Julia Merritt has devoted much of her career to the study of the ‘royal city’ of Westminster, and in this welcome book she addresses its neglected history during the revolutionary period. The picture that emerges is complex and full of contradictions. With no corporate government, the town was administered by abbey officials, local justices, a court of burgesses and powerful parish vestries. The early 1640s saw the royal court and parliament living cheek by jowl, mutually suspicious and in constant fear of London mobs and popish plots respectively. No one seemed sure who controlled the local trained bands, or where their loyalties lay. In the later 1640s and throughout the 1650s Westminster was heavily militarised, with significant numbers of troops quartered locally to protect the regime and overawe the capital. Readers of the Journal will be most interested in the religious dimensions of the story. The abbey became very closely identified with the parliamentarian regimes, regularly used for sermons by leading Puritan divines and elaborate funerals of major political and military figures. St Margaret's Westminster became the church of the House of Commons, with 250 parliamentary sermons delivered by Puritan lecturers between 1640 and 1653. Yet, as Merritt demonstrates, St Margaret's had traditionally been a conservative parish, as were the other Westminster parish churches. While their old ministers were quickly replaced, the Puritan transformation was far from complete or wholly successful. Eminent Puritan ministers were often absent, fulfilling commitments elsewhere, while others became locked in long-running disputes with their parishioners. Throughout the period the vestries contained considerable numbers of traditionalists, many associated with the peace petitions of 1643, along with Presbyterians and some radical Independents. The bonds of local community were sometimes sufficient to hold these eclectic bodies together, but tensions frequently surfaced. Puritan magistrates and constables were often zealous in enforcing godly moral discipline, levying numerous fines for Sabbath-breach or swearing. Yet we also find St Martin's and St Margaret's paying to restore and decorate their fonts, and parishes continuing to distribute charity to the local poor at Christmas. Divisions and contradictions appear in the secular sphere too, with parliamentary elections fiercely contested and fractious. Westminster in the 1650s remained a centre for fashionable society figures many of them royalist sympathisers, and Hyde Park remained a venue for elite sociability and display. Yet predictably, given the anxieties of a nervous regime and the strong military presence, the elites could never be sure whether their fashionable entertainments would be permitted or disrupted by the soldiery. Westminster offers a fascinating case study of attempted Puritan reformation, a complex and shifting pattern of co-existence, negotiation, contradiction and conflict. An important subject has found here its ideal historian.