You were good enough to say, Mr Vice-Chancellor, when you invited me to give this inaugural lecture, that it wasn't strictly necessary - or words to that effect. Since you did so the most recently installed professor of economic history in this country, Donald Coleman at Cambridge, has taken stock of what he describes as ‘this dying ritual’: of the 32 persons who have become professors in his subject since 1945 no fewer than 15 have crept into their chairs without a word. I confess I also thought of taking that vow of silence. My own academic life has been immured in Leicester so long - I came here, as you delicately forbore to point out, before most of my present students were born - that I have never been aware of taking any step that might properly be accompanied by any ceremonial. What has happened, quite simply, is that the University has given me the opportunity to indulge my historical curiosity in the way I chose, and I have been lucky enough to catch one of the biggest breakers to have risen in Modern History since the war. This is an opportunity, therefore, for me to reflect on the course of urban history in the light of the urban tendencies of our times, to consider the proper limits of the subject and to suggest some of the directions in which it might now most happily go.