The gaining and retaining of “city” status became a contested public issue in the United Kingdom during the late 1990s despite the fact that such a status brings no advantages legal or fiscal. Superficially, the topic looks a perfect source for trivia game questions. Which urban place lost and then regained city status during local government reorganization in the 1970s? Or even better, which English town produced a T-shirt for the millennium competition for city status? All the answers are in the book. In fact, this well-researched book is fascinating, at times hilarious, and raises a variety of important issues.

Since Norman times cities were cathedral towns and cathedral towns were cities. The Normans did some tidying up, encouraging bishops to move to major urban centers, as in the Dorchester to Lincoln move. This comfortable link between urban and ecclesiastical importance was broken in the nineteenth century by urban growth, the reordering of the urban system, and the association of importance with size and civic pride. When the Anglican church created new dioceses they tended to choose places with attractive, substantial, and historical churches—Ripon not Bradford, and Wakefield not Leeds. In formal terms city status was granted by the crown on the advice of the Home Office, although Ripon smuggled in an affirmation of their title as a clause to the bill for gasworks purchase. The civil servants were disgusted by the granting of city status to St Albans, “a fourth rate market town,” just because it gained a bishop. In 1888, they broke the link of cathedral and city status. Already the nature of the game had changed. Manchester gained a charter in 1853. Others were in the queue. The new “rules” were implicit. Size and civic achievement were vital. Leicester was kept waiting until 1919 because of failures in smallpox vaccination policy. The Home Office fought to keep the fiction that city status was a privilege granted by the crown. A royal visit or event was always a good time to ask. Bradford, Hull, and Nottingham got their grants as part of Victoria's jubilee.

Among all the celebrations and petitioning, city status meant absolutely nothing in practical terms. This was pure and simple “status.” There was a superleague of towns that had Lord Mayors, and an elite of these who could call their Lord Mayors “right honourable.” Because everybody believed that it mattered, it did matter. Max Weber would have been proud of them. He would have been equally pleased at Home Office efforts to observe the sociological niceties of bureaucracy. Fears of setting precedents, especially those linked to the implicit logic of population size, dominated. Derby could not be a city, despite having a cathedral, because this might let in places like Middlesbrough, Blackpool, and Croydon. At the same time Toqueville and Bagehot would have had a chuckle at the English playing patronage games with the crown as cover.

The second part of the twentieth century saw new themes emerge. Places like Sunderland realized at an early stage that status, and that meant city status, could be an element in attracting inward capital at a time of industrial failure. By the 1990s and the competitions of Jubilee and Millenium, the public relations departments of the town halls spent thousands of pounds on campaigns for a title with no practical value; hence the Warrington T-shirt. This book sits alongside the literature on boosterism and urban regeneration as well as that on civic pride and ceremonial. There were more overtly political themes. As early as 1963 Southampton laid successful claim to the title in the context of pressure from the local Tory MP holding a marginal seat. By the 1998–2002 competitions, the bulk of the grants were made to Labour-held seats, mostly electoral marginals. Nobody except the government front bench thought that this was a coincidence. Granting city status became part of the politics of countering the growing nationalist and separatist movements within the United Kingdom. In 2002, Northern Ireland got two city grants, despite population sizes well below any threshold. One was for Lisburn, Protestant and unionist, and the other for nationalist and Catholic Newry. Secretary of state for Northern Ireland, John Reid, showed he had a sense of humor as he watched Sinn Fein wriggle in the face of this honor granted by the “crown.” A minor but important error attributes the then MP, Seamus Mallon, to Sinn Fein. He belonged to the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and no doubt Reid was trying the bolster support for the constitutional party.

This is a useful, often entertaining book contributing to a variety of themes in urban history. John Beckett ends in a slightly malicious way by suggesting that in this age of transparency, government should be clear about the criteria for the award of city status. Many urban history meetings I have attended have risked sterility and breakup by trying to define “urban”; perhaps an attempt to define “city” will lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom.