Review Essay: Agents and Agency in the English Medieval City
Forty years have passed since the publication of Maurice Beresford’s magisterial book, New Towns of the Middle Ages, the first systematic historical survey of medieval “town plantation.” During this time new studies have shown how many of the towns that Beresford called new are, in fact, a product of longer-term growth arising from a process of urban formation that involved distinctive stages of development. There is, then, a less than sharp divide between the new towns and those many others described by some urban historians as “organic-growth” towns. As Lewis Mumford pointed out, a division drawn between planned and unplanned towns is artificial and should be discarded. There is no doubt, though, of the continued scholarly interest in those urban places described by Beresford as new towns. Recently, a number of highly detailed studies have appeared on the new towns in Florentine Italy, and the “bastides” of southwest France, for example. Work also continues on the new towns of medieval England and Wales, where archaeological and morphological studies have shown how the foundation of a town was preceded by trading and urban activity. A charter granting borough status typically came quite late in the process, even for those classic examples of English medieval new towns studied by Beresford: the truly “planted” town was relatively rare. Over the intervening forty years, historians of English medieval towns have begun to show that the process of urban formation was a protracted one, and planning produced towns and cities
London from the post-Roman period to 1300
the early settlement 400–900 In the late fourth century London, formerly one of the most substantial Roman cities north of the Alps, was the prime seat of authority in Britain and still a significant centre of urban life. Within a generation or two, following the withdrawal of imperial rule, the city had been virtually abandoned. Yet later London owes much to its Roman predecessor. The carefully constructed site on the Thames, the bridge at the hub of an extensive road network and the ready access to a productive hinterland and to the river networks and markets of northern Europe endowed London with continuing potential as a place for business. The circuit of walls was to shape the city for centuries to come. Features within the walls, surviving as enclosures or as barriers to movement, influenced later settlement and may have marked seats of authority (Plate 3). During the fifth and sixth centuries this largely uninhabited site perhaps served as a focus for a zone of settlements within some twenty miles (32 km). London persisted as a massive, but ruined, physical presence and as an idea in bureaucratic memory. Perhaps the most important element in the city's continuity is ideological: in the recognition of its power as the organising principle for a distinctive territory. London comes more clearly into view in 601, when Pope Gregory envisaged that it would serve as the primatial see of England. Political reality no longer matched Roman perceptions and London, in the province of the East Saxons, was under the overlordship of the king of Kent.
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.