Professor Shane Ewen

The relationship between globalization, urban-industrial change, and municipalism is one that has been reconfigured in recent years. The British school of public administration, in particular, has lent credence to the view that local authorities, or municipalities as they are taken here, have been virtually powerless to satisfactorily manage the transition of local economies into a postindustrial global society.

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Given as part of a History & Policy panel during the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, October 2018.

Traduit de l'anglais par Annie Zimmermann La mise en “réseau municipal transnational” (TMN) dans le contexte européen s’effectue en trois “temps” /1. D’abord, entre 1870 et 1913, environ, la période fut aux “réseaux de gouvernance” : des délégations municipales ont visité d’autres villes afin d’étudier leurs infrastructures socio-technologiques et d’améliorer leur propre gouvernance urbaine. Elles l’ont également fait dans l’optique de conforter leur légitimité municipale via une visibilité internationale accrue. Ensuite, durant la période 1913-1970, ces réseaux naissants se sont fortement internationalisés, et l’ “intermunicipalisme” est devenu le mot d’ordre selon lequel la pratique administrative s’est diffusée entre pays par le biais d’associations internationales telle l’International Union of Local Authorities. Enfin, le foisonnement de structures, qui s’est accéléré pendant la phase de reprise économique des années 1980 et 1990, a fermement repositionné l’autorité et l’organisation des réseaux transnationaux au sein des municipalités elles-mêmes. Cela incluant Eurocities, le club des “métropoles de secong rang”, qui offre aux villes post-industrielles des ressources et des contacts pour s’adapter au paysage géopolitique de la nouvelle Europe. Analyse, par Shane Ewen, maître de conférences en histoire sociale et culturelle (Leeds Metropolitan University, Royaume-Uni).

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.

Recent scholarly research at the intersection of the histories of technology and the built environment has revealed many tensions surrounding the design, building and management of major socio-technologies like urban waterworks. There remains much scope for research into the interdependence of socio-technological systems, engineering knowledge and the political and commercial agendas of municipal governments and private water suppliers respectively. In particular, the short- and long-term impact of reservoir disasters - examined in detail here through the case of Sheffield's 'great flood' of March 1864, in which over 250 people lost their lives - on the ownership and control of urban waterworks reveals many conflicts within the engineering profession, as well as the urban community itself, about the causes and consequences of socio-technological failure in the mid-nineteenth century. Using a rich variety of municipal, legal and commercial archival records, as well as contemporary newspapers, this article examines the competing interests involved in negotiating the long-term municipalisation of water supplies and concludes that greater attention should be paid to the influence of man-made disasters and engineering actors in this political game.

History & Policy Home Office Series 2018.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no such notion of a ‘national and onerous’ fire service in Britain. Organized fire protection was a purely local function left to the discretion of local authorities, voluntary organizations, and private enterprise. By the outbreak of the Second World War, although there remained in excess of 1,450 local brigades, the service had been accepted as of national importance, particularly in view of the threat posed by aerial bombing and incendiary fires to British towns and cities. This paper traces the development of central government intervention within the fire service during the first four decades of the twentieth century, contrasting the peacetime and wartime impetuses for reform, and locating reform within wider debates about the nature and practice of local government. Although financial, technological, and organizational factors were important influences on the professionalization and modernization of the service, the threats posed to the nation's wartime economic capacity and public morale were, ultimately, decisive factors in compelling local authorities to maintain professional fire brigades.

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 no 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, as well as 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.

Drawing on a body of research covering primarily Europe and the Americas, but stretching also to Asia and Africa, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, Cities Beyond Borders explores the methodological and heuristic implications ...

Urban history is a well-established and flourishing field of historical research. Written by a leading scholar, this short introduction demonstrates how urban history draws upon a wide variety of methodologies and sources, and has been integral to the rise of interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to history since the second half of the twentieth century. Shane Ewen offers an accessible and clearly written guide to the study of urban history for the student, teacher, researcher or general reader who is new to the field and interested in learning about past approaches as well as key themes, concepts and trajectories for future research. He takes a global and comparative viewpoint, combining a discussion of classic texts with the latest literature to illustrate the current debates and controversies across the urban world. The historiography of the field is mapped out by theme, including new topics of interest, with a particular focus on space and social identity, power and governance, the built environment, culture and modernity, and the growth and spread of transnational networking. By discussing a number of historic and fast-growing cities across the world, What is Urban History? demonstrates the importance of the history of urban life to our understanding of the world, both in the present and the future. As a result, urban history remains pivotal for explaining the continued growth of towns and cities in a global context, and is particularly useful for identifying the various problems and solutions faced by fast-growing megacities in the developing world.

