Urban history has a long record of drawing on literary sources for its engagement with cities of the past. A case in point is Lewis Mumford's The City in History (1961), which draws also on a range of fictional texts for elucidating the rich variety of urban conditions in history.Mumford foregrounds the importance of fictional texts for our understanding of the city, claiming that cities in history have reached the climax of their urban condition in fictional representations (140). The link drawn by Mumford between the very emergence of the city and 'glyphs, ideograms, and script' (Mumford 97) suggests that writing was connected both to the origins and to the individual climaxes of urbanism. Foundational works on British urban history by H.J. Dyos, both alone (1961) and in collaboration with others (Dyos and Wolff) similarly emphasized the place of literary authors and graphic images in forming views of the modern city. In Mumford's case, as in a range of more recent publications (see Kervanto Nevanlinna and Blom), the use of literary narratives does not necessarily question the extent to which the fictionality or the formal features of literary narratives make these differ from other sources such as autobiographies, letters, inscriptions, or historical annals.There is an assumption in such historical works of a more or less immediate accessibility to past urban materiality through fictional source texts. On the other hand, text-based (e.g. New Critical) and postmodernist approaches (e.g. structuralism and post-structuralism) in literary studies have long emphasized the distancesometimes seemingly insurmountable -between material world and culture-specific word.While studies such as those by Mumford and Dyos have produced cornerstones of sorts for urban history, their work has also been extensively critiqued during the past half-century.

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This article reappraises tramway closures in 1930s London by reading enthusiast memoirs of the events surrounding them. Literary representations in forms such as the novel and poetry of urban public transport experience often overlook experiences in peripheral urban zones and on modes such as the tramway which had a chiefly working-class ridership. Building a perspective around London’s tramscapes, and by practicing Deep Locational Criticism as part of a characteristically “humanities” mode, temporally focused, in mobility studies, the article reveals contestations including acts of disorder surrounding the closure events, deploying those in a rereading of mid-twentieth-century British history more broadly. The 1930s North London suburbs emerge through a reading of George Atkins’s account of 1938 closure events as sites of carnivalesque disorder and other bottom-up transport-focused activity, including the formation of enthusiast groups. This group of practices opposed the extremely top-down transport planning of the post-1933 London Passenger Transport Board’s management.