This is a very welcome book; there are too few that explore issues around the creation, management and utilization of space in Ireland's urban areas, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a collection of nine papers and, in their introduction, the editors provide an overall context which, though interesting, is not really necessary because the papers stand on their own merits.

The scale of inquiry ranges from individual buildings, as in the case of Olwen Purdue's study of the Belfast workhouse, to comparisons of multiple towns, as in Oliver Betts’ examination of Irishness in three coal towns. The range of topics is also wide. The former paper is one of three that deals with issues of space and control in an institutional setting, and the comparisons invited are intriguing. The inmates and potential inmates of the Belfast workhouse were far better at subverting the spatial controls and turning them to their own purposes than were the young convent-school girls discussed by Mary Hatfield in her paper on Dublin boarding schools. Gillian Allmond examines an unusual experiment that involved the building of an asylum for the insane as a suburban colony in Purdysburn, near Belfast, where conditions were better than would have been experienced had the inmates been healthy enough to live in their working-class enclaves in the city. The papers complement each other very well and leave the reader musing about the nature and purposes of control and who controlled whom.

Those interested in the creation of urban landscapes will enjoy three papers that explore urban development at different scales. Jonathan Jeffrey Wright's study of the White Linen Hall in Belfast shows how a building can become iconic and have an impact that is social, economic and political and considerably removed from its prosaic purpose. Laura Johnstone's detailed exploration of the creation of Monkstown, Co. Dublin, reminds us that this suburb was conceived before the arrival of the railway and thus seeing it as a railway suburb is only a partial truth. Matthew Potter's survey of municipal housing in Ireland in the period up to 1914 not only provides welcome detail but also explores whether different levels of enthusiasm for building by the various authorities can be explained in terms of need, resources or ideology.

The remaining three papers are quite different and invite the reader to explore broader canvases. Georgina Laragy's investigation of death by suicide in Dublin leads us into an examination of the creation of the city morgue and coroner's court, a place where this painful issue could be managed in as efficient and effective a manner as possible and which served the city until very recently. Mary Jane Boland takes the reader back to the early years of the nineteenth century and a discussion of the Cork-based painter Nathaniel Grogan and the more regional painter, William Turner De Lond, both relatively forgotten and never among the first rank of painters. She looks at how these painters presented their world and how this world had to reflect the tastes and interests of their clients – perhaps at the price of the artist's vision. The final paper in the volume takes the reader out of Ireland and into the coal towns of Pittsburgh, Middlesbrough and Coatbridge. Oliver Betts invites us to consider aspects of male and female identity as manifested in these towns where we learn that the Irish presence remained strong at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rather than move on, the Irish chose to solidify their urban spaces and to maintain their identity even as their economic circumstances improved.

This is a scholarly volume, well-written and with good narrative and argument. The production is high quality and visually very pleasing, but its high cost at £75 must limit its readership; a pity for reasons set out below. A review of this size does not permit any engagement with the arguments or theoretical concepts developed in the papers but the reader will find much that stimulates reflection and questioning. The use of visual material varies and some papers would have benefited from greater use because of their value in communicating a sense of a three-dimensional landscape. A minor quibble is that titles seem to be sometimes chosen for their catchiness rather than descriptive value. The papers are well supported by their readings and footnotes but this points to a wider issue. The author of this review is a geographer and the authors of the papers are mostly historians (it would have been useful to learn a little more about them with short biosketches). What emerges from the papers, notwithstanding their high quality, is the extent to which we read relatively little outside our disciplines and how much we would all benefit from a wider engagement. For that and the other reasons outlined here, this book deserves a wide range of a readers, who will greatly enjoy it.