Planning in the 1990s: An international agenda

This paper, originally presented to the AESOP‐ACSP joint conference in Oxford in 1991, stresses that both in Europe and in the US, there is a major difference for planning in the switch from boom to recession. During the 1990s a major challenge will be to find new ways of public‐private partnership in financing new urban infrastructure at a time when developer contributions — a major innovation of the 1980s — have dried up. This particularly applies to the European high‐speed train system — one critical element of which will run through the East Thames Corridor, one of Britain's major urban developments in the coming years. In the US, planners are likely to remain more locally focused, less internationally concerned, than in a Europe in which national barriers are rapidly eroding.     

X-ray fluorescence analysis of late Roman and Sassanian silver plate

About 200 analyses have been made on late Roman and Sassanian silver objects using energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence. This has shown that the main feature of the composition of the silver throughout the period and across the geographical area studied was towards high fineness (average silver percentage about 95%). Compositional differences are found between Roman and Sassanian silversmiths' products for the elements copper and lead. Much of the material analysed came from hoards, and using a statistical technique on the analytical data (Discriminant Analysis) broad compositional differences between hoards were found to emerge. The use of different compositions of silver for different joined parts of a single object are discussed.     

Evaluating marital stability in late-Victorian Camberwell

What was the extent of marital breakdown and separation in a society where divorce was unlikely to be an option? This article investigates the status and longevity of the marriages of a group of parents whose children were admitted to the care of the poor law authorities in Camberwell in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It finds that spousal death or misfortune, rather than marital breakdown, were the primary reasons for a parent to send a child to the poor law authorities, and that most of the marriages of the parents in the sample remained intact. It also explores whether those who separated formed new co-residential relationships.