Urban and environmental historians are becoming increasingly interested in the social construction of expertise in the management and control of natural resources. Experts are often depicted as disinterested, neutral and objective professionals, sufficiently qualified to gauge an independent perspective on a given problem. Yet what happens when an expert's judgment is called into question by other professional experts? The micro-analysis of socio-technological disasters offers one way to interrogate the construction and challenge of professional expertise at both the empirical and conceptual levels. Taking a comparative approach towards the study of two major reservoir failures involving considerable death and destruction in the United Kingdom - Holmfirth in 1852 and Sheffield in 1864 - this paper draws on the under-utilised research of the sociologist Barry Turner and others on the social aetiology of disasters as a route into revealing and accounting for the contested nature of expertise within the Victorian engineering professions. It is based on extensive archival research, including the written records of local and central government, private waterworks' proprietors, the printed press and the records of public inquiry. The cases reveal remarkable continuities in administrative and professional knowledge regarding the explanation of socio-technological disasters, as well as the widespread use of outside experts to interrogate the supposed failings of interested parties.

Lecture to the History & Policy Home Office Series, 2016

Executive summary The current political debate concerning the local, regional and national status of the fire service has many parallels with similar debates during the late 1930s and early 1940s. These culminated in the nationalization of the service in 1941, radically altering the structure and powers of local fire authorities. The current proposals claim to strengthen existing powers, modernize administrative and operational practices, and stabilize the officer structure. But comparison with the 1940s suggests that this may not work out as intended. The renewed proposal to reorganize the Fire Service on a regional basis is likely to result in a complex, multi-layered structure with blurred division of responsibilities. This is precisely why regionalization was abandoned in 1947. While on paper regionalization can be also presented as a way of saving on personnel, in practice even regional control rooms will still need staff with detailed local knowledge. Moreover, attempts to rationalize the officer structure are only likely to lead to demotions, redundancies and widespread dissatisfaction within the service. Especially in the light of historical experience, it is not clear why today's new needs cannot be met by reformed local fire authorities. At the very least, the smooth running of the fire service during any process of reform requires that it be evolutionary, carefully-planned and inclusive of the suggestions of professional stakeholders.

The nationalisation of the British fire service in 1941 has conventionally been interpreted as an administrative revolution by contemporaries and historians alike. The destructive ferocity of the Blitz, particularly its concentration on London and major provincial cities, was indeed the catalyst for major restructuring, highlighting serious inadequacies in the effectiveness of local fire protection. However, the decision taken by Herbert Morrison, the home secretary, was founded on reforms implemented on an ad hoc basis since the mid-1930s. Like other areas of civil defence, reform was piecemeal and the result of increasing co-ordination by policy-makers and professional stakeholders. This paper explores those reforms, arguing that nationalisation was a staging post in the evolution of the fire service from a heterogeneous collection of fire brigades to a co-ordinated system of fire defence.

This article examines the changing relationship between chief officers and English municipal government between the eighteen-seventies and the nineteen-thirties, focusing specifically on the emergence of a new cadre of municipal experts, the chief fire officers. The article locates the chief officer within debates about the changing role and status of professional elites, and continues a long tradition of urban historical research through the comparative case studies of Birmingham and Leicester. It is argued that the chief fire officer's increasing indispensability to modern municipal government was shaped by a combination of functional reforms and unexpected crises, through which he established a position as the interface between the local state and civil society.

