Dismantling the Barriers: Past and Present in Urban Britain

Abstract

Since the 1960s one of the major growth areas in the humanities has been urban history, associated with the trend to write history ‘from below’, to concentrate on the everyday experience of ‘the common people’, and reflecting historians’ discovery that the recent past, which in Britain is mostly urban, can be just as interesting as the predominantly rural remote past. Moreover, because recent urban history is quite amenable to ‘amateur’ research, employing the plethora of registration and tax documents — censuses, ratebooks, electoral rolls and pollbooks, trade directories, and birth, marriage and death certificates — compiled by our Victorian ancestors, it has benefited from the enormous surge of popular interest in genealogy and local history.