Summary: It is argued that both the tenacity of the neighbourhood and its adaptability were much greater than historians have tended to think, and that this was true not only during the ancien regime but also during the nineteenth century when the rate of mobility between towns and within towns reached enormous proportions. Demographic, social and cultural changes did not result in the destruction of the local community, but in its transformation, a transformation in which the growing need for reciprocity among working-class neighbours played a crucial role. The decline of more or less institutionalized forms of self-regulation went hand in hand with the construction by the lower classes of informal channels of social interaction based on local ties, which stimulated an active and participatory street life. Moreover, the tendency towards geographical segregation contributed to the development of a different collective sense of identity in working-class neighbourhoods, which added a new dimension to the concept of solidarity.

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The whole journeymen of the Metropolis who will form an irresistible phalanx and greatly superior to the united energies of the Masters.London employers to the government, 1813* The paths of historical research resemble the forces in the sea. As some topics surface and rise to ever greater heights, others may be dragged to the depths of silence and cease to affect the beating of the waves. In most western European countries, research on journeymen has suffered this second fate. Along with the decline in interest in guild-based economies, the issue of whether pre-industrial journeymen associations were predecessors (or perhaps adumbrations) of modern trade unions, 1 which had inspired widespread debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, faded from the agenda following World War II. This trend does not mean that the new generation of social historians has blithely ignored disputes involving journeymen. Nevertheless, many authors designate such events as crowd movements or view them as obvious forms of traditional resistance.In the 1960s and 1970s, British crowd historians painted a consistent picture of social relations on the eve of the Industrial Revolution and