Using a variety of archival sources, notably personnel records and municipal minute books, this article builds a picture of the work-life histories of rank-and-file police constables and firefighters in the English cities of Birmingham and Leicester, and contrasts the techniques of behavioural control adopted by their employers. By drawing on an expanding literature on the social history of public institutions, the article compares the experience of managing such disciplined and uniformed public services. The article demonstrates that municipal management combined insidious devices for controlling workers' behaviour with consensual and negotiated tactics deployed by workers aware of the tangible material benefits offered by a career in public service. Moreover, by placing the English experience of municipal policing and fire-fighting in an international context by focusing on the visits and writings made by prominent technical and social reformers, the article offers a framework within which comparative research can be undertaken.

Through a case study of Birmingham fire brigade, this article examines the plethora of international networking activities undertaken during the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Birmingham fire brigade, under the control of Alfred Tozer, led British municipal participation in early international fire networks, attending international congresses and exhibitions in Berlin and London, and also visiting continental cities to inspect fire brigades and their appliances. Locating the study firmly within historical debates concerning the embryonic international municipal movement, this article demonstrates that municipal institutions participated in networking activities as part of a policy learning and knowledge-transfer process.

This chapter traces the development of modern urban history scholarship across the twentieth century, its roots being found in several interdisciplinary fields interested in the shape and growth of urban areas and the changing experience of urban life over time. I then examine urban history’s institutionalization and internationalization, which started in the 1960s and 1970s before gathering momentum in the following decades with the spread of teaching and exchange programmes at European level and the end of the Cold War. At its core, the objective of these programmes and initiatives was to map the history of urbanization and the growth of towns and cities using a comparative methodology, both within nation-states and increasingly, using a transnational approach to compare across borders. Finally, the chapter considers several recent ‘turns’ within modern and contemporary urban history since the 1990s – cultural, spatial and environmental to name a few – to illustrate emerging and emergent themes prevalent across the subfield. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that these ‘turns’ reflect the changeable nature of wider historical scholarship, urban historians remain fundamentally interested in the people, places and processes that constitute our frame of reference.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper we argue that the contemporary revival of European municipalism should be examined within the rich context of the ‘long’ 20th century and the many and varied links forged between municipalities across national borders. In the first two sections we trace the emergence of the networked European municipality from the ad hoc individual connections made during the final decades of the 19th century, through the golden age of municipal internationalism during the interwar years, to the intensive cross-national cooperation pursued in the aftermath of the Second World War. We argue that the historical experience of these municipal connections was an essential prerequisite of the long-term move towards the multilevel networking experienced by European municipalities today. In the final section we focus on Eurocities, the main European municipal lobby group since the late 1980s, to show how municipalities have continued to utilise networking as their main tool within a supranational Europe, in effect to reinvent themselves within a globalised postindustrial economy.

Transnational Municipalism in a Europe of Second Cities: Rebuilding Birmingham with Municipal Networks

This chapter introduces the urbanization processes that have transformed Latin American geographies since the period of high economic growth in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter analyzes the global economy and national policy factors that have shaped the pace of urbanization and everyday life in both the largest cities and rapidly changing smaller settlements in a context of extensive urbanization across the region. The analysis considers three historical periods, including the era of industry-substituting industrialization and metropolitan expansion; the attempt to install neoliberal regimes of market rule after the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s; and highly contested urbanization policies in the twenty-first century as development itself is questioned for its negative social and environmental implications.

In his unpublished memoirs of the fire service during World War II, the retired head of the Home Office’s Fire Service Department, Arthur L. Dixon, divided the service’s wartime experience into three distinct phases. The first, beginning in 1937 when the government started to make preparations for civil defence through the recruitment of firemen into the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), lasted throughout the duration of ‘the Phoney War’ until September 1940. For firemen at least, it was marked by a period of ‘quiescence, stagnation and frustration’ in which they grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of action. Beginning with the London raids of 5 September 1940, the second phase saw ‘the onset, growth and full intensity of the air attacks, when the preparatory measures were put to the test, were found by no means wholly wanting, but fell short of full sufficiency’. This period was marked by a ‘double stress,’ in which firemen had to contend with the physical and emotional stress of air-raid fire-fighting, whilst modifying their organisational resources and tactics to give themselves a better chance of coping with ‘the grim actualities of the situation’. There followed the final period, beginning in May 1941 with the government’s announcement of the nationalisation of the service, which took the service beyond the cessation of hostilities until its return to local authority control in 1947.

