The appearance ofUrban Historyas a journal marks a further stage in the progression fromNewslettertoYearbookand now to a semi-annual periodical. The timing is apt since it coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the first issue of theUrban History Newsletter, and the enthusiasm surrounding the production and publication ofUrban Historyis a continuing sign of the vigour and confidence expressed by H.J. Dyos thirty years ago, and again in 1974, when theYearbookfirst appeared. The current academic self-confidence is matched by a commercial one from the new publishers, Cambridge University Press.

Nineteenth-century housing was not all gloom and doom. For significant elements of the nation the standard of comfort and material welfare improved substantially.1 Suburbanization of the middle classes in the second half of the century appreciably improved environmental conditions, the family in particular benefitting from a semi-rural existence with only the commuting breadwinner subject to the hostility of urban conditions. 2 In the last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. Linoleum, curtains, parlour furniture, even pianos transformed the immediate appearance of the home; shoes, a change of clothes and running water that of the people; and the kitchen range, water closets and gas mantles re-arranged the domestic patterns in other respects. 4 The possibility of an So fundamental and widespread were these improvements, it has been suggested, that the internal physical space of the working-class home was re-arranged. 7 The separation of kitchen and living room effectively added another room, for example, taking smells of cooking out of the main socializing area in the home, and physically segregating women to a separate rather than an integrated existence in the home. While the catalogues of kitchen ranges, the production of baths, furniture and other domestic equipment reflect growing consumerism, this was by no means universal. 8Indeed for the unskilled, irregularly employed or sweated piece-rate worker, the segregation within the grades of manual workers and the increasing gap between rising expectations and actual living conditions may well have been more acutely felt. Trade-union organization and the extension of the franchise, for example, drove divisions between different components of the working class, 9 and housing conditions served to reinforce this. Recent research has stressed improvements in working-class dwellings through four channels: first, rising real incomes and consumption levels in the last third of the nineteenth century; 10 second, philanthropic housing 5

The history of management-labor relations has in recent years become a central concern for business historians. In this article, Dr, Rodger and Mr. McKenna consider management-labor relations in the British building industry in the years preceding the First World War. They demonstrate that a variety of factors—not the least of which being the industry's notorious volatility—constrained management's ability to discipline the work force, and conclude that whatever success it attained proved transitory, accompanied as it was by the advent of government-financed municipal housing.

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