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the form of Methodism, particularly primitive Methodism, was the religion of a distinct minority in the North-East coalfield and Jaffe contends, in a coherent and well documented argument that its connection to the early labour movement was both pragmatic and short-lived. Finally, in chapter seven the author presents a very clear argument to demonstrate that Hepburn’s union was trying to control the terms of the market relations between labour and capital, through the defence of workplace bargaining, control of labour movement and restrictions upon output. The union was not concerned with political reform such as the reform of the franchise, nor did it seek the destruction of capitalism or the dispossession of capitalists. Rather was it concerned to see established a set of equitable market conditions.

Criticisms of this book are few. In chapter four the author stresses how weak were the community ties in the new east Durham boom towns developed after 1820. And yet, certainly by 1851, over 80 per cent of the households in these villages were inhabited by nuclear families; multiple occupation of houses was uncommon, lodging houses were few, and the male sex-ratio can be explained by the residence of young, single male lodgers within the houses of nuclear families. As the birthplaces of these lodgers was frequently the same as the head of household, it seems likely that information networks existed which meant that community ties were created very rapidly in these new settlements.

In chapter six Jaffe lambasts the established church in Durham in terms of institutional inertia and unwillingness to minister to the needs of the rapidly growing mining population in large multi-township parishes. Whilst not wishing to contest this thesis, it should be mentioned that the Church of England did, through a series of Orders in Council from the 1820s subdivide many large Durham parishes into smaller parochial and chapelry units with new churches built to accommodate the rapid population growth associated with the opening of new mines in former rural areas.

It is also somewhat surprising that the author did not use the evidence of Matthias Dunn’s journal in the analysis of the defeat of Hepburn’s union during the 1832 strike. This journal, which is referred to elsewhere in the book, throws much light on o~wnership-labour relationships during the strike, as well as containing equally illuminating comments on inter-owner negotiations and disputes. Finally-a plea from a geographer. The book has no maps and only limited graphical illustrations. This is a pity, as much of the text is locationally very specific. These criticisms, however do not seriously detract from a valuable contribution to the history of industrial relations which should be found in the library of all institutions of higher education.

Newcastle upon Tlwze Polytechnic MIKE SILL

LINDA CLARKE, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built Environment (London: Routledge, 1992. Pp. xv+ 316. g65.00 and gl9.99 paperback) Our knowledge of development processes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London has been shaped primarily by studies of great estates and great builders. Consider, for example, Donald Olsen’s account of “town planning” on the Bedford and Foundling Hospital estates, Town planning in London (New Haven 1964), or Hermione Hobhouse’s biography of Thomas &bitt (London 1971) both elegant narratives, unencumbered by theory. Clarke is interested in the same period but her motivation is very different, her chosen estates less rigorously controlled, and her principal players less heroically depicted. This is an ambitious book, addressing major questions about urbanization and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, gradually broadening out from a case study of one small estate in north London-Lord Somers’

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Brill Farm, which was transformed into Somers Town-to accommodate development and building in other parts of the metropolitan fringe.

Part I is resolutely theoretical. Clarke observes that urbanization is rarely examined as a productiorl process, more often as a consequence of consumption or exchange; when the production of buildings is considered at all, it is assumed that building is the handmaid of demand, that the growth of cities can be explained in terms of increased trade or increased population. In contrast, Clarke’s interest is in the city as building site, and even more in the r6le of labour in the building process. Her theoretical interests lead in two linked directions. One is to engage in debates about “urban autonomy”-whether there was anything distinctively urban about urbanization. Development on the urban fringe did not imply greater urban influence on hitherto rural areas. “Rather the reverse, as new forms of organizing production introduced in agriculture around London ‘encroached’ more and more on the City”; the social relations of building production had been pioneered in agriculture and challenged those that characterized the City of London. these observations prompt a lengthy commentary on the “Brenner debate” on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in which Clarke adapts arguments usually applied to earlier periods to her interest in eighteenth-century London. While some protagonists have emphasized the r6le of the market-the transformation of lords into merchants and ultimately into industrial capitalists-others have focused on changing social relations of production, on the tmnsition from serf labour to wage labour and the development of artisanal production. Clarke goes further, arguing that capitalist building contractors emerged as a distinctive form of producer, treating wage labour as a commodity just as much as the products their labour produced.

