Abstract The essays that follow aim to capture aspects of the unique style of R.J. Morris, aspects which taken together represent the formidable legacy that he leaves to the global world of urban history.

Abstract Bob Morris was elected as president of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) ahead of its 2002 conference in Edinburgh. Bob’s presidency, and the Edinburgh conference specifically, took place at an important point in the development of urban history within Europe and further afield. First, the programme reveals several emerging themes and topics of interest that have since shaped the sub-field in new and innovative ways. Second, Bob’s informal and collegial approach towards networking is reflected in the decision to place the EAUH on a quasi-formal constitutional basis. Both of these developments reflect, in part, Bob’s own research interests, as well as the sub-field’s welcoming approach to younger researchers, including taught and research postgraduate students, interested in networking with more established scholars.

Modern British ambulance originated during the late 1800s in the country's metropolitan areas. The fast-urbanising cities of Glasgow and London recognised that biological-temporal need required the time between injury and specialist care to compress. This was nowhere more urgent than in the large number of burn injuries that occurred in the cities' homes and workplaces. In tracing the origins and choreography of ambulance - a set of skills; a body of trained responders; and emergency service vehicles - in Glasgow and London, this article argues that the rollout of ambulance technologies was a key moment in urban modernity. Using first aid publications, newspapers, police and fire brigade reports, and London Ambulance Service log books, we reveal how much of the early development of first aid was improvised by enterprising individuals. This led to the formation of voluntary organisations, the St John and St Andrew's Ambulance Associations in England and Scotland respectively, followed by municipal services at the turn of the twentieth century. This early choreography of ambulance was organised on strictly gendered lines, which shut women out of public-facing roles before the First World War, and we discuss the ways in which this was achieved, from clothing to learning.

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On 14 June 2017, flames engulfed a residential block of flats in West London. Seventy-two people lost their lives and many hundreds more were traumatised as a national ‘cladding crisis’ unfolded. Yet the Grenfell Tower fire was a disaster foretold – the culmination of successive decades of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional failure to learn from the lessons of past multiple-fatality fires. By advocating a historical approach spanning the twentieth century, Before Grenfell deepens our contemporary understanding of the events surrounding the disaster and reveals how past decisions taken by governments and industry bodies created the conditions under which the fire occurred. Drawing upon unexplored archives as well as extensive use of published records, Shane Ewen’s book traces the underlying causes of the fire through more than four decades of deregulation of fire precautions, scientific governance and building regulations by successive governments in thrall to the ideology of neoliberalism. In drawing upon several previous, and often forgotten, multiple-fatality fires, the book sheds light on the historic failures of policymakers to heed the lessons of the past in protecting vulnerable communities, arguing that good policymaking necessitates learning with history as well as learning from history.

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On 9 June 1902, a fire at the General Electric Company offices in Queen Victoria Street led to the deaths of ten employees, including nine young women aged between 14 and 18. A coroner’s inquest was immediately organized to ascertain the cause of death and a number of witnesses were called to give evidence. This article explores the evidence gathered at the inquest, focusing on the testimony of four witnesses: the spectator, employee, survivor and fireman. Their testimony exposed defects in the company’s attitude towards fire safety, London’s building bye-laws and the capital’s fire protection. It subsequently weighs this evidence against other accounts of the fire as featured in newspapers and other contemporary texts. Our conclusions reveal significant variations between the coroner’s verdict and the media’s analysis of the fire, with particular focus given to accounts that sought to identify and hold to account those who were deemed publicly responsible for the failings to rescue the victims.

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Simon Gunn’s and Susan C. Townsend’s Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan is an excellent comparative history of how and why mass motorization reshaped cities in Japan and Great Britain during the twentieth century as well as its persistence at the turn of the twenty-first century. As a collaborative exercise over more than a decade, the book benefits from the authors’ respective expertise and enthusiasm for the subject matter and their chosen case study cities. Birmingham and Nagoya—arguably the respective countries’ “second cities”—make good comparators: they were both remade as “motor cities” (xiv) during the second third of the twentieth century through their growth as centers of vehicle manufacturing, the emergence of a car ownership culture, and urban redevelopment being driven by motorization, especially between the 1950s and 1980s. As the authors note, comparative history has “given way” (xiv) to transnational and global history since the early...

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