prices, the level and structure of housing demand and the character of the supply side of the markets. Studies of local housing markets, however, have been constrained by the lack of reliable data on the most important variables and are, therefore, characteristically qualitative and descriptive. Our main objective, therefore, when embarking on the study described below, was to obtain reliable data on which to base analyses of local housing markets.

The growing popularity of local history in towns and cities raises some questions for urban historians. What contribution is being made to our knowledge of the urban past by groups of people for whom local history is a leisure-time occupation? Are they poles apart from the interests and approaches of urban history? Can guide-lines be laid down? There is no general agreement on these matters. Opinions range from the view that local history is best left to develop its own canons, to the view that it can supply a source of labour for academics under their direction and control. Another, possibly more sympathetic view, is that the two kinds of work might feed into each other, provided that local historians are willing to move more purposively into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So they are urged to take on new subjects, to ‘flesh out’ the urban process, and to develop a more ‘vital approach’, making their ‘touchstone the real life experiences of people themselves’, But how responsive are local historians likely to be?

Over the past two decades the enumerators' books of the nineteenth-century censuses have rightly become one of the major sources for the study of nineteenth-century social structure. Containing as they do, for the whole population of Great Britain, information on name, residence, marital status, relationship to household head, sex, age, occupation, birthplace and infirmity of sight or hearing, they have made possible a wide range of studies of, for example, patterns of residence, household composition, occupational structure, migration, age of marriage, patterns of education and farm labour utilization. Linked to other sources or bodies of material they have been used in studies of class consciousness, voting, voluntary association membership, property ownership and development, farming, poverty, the employment of married women and servant keeping, to name but a few.