Although reviews of university lectures and courses have appeared in recent years in student newspapers on some of the more ‘progressive’ campuses of Britain and the U.S., one hopes that the practice will spread no further. Valuable though the occasional frank comment may be, nothing would normally persuade an academic to pronounce publicly on the content and presentation of a colleague's course. It was therefore with much hesitation that I agreed to follow the Open University's new course on Urban Development, and for a long time I was uncertain of my own ethical position in attempting to ‘review’ it. That this article should appear at all is the product of two considerations. Firstly, a course which is freely broadcast on radio and television can perhaps make less claim to confidentiality than a traditional university lecture course. Secondly, and this is much more important, the Urban Development course is generally so impressive that I have little but good to say of it, and with the Open University still something of a dirty word in traditional university circles, its successes deserve to be acknowledged.