Civilizing the Urban

Early industrial Merthyr is synonymous with the darker side of the British urban experience. This work considers the efforts of dedicated civic "boosters" to civilize the town's public spaces and its inhabitants and shows how this vision of Merthyr depended on the taming of popular culture.

Andy Croll has chosen to look at an unexplored aspect of the town, its transition from the shock town of the Welsh industrial revolution to a civic community with pretensions to urbanity. His gracefully written book is an engagement with the emerging historical problem of urban spacethere is much here for historians of leisure, towns and of 19th-century British society in general.',This trenchant studyis meticulously researched, rigorous in its conceptual apparatus and lucidly writtenMerthyr is a fascinating case study of the civic project'