Book launches and reviews

Catherine A. Smith, The Renaissance of the Nottinghamshire Market Town 1680-1840 (2007)

In the decades after 1660 major English towns were refashioned and often rebuilt. Thoroton noticed this happening in Nottingham in the 1670s, and a decade ago the process was unpicked by Adrian Henstock in A Centenary History of Nottingham, ed John Beckett (1997). Cathy Smith’s book complements this work by expanding on her Nottinghamshire History Lecture to the Thoroton Society in 1991 to show how the renewal process in the smaller towns of the county was just as real, but it came later, mainly from the 1770s or thereabouts. The large towns, notably Mansfield and Newark, and to a lesser extent Worksop and East Retford, saw the most change, with Bingham and Ollerton much less affected. Dr Smith examines urban development (in terms of population, building and economic change including the appearance of mills and other ‘industrial’ functions to supplement the staple interest in agricultural processing). There is discussion of social emulation, household goods, property ownership, clubs and societies, residential segregation, street improvements, new buildings (including public buildings such as town halls), and the broader issue of urban ‘improvement’. Although at times the book reads a little too much like the thesis on which it is based, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of urban change in Nottinghamshire between the 1660s and the mid-19th century, and also provides an interesting comparative context in which to view the separate histories of Nottinghamshire’s market towns. John Beckett