Portraiture has accurately been identified as one of the many harmony-inducing, commemorative devices employed in the celebratory culture of the London liveries in the century after the Reformation. But a closer examination of the developing tradition of livery company portraiture shows its use to be considerably more complex, and sometimes more divisive, than previously recognized.

Belfast's civic portraits provide an unbroken narrative of the city's municipal identity dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Their layers of meaning can be understood within the context of the social, political and cultural concerns of the period in which they were produced and presented. An examination of these complex and coded works of art is revealing about the political and religious tensions, as well as the personalities, of mid-Victorian Belfast's intricate urban landscape.

Using case studies of city halls in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, this article contributes towards the creation of an iconographic reading of this building type. This article argues that the symbolic aim of the city hall was to express the burgher's pride and values, and to symbolize the local and national history. To understand the multifaceted architecture of a city hall in a capital city, one must also understand the ideas behind nation-building in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The second part of the article analyses how European, national and local narratives were used in the city halls.

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

The retreat from bold reconstruction planning in Britain's blitzed cities is now well established, although there are two notable exceptions: Coventry and Plymouth. While the circumstances in Coventry have been fully researched, the narrative in Plymouth remains untold. The aim of this article is therefore to evaluate the main formal measures required to embark on the comprehensive redevelopment of Plymouth's heavily blitzed core area and whether, despite Whitehall's failure to deliver the necessary legal and administrative powers in a timely and co-ordinated manner, the city maintained its faith in bold plans and planners.

The inauguration of New Delhi in 1931 represented a complex vision of the late colonial state where liberal political reforms intended to pacify Indians simultaneously bound them more closely to the British Empire. These conciliatory reforms focused Indian attention on provincial local self-government while the centre remained firmly in British hands. New Delhi, as the pre-eminent symbol of this imperial centre, crucially disseminated this double narrative of promised liberation and continued colonial dependency. The new capital may have projected imperial power and permanence, as many scholars have noted, but it also symbolized the underlying strands that connected British political reform with the reinforcement and reaffirmation of continued British rule.

Manhattan's landscape contains few material reminders of its colonial past. Traces of the Native Americans who frequented the island, the Dutch who planted New Amsterdam at its tip and the various European and African peoples who populated the city renamed New York by the English in 1664 are few and far between. Though the obliteration of the tangible remains of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century city dwellers speeded the transformation of Manhattan into a vibrant twentieth-century metropolis, the dearth of visible signs of this era has complicated historians' efforts to fabricate enduring images of the men and women of this early urban society. Their stories, though dutifully rehearsed by schoolbook writers and museum curators, have rarely become etched in memory.

Liverpool's designation as European Capital of Culture for 2008, together with the 800th anniversary of the founding of the borough in 2007, has (unsurprisingly) generated a number of books dealing with different aspects of the city's history. The five volumes reviewed here represent just a small selection of those available, ranging from the deliberately academic to much more popular publications. Together they provide much of interest for urban historians. If these books have a common theme it is the argument (or assumption) that for much of its history, and in many different respects, Liverpool was (and remains) in various ways different from other British cities. The celebration of difference lies very much at the heart of Liverpool's Capital of Culture activities, and these books provide additional perspectives on Liverpool's demographic, social, cultural, sporting and architectural distinctiveness.