Dr Henry Littlejohn's Report on the Sanitary Condition of Edinburgh (1865) was a landmark in urban management and public health administration. The Lancet described it as 'monumental'. The Report had a significance far beyond the boundaries of Edinburgh and his meticulous research produced penetrating insights into the links between poverty, employment and public health in Victorian cities. Insanitary City reproduces the full Report and sets it in this wider context. For over half a century, Littlejohn's career as Police Surgeon, Crown witness in murder cases and medical advisor to the Scottish Poor Law authorities, gave him an unrivalled overview of the problems confronting Victorian society. In 1895 he was knighted 'for services to sanitary science'.

In this collection of essays J. B. Harley (1932-1991) draws on ideas in art history, literature, philosophy, and the study of visual culture to subvert the traditional, "positivist" model of cartography, replacing it with one that is grounded in an iconological and semiotic theory of the nature of maps. He defines a map as a "social construction" and argues that maps are not simple representations of reality but exert profound influences upon the way space is conceptualized and organized. A central theme is the way in which power--whether military, political, religious, or economic--becomes inscribed on the land through cartography. In this new reading of maps and map making, Harley undertakes a surprising journey into the nature of the social and political unconscious.

This book does not claim to be a fully researched history nor is it an autobiography or a memoir although personal experience is invoked at intervals to illustrate the narrative from a sometimes participant observer. It can more accurately be described as a polemic and at times the language is vitriolic for which I make no apology. I am genuinely angry as well as sad about how the educated elite of my generation, the baby boomers, have transformed our country for the worse. The first part of the book examines through the prism of my northern working class background our inheritance and the nature of the world in which we grew up and then takes the reader through the ascendancy of Mrs Thatcher, which is crucial in understanding what follows. The second part of the book begins with an analysis of what constitutes the political class and then examines thematically how the new establishment achieved, wasted and abused power at the expense of those they claimed to represent. The final part of the book optimistically entitled "Power to the People", argues how power can be reclaimed by the electorate from the arrogant political class which dominates our lives at home and in Europe which has systematically conspired to subvert our once vibrant democracy and destroy our national sovereignty.

This book is not a scholarly work of history, nor is it truly a memoir or an autobiography, as I am under no illusions that my life merits that kind of treatment. My standpoint is that of the participant observer, and the backdrop is provided by the proud communities of Blackburn and Darwen, where my family lived, where I was educated, and where I worked before moving on to make my own way in life. I am sure that the experiences I describe will resonate with readers in many other once prosperous industrial areas. The key theme of this book is what is what like to grow up in working class communities during what I have called the Age of Affluence, the thirty years that followed World War Two in which the working people of the United Kingdom for the only time in our industrial history, experienced unbroken full employment and saw their lives transformed as a consequence.