It seems likely that historians in the past have seriously underestimated the number of English townsmen in the early fourteenth century. In London alone there may have been 80–100,000 around 1300. The population of Norwich in the early fourteenth century was higher than used to be thought, and it was growing: Rutledge proposes 17,000 for 1311 and 25,000 for 1333. Keene's estimate of about 10,000 for Winchester in the early fourteenth century can serve as a basis for estimating the population of other towns in the same period. Those whose taxable value in 1334, and whose contribution to the poll tax of 1377, was at least as great as Winchester's, probably had a population equal to Winchester's or greater around 1300. By this argument about fifteen towns, including London, are likely to have had 10,000 or more people at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and perhaps 5 per cent of England's population lived in towns of this rank. Estimates taking account of smaller towns are much more precarious, but it is possible that all told 10 per cent of England's population lived in towns of over 2,000 inhabitants and that a further 5 per cent lived in small boroughs, some with as few as 300 people. Even this estimate does not take account of many small market towns, not described as boroughs, that had elementary urban characteristics.

Urban history is a rapidly expanding, flourishing field in Europe. Nevertheless, urban scholars would do well to re-examine the paradigms within which they have been working as the field today lacks central questions and general interpretive models. Moreover, the common focus on urban biography or upon one region within a single nation-state has become increasingly outmoded, given the international scale of economic processes and migration flows. More attention to topics treated within a European-wide or even international context is needed. In addition, urban history as currently defined is tilted towards social and economic concerns to the neglect of the political arena.

The houses in early modern European cities almost all had names and signs. These are usually taken to be an early form of advertising, or else a way of finding one's way around the city in times before street names and numbering. This article argues that their primary purpose was to mark the individual, family or ethnic identity of the house owner or tenant. During the eighteenth century the names and signs changed in character, and by the mid-nineteenth century they had almost disappeared from city centres, primarily as a result of changes in individual and family identity among the urban middle classes, and of the transformation of neighbourhood communities under the pressure of urban economic and social integration. The evolution of house names and shop signs therefore illustrates the changing relationship between the city's residents and the urban environment.

Historians have long recognized the central role of debt and credit for producers, retailers and consumers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against a background characterized by persistent shortages of specie, limited banking facilities and erratic transport mechanisms, the speculative impulse that fed the expanding economy drew sustenance from a proliferation of instruments of private credit — notably bills of exchange, promissory notes, and accommodation bills — which, together with an increase of trade credit to retailers and their customers, served to promote and intertwine the industrial, commercial and consumer revolutions. ‘At any one time any business owed and was owed many goods caught up in the process of exchange’, Julian Hoppit observes of the later decades of the eighteenth century. ‘All businessmen were creditors and all businessmen were debtors.’ As trade and manufacture increased in English towns and cities, extended chains of indebtedness multiplied the economic links both between individual producers, retailers or consumers and among these sectors of the economy. Thus in Lancashire innkeepers were the debtors of maltsters, brewers and wine merchants, but were the creditors of shopkeepers, who in turn extended webs of consumer credit to sawyers and carpenters, artisans typically indebted (in their capacity as producers) to the master builders for whom they laboured in Liverpool's shipyards. Based on personal faith rather than tangible securities, these varied forms of private credit were notoriously unstable. Broad-based financial crises fuelled by the failure of private credit became commonplace in the last three decades of the century, and persistently disrupted economic life into the Victorian period.

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

In spite of the campaigns for social housing conducted by its most ardent supporters, at the beginning of the century Greece completely lacked the various low-cost housing organizations that were quite common in Europe. During the inter-war period, progressive governments took various steps to rationalize the provision of housing, aiming, among others, at encouraging the formation of housing co-operatives. Under the provisions of appropriate legislation, housing cooperatives acquired land on favourable terms either in or outside the city of Athens. The proposed schemes, which were meant to be supported by state funds, were, however, inadequately administered, mainly because of the political instability and economic hardships of the inter-war period. As a result, the function of the housing co-operatives was gradually restricted to providing small investors with cheap land, on which they would build individually at a more convenient time. The happy exceptions to the rule were co-operative housing schemes which owed their implementation to the higher economic and social status of their members.

Altogether, as a place of education Adelaide falls far short of the mark; as a place of amusement it is hopeless; and as a village — well, it is tolerably clean, and comparatively healthy.

Thistle Anderson (1905)

Architectural treatises and inscriptional evidence from buildings, artefacts and monuments are used to identify the different terms ascribed to urban settlements in medieval India. These sources reveal the diversity of terms used to describe towns and cities, and accordingly the diversity of functions associated with them. The linguistic variations employed indicate how urban functions changed over time, and convey contemporary perceptions of an urban hierarchy based on a functional classification or typology of towns.

For over thirty years demography has featured prominently on the urban history agenda. As long ago as 1963, in an article subtitled ‘On broadening the relevance and scope of urban history’, Eric Lampard emphasized that ‘An autonomous social history ought to begin with a study of population: its changing distribution in time and space’. In 1968 Leo Schnore suggested concentration upon ‘the demographic and ecological aspects of urban life’, according demography the number one priority. Leading British urban historians and historical geographers repeated such injunctions in the 1970s, emphasizing how little was known about even the most basic aspects of pre-industrial urban populations and how far British researchers lagged behind their continental colleagues in the field of urban demography. Unfortunately the response of the last generation of researchers to these precepts has been decidedly muted, and pre-industrial urban demography in England remains in its infancy.

The relationship between changes in the local economy of the town and region of Colchester are explored in relation to women's employment opportunities. Economic decline and technological change in the woollen industry, as well as diminishing agricultural work for females, provided a ‘push’ factor for women to move to Colchester. In the town, urban rejuvenation meant expansion in the service sector. Yet Colchester was unable to absorb all the labouring women who moved there. Employers introduced new types of industry, characteristically by expanding from retailing to manufacture. The sweated trades produced silk, shoes and ready-made clothes. A process of re-industrialization was, then, engendered by the availability of cheap female labour.