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Europe to correct shapes and insert names on their maps. So much history has been well condensed into the essential few paragraphs required to explain how the maps came to be drawn, and the problems faced by the missionaries and traders penetrating into lands that had not previously appeared in any detail on the maps. For example, Laos was so inaccessible that there was probably no European visitor in the two hundred years between the journey by Father Leria in the 1640s and that by Henri Mouhot in the mid-19th century. Then followed a “flurry of new maps of the area, primarily by French cartographers”.

While this book does not list ull the printed maps of South-East Asia, and is more of a general coverage than a scholarly carto-bibliography, it is unlikely that any important map has been ignored. It is a welcome addition to the mapping of Asia.

Lordor SUSAN GOLE

A. D. MILLS, A Dictionary of English Place-Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xxxiii +388. El2.95)

The title of this book is not inaccurate, but it is slightly misleading, for by the standards of Oxford University Press’s other series of dictionaries it is a “short” dictionary of English place-names. It is considerably shorter than the same publisher’s Concise Dictionary by Eilert Ekwall, the fourth edition of which first appeared in 1960 and is still in print.

A work of this nature and length requires succinct entries and a tough standard of selection. Mills achieves the first requirement admirably, and for the second has based his choice on the place-names that appear in those “popular touring atlases” that contain maps at three and four miles to the inch. Given the constraints of space, some pragmatic basis of that kind is certainly required, but the one which he has adopted contains the danger that urban areas, where the cartographers have their own problems of space, will be under-represented, and that danger has not been completely avoided. The dictionary contains over 12 000 names, chiefly of settlements, including the new towns of the twentieth century, but also those of the principal Roman roads, rivers, counties (both pre- and post-1974), and districts.

The introduction covers the major elements of place-names and their origins. Unfortunately, some of the examples used in the introduction to illustrate particular forms and meanings do not occur in the dictionary, and so the reader is unable to check their full meaning and derivation. This applies to Affington, Chegworth, Cholmondeley, Mondrum and Ulverley, for example, and there are also some cases of inconsistent spelling between the dictionary and the introduction.

The value of a dictionary such as this really does depend upon the number of entries which it contains. On that basis, it is not a reference book for historical geographers and local historians, who will continue to use Ekwall’s dictionary as their first point of call, backed up by the more specialized county and local volumes. It is presumably aimed at a wider readership, providing an introduction to the subject, and a dictionary that is more useful for browsing than for anything else. In this respect the dictionary section may be quickly exhausted, once the local and familiar place-names have been checked. For example, the inhabitants of Sedgley, on the edge of the Midlands conurbation, will find that name, and those of nearby Coseley, Penn and Wombourn, but not Gornal, Ruiton, Baggeridge, Gospel End or Woodsetton. Anyone wishing to acquire an informed interest in the subject may prefer to spend the extra &IO required for a copy of Ekwall, which provides the fuller and more numerous dictionary entries. The book under review will chiefly be valuable as a brief introduction that will whet

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appetites rather than satisfy them. Finally, the publishers are to be commended for their awareness that an attractive dust jacket helps to sell books of this kind, and the witty and appropriate one on this book, designed by Caroline Church, fits the bill admirably.

-Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments qf‘England STEPHEN PORTER

T. R. SLATER (Ed.), The Built Form of Western Cities: Essaysfor M. R. Conzen on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990. Pp. 448. 07.50)

This is a Festschriff written by a community of scholars from a large number of different cotmtries who wished to honour an academic who, as an emigre from Nazi Germany, settled in England. Conzen developed a conceptual framework for the urban morphological approach at a time when there was limited academic interest in the study of urban form. But his message caught the imagination of scholars working at Birmingham University, Slater and J. W. R. Whitehand, who perceive him as the founder of English urban morphology. They developed his ideas into a coherent school operating from Birmingham as the “Urban Morphology Research Group”.

As editor of the Festschrifr, Slater has admirably succeeded in paying tribute to Conzen by producing a volume written by researchers who are interested in the built form of cities, the processes which lead to particular built forms and the management of historical townscapes in the context of concepts and techniques developed by Conzen. The case-studies of individual towns range widely from town-plan analysis of medieval towns in Ireland and England (J. Bradley, Slater and C. J. Bond) to industrial towns in Poland, North America and South Africa (M. Koter, M. P. Conzen and R. F. Haswell) to an analysis of processes, people and buildings in towns in Wales, Scotland. Austria and England (H. Carter, G. Gordon, E. Lichtenberger and M. Freeman), to the study of urban fringe-belts in Scotland, Spain and Germany (M. Barke, J. Vilagrasa and B. Von der Dollen) and finally to problems of townscape conservation in England, North America and Italy (P. J. Larkham, Whitehand, A. McQuillan and I. Samuels).

The real attraction of the book lies in the way in which its editor shares his by now considerable amount of experience in urban morphology and with urban morphologists with the reader. The result is an interesting story of the diffusion of ideas about the s,tudy of urban form, which came with Conzen from Germany in the late 1930s were developed by him in the 1950s and promoted and considerably extended by the Birmingham School in the 1960s and 1970s and were then exported to North America and transferred back to Germany. They also made their way into Poland and Spain. Ironically the discipline of urban historical geography is now stronger in England than in Germany. The centre for urban morphological studies remains Birmingham.

Slater rises to this challenge. He traces the development of cooperation between English and German urban historical geographers. A particular challenge is constituted by the school of Italian urban design (following Muratori and Caniggia), which has developed it,s own conceptual framework. The interaction between the two major groups of urban morphologists, the Anglo-German historical geographers and the Italian architectural planning group, could lead to the development of a theoretically founded approach to townscape management. This is a formidable agenda, which Slater presents us with, set out by people who do not only study towns but also genuinely care for their future.

The book is well illustrated with plans and photos. Some readers might regret that the painstaking work on medieval urban topography pioneered by D. Keene is not included in the volume. The book is extremely valuable as a reference book for all