This collection uses the transnational activities of municipal urban governments to historicize the origins and development of the global city, focusing on how urban problems were addressed with concepts that emerged from the "world in ...

Fighting Fires: Creating the British Fire Service, 1800-1978 examines the role played by fire-fighters like Braidwood, Captain Eyre Massey Shaw and Alfred Robert Tozer in creating a professional ethos for paid fire-fighters during the ...

Globalization has been conventionally identified by scholars as heralding a historic rupture in city-state relations, shifting from a state-centric to a city-centered configuration of socioeconomic, political, and geographical power. Leading protagonists argue that, in the wake of unprecedented transnational and global flows of capital, trade, people, and ideas since the 1970s, "global cities" like London, New York, and Tokyo have emerged as the engines of economic and social transformation. These flows have, in turn, reshaped patterns of urban development and wealth accumulation. Globalization, then, has compressed the space-time continuum, removing cities from their territorial straightjackets and allowing them to effectively inhabit the spaces "in between" conventional national borders, through which they steer the flows of capital and information that together constitute the neoliberal capitalist economy.

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When it comes to the history of fire, the homes of the poor were the focus of prevention campaigns in the Victorian period. Not entirely unfounded, the material culture of burns and scalds in poor homes at this time included common items which posed potential fatal hazards, such as candles, paraffin lamps, kettles and wash tubs. Other objects regularly appeared in reports documenting attempted rescues, including clothing, carpets and blankets, which were used to smother the flames of burns victims, who were often the elderly, but even more frequently children under the age of ten. A preoccupation of contemporary publications, such hazards have been neglected in studies of health in the home.1 While hazards and remedies evolved with technological and medical innovations since Victorian times, one object – albeit a largely absent one – in the homes of the poor remained a consistent feature of accident reports and became ever more rooted in debates around fire prevention by the end of the nineteenth century: the fireguard. Despite the variety of domestic fire hazards, the most prominent was the hearth. In the homes of the poor, the hearth – particularly in Victorian and Edwardian England – was the heart of the family home, due to the warmth it generated, and as a means of cooking and washing. Yet, young children – unaware of fire’s dangers – could easily find their clothing ignited or topple a pan of hot water when playing too close to the fire. Unsurprisingly, burns or scalds occurring in poorer homes were a consistent feature of accident reports throughout this period, with absent fireguards often noted as a contributory factor. This absence fuelled debates around fire prevention and an outcry for poorer householders to invest in a fireguard to avoid further domestic deaths.

Heritage, by its nature, is a multidisciplinary practice and thus has no singular defining academic approach. This thesis takes a mixed methods approach to investigate the utilisation and formation of heritage narratives within an urban context. To ground this work, the thesis utilises a case study of the city of York, England, to explore the variety of mechanisms and processes used across varying levels of society to construct historical narratives. This research looks to decentre and disrupt existing ‘official narratives’ produced and supported by city institutions by investigating alternative narratives and approaches. As such, the thesis formulates a broad understanding of the current forms of governance within the city, primarily the York Civic Trust and York City Council, to utilise the material culture of York through its archaeological finds and architecture in order to market an exported tourist narrative of York. Contrasting this more traditional interpretation of heritage within the urban context, the thesis draws on more grassroots and bottom-up approaches of heritage engagement at both a community and individual level as a form of democratised engagement. As such, approaches towards constructing and selling an official heritage narrative for the city’s heritage are juxtaposed with discussions of community-led performances, social media-based forms of collection nostalgia and the practice of urban exploration. Underpinning this examination is a core investigation of the methodological approach to studying these heritage narratives. The thesis thus advocates incorporating more person-centred emotional data in analysing public participation in heritage and, consequently, in helping to further the development of heritage studies more broadly as a multidisciplinary field.

