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The Urban History Masquerade: Recent Trends in the Study of English Urban Development

The appearance of a clutch of books on English towns and cities permits a review of the standing of urban history six years after the passing of what David Cannadine has called 'the Dyos phenomenon'. During much of the 1960s and 1970s Jim Dyos was at the heart of a network of urban history activity which was fruitful in terms of publications, conferences and research initiatives. His untimely death in 1978 robbed the association of historians committed to the study of cities of its entrepreneurial inspiration. The important Leicester conference held posthumously in his honour in 1980, and the volume of essays deriving from it, marked the end of the Dyos era. As the books now under review testify, the field is still prolific even without Dyos' guiding hand, for none of these authors hails from the Dyos stable. Collectively these books raise the central question of the definition of urban history, which was never far from Dyos' mind. Is urban history an academic discipline which stands alongside economic history or social history as a field in its own right? Is it a sub-discipline, tenuously connected to economic history from which it first 1 D. Cannadine and D. Reader (eds.), Exploring the urban past (Cambridge, 1982), p. 203. * See D. Fraser and A. Sutdiffe (eds.), The pursuit of urban history (London, 1983).