Cities and Space

The Cities and Space research group within the School of History brings together historians as well as academics from other disciplines with research interests in cities, urban culture and society.

We encompass a range of areas including urban public health, demography, popular protest, civic culture and activism and processes of urbanisation. We're interested in the ways that a diverse range of social and cultural approaches to the study of history can be focused on the urban environment.

Leeds has an enduring tradition of research into urban history. Current members of the School have completed important projects on the history of Leeds itself and of urban life elsewhere in Britain, continental Europe, and South Asia.

Members of the group have also explored the dynamics of population dispersion and migration in post-colonial Britain as a means of theorising the relationship between different urban spaces. Others have looked at how working-class worlds, including those of children, were transformed in the transitions to industrial and post-industrial urban society. We seek to plan projects that intersect with urban history in these innovative and revealing ways