History or heritage

British urban history emerged as a coherent academic discipline in the 1960s. The establishment of the Urban History Yearbook in 1974, under the enthusiastic tutelage of Jim Dyos, was but one indication of the emerging strength of the subject. Subsequent years have seen a growing volume of publications in the field, and a widening focus to include not only the era of the Industrial Revolution but also the pre-modern period. Parallel with this trend has been an upsurge of 'popular' interest in historic towns. In recent decades such centres have flourished as tourist resorts and salubrious residential enclaves, exploiting the rising social cachet of 'the world we have lost'. The task of interpreting the urban past to the general public has by and large fallen not to academic publications but to a special brand of popular literature -tourist leaflets, guides, coffee-table books, and so on. In itself this is hardly astonishing; what is surprising is the extent to which, outside the areas of architecture and artefacts, the popular genre appears to have been largely unaffected by developments in its academic counterpart. Urban historians may feel that there has been a revolution in their subject, but its impact has been generally confined to the academic world, especially its higher reaches. Not that there has been any lack of output in the popular

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• Introduction

  Open Access•Shane Ewen, Tosh Warwick•Urban History•2020

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• Research in urban history

  Open Access•Tosh Warwick•Urban History•2018

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