Urbanities

Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2004; 432 pp.; £25; ISBN 0-297-60767-7. Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000. Essays in honour of David Reeder, ed. Robert Colls and Richard Rodger, Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2004; 329 pp.; £55; ISBN 0-7546-0650-3 These are timely books. The arrival of my copies happened to coincide with the forced suspension of the Chief Constable of Humberside at the heavy hand of David Blunkett and against the better judgment of the local police authority – authority in name only, it seemed. And every day questions of the balance of local and central power relations were being asked but never resolved. So the government forces through obligatory postal voting in some regions of England in local and European elections, despite practical objections on the ground: all in the name of increasing participation in the democratic process. So the government resurrects capping where council-tax rises are above what it considers proper: all in the name of protecting the interests of local citizens. So the government forces through the merger of education and social services for children, irrespective of the views of authorities or the professionals involved. Think-tanks and opinion-formers bandy about the term ‘New Localism’ in recognition that Whitehall and Westminster can't run everything: but the agenda appears to leave little room for local patriotism or self-action, coming down to new means by which government can everywhere get its own way.

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