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the importation of western industrialization which has been attempted in most Medi- terranean countries and has led to major environmental problems without major sustained economic gain. Instead, he suggests a recasting of traditional agricultural attitudes from the exploitation of land for short-term gain to proper stewardship of land. The focus is on the necessity of dealing adequately with the peasant societies in the region. He replaces the old stereoptye of peasants, illogically resistant to change, with the belief that they are inherently receptive to change if they can be convinced that real benefits can be gained. He suggests ways in which this can be done in the light of the British experience in Cyprus.

The author’s Mediterranean canvas is large: it includes southern France, Anatolia and the Balkans. Not surprisingly, given the brevity of the book, the picture painted is some- times decidedly impressionistic: it does not always repay close scrutiny. Although Thirgood admits that different parts of the Mediterranean have different climates, vegetation types and histories, the reader often loses sight of this. More serious is the incompetent treatment of the historical material. Throughout, historical statements are frequently inaccurate, and interpretations outdated or simply incorrect. A large amount of historical material is derived from works by foresters rather than historians. Even the works of historical geographers who are cited are generally elderly: there is, for example, a heavy reliance on Ellen Semple’s Geography of the Mediterranean Region, published in 1931. Consideration of vegetation history is restricted almost entirely to historical documents. The growing body of palynological and other palaeo-environmental data from the region, particularly for prehistoric periods, is largely ignored. The re-evaluations since World War II (well summarized in R. M. Netting’s The Ecological Approach in Cultural Study, 1971) of supposedly uneconomic or irrational peasant practices, such as swidden agriculture, pastoral economies, and “bride-price” (here apparently confused with dowry!) are similarly ignored. Important works of direct relevance are also dis- regarded: Vita-Finzi on Mediterranean valley alluviation; Kolars on the supposed role of the goat in deforestation; Kraft, Aschenbrenner and Rapp on the siltation of rivers in the region. Wertime’s important paper for a recent conference on ‘Deforestation, Erosion and Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East’ is referred to (and is, incidentally, one of only nine references less than ten years old) but none of the other papers from that obviously relevant meeting is mentioned. Thirgood warns in a prefatory note that he has often forgotten or mislaid his sources of information. This is hardly an acceptable excuse for the welter of unreferenced statements, particularly in the first two chapters, many of which are controversial.

Basically, this is a book written by a forester whose particular expertise and point of view strongly colour the book. But he has invaded territory which better qualified scholars fear to tread.

University of Liverpool H. A. FORBES

KEN YOUNG and PATRICIA L. GARSIDE, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change 1837-1981 (London: Edward Arnold, Studies in Urban History Series, 1982. Pp. xiv+ 401. E25.00)

This is a book about “space, imagery and politics”; it describes the development of London in terms of the relations between them. A “linear and simple schema”, as in general theories of “urbanisation” or “counterurbanisation”, is rejected. Young and Garside believe that reality does not impose itself directly on politics: political institutions and debate are grounded in symbols and imagery which, in turn, are themselves affected by argument and sentiment. They illustrate these principles through a detailed examina- tion of the discussions about local government and housing reform in London, from the establishment of the General Register Office in 1837 to the election of Ken Livingstone

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and the assumption of control of the Greater London Council by the Labour Party in 1981.

The authors divide this period into three. During the nineteenth century, they suggest, much attention was paid to the constitutional question of local government reform and, in particular, to the need for a consolidated central authority for London as a whole. They believe that this began with the promotion of public health reform but that in the second half of the century it became increasingly a party question. The establishment of the London County Council in 1888 soon led, after a four-year honeymoon, to the en- trenchment of party politics. From 1900 to 1939, the second period, the London conurba- tion expanded and the LCC began to look beyond its boundaries for building sites, bringing conflict with surrounding local authorities. The Green Belt policy promised some control of this growth. After the Second World War urban expansion was different: the decentralization of employment to alternative locations, especially the New Towns, halted the spread of the London conurbation.

Young and Garside contend that political pressures ensured that, during each of these periods, the political territory of “London” has not been the same as the functional economic area it needed to control. In the nineteenth century, local vested interests blocked the delegation of authority to any single administrative body which could legis- late for the complex and interrelated problems of an expanding metropolis. The consoli- dated area finally defined in 1888 was far too small to negotiate the difficulties faced by London between 1900 and 1939, when the most rapid rates of growth were in the suburbs and when the centre was already losing population if not jobs. Yet Tory councils in the suburbs, afraid that the tone of their districts would be lowered, resisted attempts to incorporate them into the building plans of the LCC. The dispersal of economic activity to relatively autonomous towns beyond the Green Belt after the war the authors suggest, broke up the larger functional unit of Greater London; yet in 1965 a Tory government extended the London authority to its present size by establishing the Greater London Council. This was due, in Young and Garside’s opinion, to a Conservative wish to add Tory suburbs to the LCC and thus ensure themselves a majority on the new metro- politan authority.

This is certainly a bold attempt to write a general political history of London since 1837 and the case is documented in great detail. It provides an interesting contrast to works, such as Cherry’s Evolution of British Toww Planning, which see the development of town planning policy as the slow fruition of idealistic seeds. For example, in the case of the New Towns policy, Young and Garside argue that the intellectual heritage of the idea was only one, and a fairly minor one, of the arguments in its favour. Political expediency alone, in their opinion, could explain why the Labour Party, within a fort- night of being elected in 1965, should base its planning policies on an idea which it had not even considered important enough to put in its manifesto.

The difficulty with their approach to the study of the relations between “space, imagery and politics” is that one is not sure just how much autonomy they are ascribing to political expedience. Furthermore, having convincingly attacked the teleological as- pects of Berry’s work on counter-urbanization, they, then, put forward their own general theory of the metropolitan life-cycle. This excellent study of London’s historical geogra- phy and politics does not, therefore, clearly specify the extra-political constraints on government, so that “reality” becomes teleological, and politics and “images” appear divorced from those constraints.

University of Liwrpool GERRY KEARNS