While urban historians have long utilized elements of social identity and cultural representation when exploring the historical experience of urban dwellers, maritime history on the whole has more often focused on the global machinations of trade, mercantile and naval corporate life and economic development when looking to waterfront and maritime communities. Recent studies of port towns have brought a renewed focus upon the social and cultural life of maritime communities, particularly their place within a broader urban framework. Moreover, studies with a firmly cultural focus have, more often, taken naval seafarers as their subject. Port Towns and Urban Cultures seeks to elide simplistic distinctions between the cultures of naval and mercantile seaborne officers and workers, by taking the port town, as urban place, as the starting point for a nuanced exploration of cultural and social diversity, community solidarity, internecine strife and conflict within and between the settled and itinerant populations of seemingly disparate locations.

The book takes in the period spanning the eighteenth and the early twenty-first centuries, with authors undertaking richly detailed case-studies of port towns across the world, including Cape Town, Durban, Gothenburg, Portsmouth and Hull. Organized into two interrelated sections, the first focused on urban–maritime cultures and the second on representations and identities, the volume attempts to foreground the hitherto ‘hidden history’ of life in the ‘liminal spaces’ of ports, moving beyond a traditional historiography that has relied heavily on analyses of global trade and the networks of empire. This intention is made clear in the editors’ introduction, reminding us of the important framework provided by the conventional historiography while making clear the need to push a critical and definitely urban agenda in maritime history: ‘the waterfront was the intersection of maritime and urban space and the port town was often a unique site of cultural exchange that both reinforced and challenged local, national and imperial boundaries’ (p. 1).

Part I takes as its starting point the nexus of urban–maritime cultures, born within the often unique and ‘specific spatial localities’ of port towns, underlining the centrality of exploring representations and expressions of personal and collective experience. Contributions by scholars spanning the study of urban popular culture, human geography, ethnology, architectural history and maritime social and cultural history ensure a truly multidisciplinary outlook, with authors seemingly united by a commitment to unpick the multilevel and multivocal nature of culture in port town communities. The role of popular song and poetry in contributing to a ‘sense of place’ and ‘common cultural identity’ in the north-east of England sits alongside a social historical study of sailor experience and identity in Cape Town, where official records of anti-social disorder give rise to fascinating narratives of sailor–soldier conflict, where the fundamentally urban character of port towns is stressed (p. 31). Underresearched phenomena in the maritime–urban context offer particularly startling insights into diverse port town cultural experiences. Popular religion, the influence of the built environment on the self-image of imperial port towns and the Finnish sailortown are important contributions to an established, though not exhausted, historiography of port town experience ‘from below’.

Part II opts for a greater focus on cultural representations of class, gender, racial, occupational and national identities in the urban–maritime context, again with a geographically varied array of case-studies. While a deeper analysis of the development of place identity is not the intention of these chapters, nevertheless identities related to being in place, either aboard ship or ashore, are the source of many of the conflicts and solidarities that arose on land in port towns during the long period in question. Chapters adapting the concept of sailortown (Jo Bryne's ‘taskscape’ in the shape of Hull's ‘trawlertown’) and analyses of both merchant and naval seamen identities are particularly notable for their focus not only on overlooked aspects of a relatively well-worn area, but a willingness to embrace a broad swathe of historical sources to unpick the dynamic cultural landscapes in question. In the process, we gain a greater sense of the lived and meaningful existence of historical actors in urban–maritime places.

Though the concepts of space and place are taken to be formative in the production of the maritime–urban, the manifold ways places are explicated in the ebb and flow of port town social and cultural life is not outlined explicitly. However, it would be unfair to present this as a downside to an otherwise rich, engaging and vital work. Rather, the idea that port towns developed historically as enacted spaces embodied with social meaning is taken as a given from the outset. The most important lesson to learn from the study of maritime and urban cultures is the instrumental role of the port town's relation to the wider urban world, and its placing often at the boundaries of this world. As the book's structure and Isaac Land's closing chapter demonstrate, port towns must be viewed and analysed on their own terms but in context, as places with unique identities that are frequently open to contestation and conflict within and from without. The ability of port dwellers to exercise agency in producing perspectives on life on the waterfront is constantly underlined in this work, providing an exciting and welcome contribution to a conventional historiography concerned primarily with macrohistorical economic and social trends.