It was bound to come, sooner or later. Once Britain was impelled, reluctantly and slowly, to depart from its Georgian and Edwardian heritage, sociology was bound to find first a foothold, then a niche and now a whole platform. It is not that Britain did not know about sociology. In a sense, sociology, especially empirical sociology, got started in Britain but, like modern industrial technology, it had to be taken elsewhere to be further developed. The sober attempts of a small group of dourly upright reformers and administrators in the nineteenth century to describe in a reliable way the real ‘condition of England’ were among the first of their kind in history. For the first time men and women sought to arrive at a judgement of their own society through the disciplined and direct study of their fellow citizens, by observing them, and by asking them questions and by systematically recording these observations and conversations. Sociology has certainly grown since the days of the Poor Law Commissioners, of Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb but their mode of learning about their own society is still one very vital element of sociology. Contemporary sociology is more knowledgeable, more sophisticated in outlook, more imaginative in substance, more ingenious in technique than they were, but it would not be what it has become without them. After this great surge, which ran over about three quarters of a century, British sociological powers seemed to exhaust themselves.