Dennis Mills’ work, with its wide range from early interests in the geography of Russia, through the history and historical geography of English rural communities to the development of the city of Lincoln and the cartography relating to it, is well known, and equally well appreciated, at national as well as local level. This collection of nine papers, with a bibliography, biography and appreciation, has been published as a tribute to him. The book has a common geographical base in the city of Lincoln and Lincolnshire and the studies in it range from the archaeology of the city of Lincoln as revealed and recorded during the construction of Lincoln's sewers in the 1870s, to reservoir building, the landed gentry, carriers, alehouses, farm buildings, markets and fairs, and tourism in nineteenth-century Lincoln. It ends with an analysis of the role of the historian in the study of urban and rural communities in the twentieth century.

This last, Andrew J. H. Jackson's ‘Towards the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond: Rural and Urban Change and the Task of the Historian’ addresses the continuing relevance of Mills’ work with its consideration of ‘open and closed settlements, rural and urban planning, community identity, case studies in Lincolnshire and Devon, and the task of the local historian today’. Shirley Brooks revisits an early (1959) piece on the development of rural settlement around Lincoln. By successfully exploiting sources that have become better, even if still not widely, known, land improvement loans and mortgages under Gilbert's acts, she adds further depth to Mills’ analysis of the significance of agricultural improvement in understanding settlement patterns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Two other papers address areas of particular interest to the student of rural society. Wendy Atkin successfully anatomises the alehouses of Kesteven in the period between 1755 and 1851. She opens up, without the space to develop them fully, significant insights into the place of alehouses in rural society. Dan Ellin provides a competent survey of ‘North Lincolnshire's Country Carriers’. But his concern to place his paper within the context of Alan Everitt's work, some of it nearly forty years old, means that he gives himself less opportunity to build on the insights that more sustained reference to Dennis Mills’ distinctive approach to the study of rural society might have provided.

Andrew Walker opens up some valuable insights into the interaction between town and country in a discussion of fairs and markets in Lincolnshire between 1840 and 1920, which again promises more, with the opportunity to develop its arguments in greater depth. Michael Trott's study of the Sibthorps of Canwick reflects Dennis Mills’ interest in the family and village. The emphasis of other papers is urban rather than rural. The very high quality of the maps that are reproduced in Rob Wheeler's paper on Skellingthorpe reservoir, an urban facility in a rural place, is, with the other illustrative material in the book, a fitting acknowledgment of Dennis Mills’ interests in cartography. An index to pull together its various themes and insights would have enhanced a stimulatingly varied book.