So her interest is in two sets of social relations which she examines in depth in Parts II and III of the book: urbanization through artisan production, and urbanization through contracting. In the former, labour was paid piece rates, total building costs were determined by a “measure and value system” of fixed prices, and a chain of development extended from ground landlords, through head leaseholders, who granted building leases to small-scale, local, artisan builders. In the latter, labour was paid time-rates, by the day if not by the hour, and building contractors negotiated with larger-scale builders, who in turn subcontracted to self-employed but dependent tradesmen (as, dependent on big business as many of today’s “self-employed”). Contracting developed especially in paving, brickmaking and bricklaying, activities in which corporate and apprenticeship regulations were weak. Clarke is not arguing that the contracting system evolved out of the artisan system, although chronologically it does appear ra.ther later; rather, both systems emerged from the transition of feudalism into wage labour, but the latter gradually came to dominate the building industry in nineteenth-century London.

The book is, as rich in empirical detail as it is in theoretical discourse, personifying artisan production and contracting in the experiences of a developer, Jacob Leroux, and a contractor, John Johnson. Clarke pays considerable attention to brickmaking as an integral and at times the most profitable part of the building process. But however Leroux tried to manipulate the market, building in Somers Town continued to be financially precarious. Bankruptcies were frequent, building quality declined, and some buildings were never completed-ground floors of planned three-storey terraces were occupied as rows of ungainly single-storey cottages! Somers Town contrasted with the neighbouring Southampton estate. Lord Southampton, like the Duke of Bedford, maintained a long-term investment strategy that required developers and builders to generate improved ground rents, but Lord Somers was more interested in quick profits and disinvestment. When Leroux died most of his undeveloped sites were acquired by John Johnson, a paving contractor who extended his business geographically, into Pimlico and Kensington. as well as sectorally, into housebuilding. If this part of the book appears less innovative, it is perhaps because Johnson was in

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the same mould as Thomas Cubitt, and because his activities outside Somers Town were on more tightly controlled estates. This is a story that we have read before.

That the book engaged my enthusiasm should be evident from the details reproduced above. It is an original, and for the most part successful attempt to show how the metropolis was built, in bricks and mortar and labour as much as estate plans and mortgages. Nonetheless, a few cautions are necessary. Neither the treatment of urbanization as production, nor the application of theory in urban history, is as rare as Clarke implies. David Harvey is criticized for ignoring production in favour of exchange, but only on the basis of his work in the 1970s. More generally, apart from references to the Brenner debate, the theoretical formulations that Clarke discusses are mainly from the 1970s reflecting the book’s origin as a mid-1980s thesis. I was s;urprised at the absence of references to Anthony King’s attempts to theorize in urban history, or to the prolific 1980s literature on restructuring and flexibility, or to American urban historians who have paid attention to the building of suburbia, all admittedly concerned with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but as pertinent as studies of the decline of feudalism to which Clarke pays so much attention.

How exceptional were Leroux and Johnson and the systems they embodied? Were there really two systems, with distinctive origins? How typical was Somers Town’s unregulated and chaotic development, in contrast to apparently more regulated systems elsewhere? What was the relative scope for either artisan building or contracting on other estates‘?

Clarke seeks to go beyond the building process in two ways. She alludes to a transformation in local politics, from control by JPs, to the institution of select vestries, comprised of major property owners, to the take-over of vestries by radicals in the 1830s leading to the demise of landowners’ political power. She also, less satisfactorily, discusses the changing social structure of Somers Town: the increasingly French emigre character of the population in the 1790s the proliferation of building workers as alccupiers of houses, and the development of intense overcrowding. But in contrast to the sophisticated treatment of building production, there is no sustained argument, for example about the activities of house landlords, which might help to explain these patterns.

The book is seductively designed, from the full colour reproduction of John Linnell’s Kensington Gravef Pits on the cover to the copious black and white illustrations, many dating from the inter-war years. They portray a persistent shabbiness, partly reflecting the lack of contrast of grey tones on matt paper, but clearly indicating the haphazard layout and generally mean quality of development that so rapidly turned Somers Town into a slum. There are also numerous reproductions of contemporary maps and plans. They look attractive at first sight, but it isn’t always easy to relate them to the text. A few more purpose-drawn maps would have been useful.

Cmivrrsity College London RICHARD DENNIS

HAZEL CONWAY, People’s Parks: the Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Eritain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii + 287. E49.50)

Despite the wealth of literature on the Victorian city, the history of the municipal park has received comparatively little attention. This volume provides a well researched and thoroughly readable account of the history, design and use of Victorian municipal parks. Conway first establishes the legislative context for park provision and examines the difference between public and municipal parks. The former could include many