The lesser gentry is an understudied section within the upper reaches of society compared to the numerically smaller but more powerful greater gentry. Research into minor gentry families tends to concentrate on well known, reliable and expected records. Despite relative anonymity, the family at the centre of this study, the Wades, are arguably a more representative example of the many minor gentry families who resided throughout England often the de facto authority figures in the small areas they resided.  This thesis aims to study the, often porous, boundaries between different strata of the gentry; definitions of gentry status that were often arbitrary and depended on context, local developments and shifts in attitude across time. Networks of family and friendship were essential facilitators to social, political and cultural success and relevance across the strata of lesser gentry. The study builds on existing work regarding the smaller gentry families variously described as the squirarchy, minor, lesser or parish gentry in the work of Vickery, French and Hague.  Based on a review of the literature and historiographical debate, knowledge and evidence were collected by using a variety of multi-disciplinary sources to build a comprehensive picture to better understand the complex issues of social identity, behaviour and influence of lesser gentry families. The Wade family were unremarkable, making little impact on regional or national history. This inconspicuousness is precisely the point of investigating their origins, landholdings, allies, material culture, status, and wealth. They were representative of a group of gentry that was numerous, old fashioned, conservative and restrained. The term ‘lesser gentry’ covers a broad range of gentry families, diverse in size, wealth, social connection and geography. However, within their ranks, they shared a belief in a natural order embracing self-belief in their right to authority and an elevated social position.

The Second World War has frequently been invoked in commentary on Covid-19. The analogy is not always helpful, but we can take lessons from how the wartime government managed Air Raid Precautions and post-raid services. Air Raid Precautions (ARP) were well advanced by the time war was declared, but it is not too late for the government’s response to Covid-19 to catch up. The blackout provides the closest analogy to social distancing. Its success demonstrates that the government needs to communicate clearly the link between people’s behaviour and the national interest, using sanctions consistently. Volunteers were mobilised in large numbers during the Second World War, but were often poorly coordinated and equipped. Current schemes need to foster local networks and communication between volunteers, while existing pools of labour should be redeployed to essential tasks. The wartime government was slow to pivot when its pre-war forecasts proved wrong, causing serious problems for hospital provision and post-raid relief. There are obvious lessons here for an emergency that changes by the hour not the day. Local authorities carried many of the burdens of ARP and post-raid services, but were not given adequate funding to fulfil them consistently. Today’s government must avoid this mistake. The fire service was completely re-organised when its role on the front line became apparent – today’s crisis is already showing signs of flexible thinking, but we argue that this needs to go further and must involve representative bodies. This policy paper is the result of a virtual roundtable focused on Britain’s response to bombing during the Second World War. Convened by Henry Irving and held on 25 March 2020, the discussion brought together a range of expertise on civil contingency planning carried out under the umbrella of Air Raid Precautions (ARP). It was chaired by History & Policy in collaboration with the Centre for Culture and the Arts at Leeds Beckett University. Special thanks go to Alix Mortimer (History and Policy) and Andrew McTominey (Leeds Beckett University) for helping to organise the event and edit the contents.

Public lecture as part of the Forged by Fire exhibition, January 2020. Audience included staff from the Home Office's Fire and Resilience Directorate who are working on the Government's response to the Hackitt Building Regulations Review and the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry. Event feedback also available.

This article examines the 1985 Bradford City stadium fire through the coverage of the national, local, and specialist print and broadcast media. Drawing upon extensive media coverage, it argues that the reporting of the fire provides a useful lens through which to understand the emotional environment and construction of communities during Britain’s ‘decade of disasters’. Moreover, archival sources have been consulted to reveal the multiplicity of personal and collective responses to the media reporting of the fire, covering both the immediate and longer-term aftermath. Through letters sent by members of the public to the Bradford Disaster Appeal Fund, it shows how people received media narratives and articulated their own affective bonds with the tragedy. These included declarations of belonging, through which the disaster became the impetus for the creation of a multicultural civic identity in Bradford. Finally, it uses social services records to show how survivors and the bereaved continued to be affected by the disaster even as the story of the fire—as told in the mass media and through memorial ceremonies—turned towards resilience and recovery.

A history of the Fire Brigades Union, produced for its centenary in 2018. I was a consultant and 'talking heads' contributor. The film was screened across the UK in cinemas, theatres, community centres and fire stations, and was published for free viewing on YouTube in December 2019.