In Streetlife, Leif Jerram has produced a fascinating narration of urban history in twentieth-century Europe. It sets out one clear aim which it achieves with both elegance and nuance: to explore twentieth-century urban history from the bottom up and to take seriously the import and impact of everyday spaces. History he says, happens in the spaces in which we sleep, eat, work and play as much as if not more than parliamentary chambers, ministry corridors and boardrooms. In short, history takes place at ground level in workshops, factories, beer halls, dance halls, front rooms, squares, street corners and so on. In the five substantive chapters of Streetlife Jerram works through the ways in which twentieth-century Europe was transformed from the point of view of these spaces. His argument is that power resides in and emerges from them; power that is harnessed to form the engine of change. Streetlife shows very effectively that new ideologies and new practices associated with key transformative moments can trace their roots to such spaces. These spaces were fundamentally urban and Jerram suggests that it was only in the cities, which witnessed profound and rapid growth through the twentieth century, that these spaces became more significant than at any time before.

The first substantive chapter ‘Revolution in the streets’, is, for me, the most satisfying perhaps because it sets out the foundational theme of the book. There are fascinating accounts of the spaces of National Socialism and its opposition which suggests that the economic depression removed access to the everyday spaces of work in which counter-ideologies to Nazism could thrive and thrust people into the leisure spaces of the bars, beer halls and canteens that were well infiltrated and well understood by the Nazis – the German Social Democratic Party therefore literally lost its geography in the depression. In another well-worked example Jerram discusses the intimate physical proximity of the No. 6 workshop of the Trubochnyi Factory and how it enabled Bolshevism to emerge as the most powerful amongst many competing revolutionary movements in early twentieth-century Russia. The second chapter focuses on the cultural politics of gender, specifically women, and their changing relation to urban space, focusing not as perhaps expected on the spaces made by women but on the use made by women of space. There are some especially interesting sections on domestic space and the dual role of the home as both liberator (in terms of a space of one's own) and oppressor (in terms of received gender roles) and fascinating material on the modest revolutionary role that suddenly visible and violent women played in the urban riots over food shortages in the aftermath of World War I.

The following chapter then explores the role of urban spaces in driving changes in popular culture including football and football violence, music hall, dance halls, cinemas and so on. A chapter on the role of the urban in the identity politics of sexuality demonstrates very well, in its focus on homosexuality, how the everyday spaces of mundane heterosexuality remain hidden, whereas the spaces of homosexuality are more evident because of stringent law, regulation and spatial planning. Finally, a chapter on urban planning chronicles various efforts across the Continent to effect logical, rational and apparently neutral management of urban spaces and populations. The latter is perhaps the weakest chapter because much of the rest of the book is focused on the spaces left for resistance by legislative authorities, the establishment and capital – spaces in which alternative practices and ideas could establish themselves and evolve – whereas this chapter concerns restriction and control.

Streetlife's chapters are not structured by the spatial foci of the book and instead are set out thematically and chronologically. This is not then a book about geography, but it might be frustrating to some geographers and maybe historians too that the spaces that are the subject of the book are not systematically explored. Do for instance the everyday spaces of work (the canteen, the workshop) play different transformative political roles to the everyday spaces of leisure (the cinema, the living room, the dance hall)? The answer to this question is in the book but it is not drawn out explicitly. Similarly, there tends to be a slippage in the account between the meaning of key geographical terms, especially space and place. And, again in terms of geographical sensibilities, despite some explicit recognition that the ‘urban’ is not the same everywhere, that for instance the layout of the standard British city with its narrow streets, alleyways and meagre squares is somewhat different from the cities of central and eastern Europe, there is a tendency to deal with urban space as a universal in the book: similar social formations and movements emerge from similar urban spaces regardless of nation and region.

However, what Streetlife might lack in terms of geographical nuance it more than makes up for in its impressive scope and in the power of its narrative. It makes a compelling argument for both historians and geographers that the events that occur in everyday spaces have significant political outcomes that have changed and continue to affect the course of history.