Andy Croll is a Lecturer in History at the University of Glamorgan. He is the author of several articles on urban culture and social order in nineteenth-century England and Wales.

Andy Croll has chosen to look at an unexplored aspect of the town, its transition from the shock town of the Welsh industrial revolution to a civic community with pretensions to urbanity. His gracefully written book is an engagement with the emerging historical problem of urban spacethere is much here for historians of leisure, towns and of 19th-century British society in general.'