This is a pioneering study of 18th century Scottish urbanism: dynamic but different. This heavily illustrated and innovative study is founded upon personal documents, town council minutes, legal cases, inventories, travellers' tales, plans and drawings relating to some 30 Scots burghs of the Georgian period. It establishes a distinctive history for the development of Scots burghs, their living patterns and legislative controls, and shows that the Scottish urban experience was quite different from other parts of Britain. With population expansion, and economic and social improvement, Scots of the time experienced immense change both in terms of urban behaviour and the decay of ancient privileges and restrictions. This volume shows how the Scots Georgian burgh developed to become a powerfully controlled urban community, with disturbance deliberately designed out. This is a collaborative history, melding together political, social, economic, urban and architectural histories, to achieve a comprehensive perspective on the nature of the Scottish Georgian town. Not so much a history by growth and numbers, this pioneering study of Scottish urbanization explores the type of change and the quality of result. It is heavily illustrated, the pictures being as much of the message as the text. It is a pioneering study of how Scottish urban life changed during the 18th century, to be matched against the well-covered English town. It combines social, economic, architectural and urban history in a systematic, comparative manner. This research significantly revises current historiography about the Scots urban evolution and the nature of 'British' towns.

The first Tay Bridge collapsed into the sea in 1879, only eighteen months after it had opened, drowning seventy-two people travelling by train to Dundee. Shock reverberated through Britain, and the public demanded answers. The bridge had been hailed as a triumph of construction, and its fall shook society's confidence in the excellence of Victorian engineering. This epic tale of engineering follows the rise and fall of the career of engineer Thomas Bouch, ostracized from the engineering community when his bridge crashed into the Tay estuary. Charles McKean offers new conclusions about why the first Tay Bridge collapsed and tells how the Forth and Tay Bridges eventually became reality. He follows the railway battle for Scotland from 1845-95 and the people it involved: from the Victorian entrepreneurs, poets, journalists, lawyers and town councils, and the engineers, briggers, excavators and rivet boys, to the pioneering and inventive contractor William Arrol, who constructed the bridges that stand today. Meticulously researched and vividly told, Battle for the North explores the complicated reality underlying the Victorian pursuit of progress.

In this work, the author overturns the theories that Scottish Renaissance country houses were merely 'castles' or fortified houses, alongside a country left behind in a backwater, and reveals 16th-century Scotland as vivid, colourful and European.