Beyond the Metropolis deserves a wide but not uncritical readership. It offers a rich resource of images of nineteenth-century urban Britain, and not just the more familiar engravings of popular series (such as The Land We Live In), but also more ephemeral prints, advertisements, even the images on furniture and ceramics, an important body of material, and one whose neglect Katy Layton-Jones is right to lament. Notwithstanding what I thought was a comprehensive knowledge of views of nineteenth-century Manchester, there were a number of images discussed here I had not previously seen. Urban historians, especially those interested in Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol, will no doubt find much to broaden their pictorial engagements, if not necessarily to revise their understandings.

There are five substantive chapters. Chapter 1, on the general urban ‘prospect’, argues for persistence of the eighteenth-century trope of the general urban view. The second chapter, ‘The town on show’, discusses spectacles, panoramas and especially exhibitions and their opportunities for urban self-presentation. The third, ‘Improving the urban image’, explores the tensions between early Victorian urban anxieties and civic boosterism, especially in the context of images of cultural institutions. Chapter 4, ‘Advertising the town’, considers the imagery produced to advertise individual manufacturers or merchants, arguing for a shift to a more focused view of manufacturing cities as dominated by their industrial character. Finally, ‘Crucibles of liberty and ruin’, focuses on prints of Peterloo, and of the 1831 Bristol riots.

The challenges of interrogating the book's raw material to make historical arguments, to trace ‘more general attitudes towards urbanisation’ (p. 123), should not be underestimated: attribution is challenging; information about artistic assumptions is scarce; patterns of consumption are obscure; there is all too little evidence of audience responses, leaving analysis of how these images operated and the contemporary cultural work they did heavily reliant on retrospective ‘readings’. Much of the merit of Beyond the Metropolis lies in its raising of the question of how far prints do ‘provide a valuable, arguably unique’, access to attitudes to, and perceptions of, the urban environment (p. 11). Despite the considerable scholarship on urban ‘image’ more generally, and the more limited work on pictorial representations, this is still a surprisingly ill-served topic. In that sense, it is both the strength as well as weakness of Layton-Jones’ work that it offers at least as many problems as insights. The extent to which readers are satisfied may well rest on their preference for debates opened or understandings achieved. For this reviewer, the ambivalent play of perceptions registered in the mute image and those read into them by contemporaries and by scholars was too frequently not just unreconciled but unacknowledged, producing a strained quality to the analysis, an over-reading of individual images and an excessively bold extrapolation to larger narratives.

Less subjectively, there are a number of ways in which Layton-Jones’ approach seems unsatisfactory. The structure presses discussion into a frustratingly fragmentary frame, offering a progressively narrower subject matter which places increasing strain on the transition from specific to general. Cultural institutions may be emblematic of a wider civic identity; promotional images of firms or factories less so, and portraits of political gatherings only with a conditionality and complexity which is not sufficiently allowed for here. The overall chronology is unhelpfully skewed to before 1850. Few later images are discussed, beyond those associated with a specific event like the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. The popular illustrated papers and the architectural papers like the Builder were by the far the most important circulators of urban images in the period, and yet they are almost completely ignored. Without them, and especially their post-1870 imagery, such as the important series of bird's eye views published by the Graphic in the 1880s, it is simply impossible to present a satisfactory argument about the evolution of nineteenth-century provincial urban imagery.

Layton-Jones claims three aims: ‘to redress the dominance of the late nineteenth century in narratives of urban development, and reposition the early decades of that century as a distinct and important period in the definition and visualization of urban Britain’ (p. 4); this is partly achieved, but in a way that unhelpfully dislocates the relationships between the two. The second, ‘to challenge the all too pervasive dependence of historians on a polarity of celebration and despair when characterizing nineteenth century attitudes to provincial towns’ (p. 4) is broadly substantiated, although to less revisionist effect than is implied. Where the book may be most successful is in the third, ‘to award visual evidence a more prominent position’, ‘employed critically as a central tool in identifying the themes of historical enquiry’ (p. 6). Beyond the Metropolis certainly challenges historians to look again at the surviving visual representations of the nineteenth-century city, to tackle the difficulties of the graphic as well as the textual image. If the challenge is accepted, as it should be, this will prove to be an important book.