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paper on the treatment of geographers in the Oxford dictionary of national biography (hereafter ODNB) raises important questions about how the history of the discipline should be documented, and about the place of biographical accounts in the writing of disciplinary histories. 1 Johnston rightly draws attention to the unsung labours of a relatively small number of individual geographers in the business of building a university discipline in Britain during the twentieth century. The story of the pioneering establishment of geography at Oxford and Cambridge is relatively well known. However, without equivalent efforts at other established and newly emergent academic institutions around the country, geography could never have matured into a fully fledged university discipline at national level. The efforts of professional geographers active in universities and other higher-education institutions in the English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been too easily forgotten, not least because many of these pioneers published relatively little, exerting their primary influence through teaching and through the channels of departmental and university administration, arguing the case for new buildings, library space and new staff. The influence of teachers was perhaps more publicly recognized in earlier generations than in our research-focused one, and is an important strand of any disciplinary history, although, as Livingstone has rightly cautioned, a story of 'handing on the disciplinary baton' is not the same as a critical and contextualized history of a discipline (Livingstone, 1992). The influence of geographers in fighting for resources for their discipline within universities has often eluded the historical record entirely.There are many histories of geography to be written. The British Academy's recent Century of British geography (Johnston and Williams, 2003), for example, has the particular merit of allowing interdisciplinary comparisons, being part of a series of disciplinary Debate

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The term ‘megalopolis’, meaning a large city, was in use in the general press by the 1820s: its occurrence in the scholarly press largely reflects use in the twentieth century by Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford to denote an overlarge city doomed to destruction, and by Jean Gottmann to denote a large and highly connected urban region, notably that in the northeastern USA. Gottmann's definition dominates dictionaries of geography, but is ignored outside the discipline. The Oxford English dictionary is urged to recognize Gottmann's (and hence geographers') usage: compilers of geographical dictionaries are urged to revise their definitions.

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