Women and the Land examines English women's legal rights to land and the reality and consequences of their land ownership over four centuries. Women and the Land examines the pre-history of gendered property relations in England, focusing on the four-hundred-year period between roughly 1500 and 1900. More specifically, the book is about how gender shaped opportunities for and experiences of owning property, particularly for women. The focus is especially on land, residential buildings and commercial property, but livestock, common and personal property also feature. This project is drivenby an explicitly feminist agenda: the contributors directly challenge the idea that the existence of patriarchal property relations - including the doctrine of coverture and gendered inheritance practices - meant that property wasconcentrated in exclusively male hands. Here a very different story is told: of significant levels of female landownership and how women's desire to own property and manage its profits led to emotional attachments to land and a willingness and determination to fight for the right to legal title. Altogether, the chapters in this volume offer new histories of land and property which hold women's lives as their centre. Presenting the very latest qualitativeand quantitative research on women's landownership, the book will be of interest to those working in social, economic and cultural history, historical and cultural geography, women's studies, gender studies and landscape studies. AMANDA CAPERN is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History at the University of Hull. BRIONY MCDONAGH is Senior Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull. JENNIFER ASTON is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Northumbria University. CONTRIBUTORS: Jennifer Aston, Stephen Bending, Amanda L. Capern, Janet Casson, Amy Erickson, Amanda Flather, Joan Heggie, Jessica L. Malay, Briony McDonagh, Judith Spicksley, Jon Stobart, Hannah Worthen

Middlesbrough and Teesside are renowned for their association with the iron and steel industry. Iron has been produced there on an industrial scale since the 1850s, when Cleveland ironstone was discovered in the Eston Hills. By 1866, there were fifty-eight blast furnaces in Middlesbrough, Cargo Fleet, Eston (South Bank) and Port Clarence and the growth and subsequent decline of the iron and steel industry is, in many ways, the history of Middlesbrough itself. Any uninformed visitor could be forgiven for overlooking this heritage, however, as there are so few remaining architectural reminders of that historical association; the furnaces and mills have been demolished, the corporate buildings are now night clubs or pubs, the river is less polluted, the air is cleaner and quieter. These images trace the changing landscape from the latter half of the nineteenth century through time to the late 1960s when the industry was nationalised.