Early works of urban history focused on the late nineteenth century as a time marked by the advent of a new kind of order. But historians disagreed about what kind of order was brought about, and by whom. Robert Wiebe argued in The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967) that a confident, rising professional class gained power by imposing bureaucratic order, while Paul Boyer, in Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), maintained that private, Protestant reformers sought to bring moral order.

Lisa Keller focuses on the advent during this same period of a different sort of order, which might be called politico-spatial. She asks how London and New York, arguably the most significant cities in the world over the last 150 years, struck a balance between the freedom of political expression taken for granted in a democracy and the order necessary for economic growth and prosperity. The theatres in which these two values contended, she argues, were the public spaces of the cities – streets, parks and squares. The key players in this tale are not rising middle classes or anxious reformers, but police and government officials. She argues that these authorities forged a consensus with the public of each city, which determined the balance of these competing ideals. By undertaking an ambitious cross-national comparison, she is able to demonstrate that the fundamentally similar Anglo-American political ideologies of these two cities had quite different results: London, she argues, allowed substantially greater freedom of assembly and expression than New York throughout this period. She is also able to use this history to raise some uncomfortable questions about the present: she suggests in her conclusion that the delicate balance between freedom and order may have tipped too far toward order in the post-9/11 era.

Keller's method is not to track every decision that affected the balance of freedom and order, but to focus on key episodes in each city that illuminate this issue. In London, these include the Chartist demonstrations of the 1840s, the Sunday Trading Bill riots of 1855, the ‘Black Monday’ riot of 1886 and the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 1887. Although the policies of the police and the government varied over this period, Keller finds a recurrent British belief that public protest is a healthy ‘safety valve’ that averts more drastic violence and political upheaval (the spectre of French revolutions and communes was never far from the mind of British officials). As a result, when police cracked down on protesters, as in the Trading Bill and Black Monday riots, subsequent government reports and court rulings favoured the protesters. Public spaces might occasionally be put off limits, as Trafalgar Square was from 1889 to 1892, but officials understood that keeping the public out was politically risky, and when the Liberal government reopened Trafalgar to demonstrations in 1892, it set an enduring precedent legitimizing the rights of free speech and assembly.

In New York, by contrast, authorities saw demonstrations not as safety valves, but as incipient uprisings. In the shadow of the draft riots of 1863 – to this day still the most fatal civil disturbance in American history with 119 dead – New York police used a strong hand in episodes such as the Tompkins Square ‘Blood or Bread’ riot of 1874. In contrast to their London counterparts, New York police were rarely condemned or convicted by investigations into alleged excesses in police violence. Even today, New York remains less hospitable than London to mass protests, Keller argues, citing the treatment each city gave to anti-war and bicycle-rights demonstrations since 2000.

Keller's work is thought-provoking and timely, speaking directly to current concerns about what Henri Lefebvre called the right to the city. Its ambitious cross-national comparative framework sets an example for others to follow. Yet, while it convinced me that London was more liberal than New York in its treatment of public expression, it left me wondering what explained this contrast. Was it a particular event, such as the New York draft riots, that made the difference? Was it something in the two countries’ political culture, or in the two nations’ contrasting history of suffrage? The question of what caused the difference between the two cities raises another thorny question for this book: who was behind the policies in each city? Keller is inconsistent on this point, sometimes attributing police regulation and repression of protest to the interests of business (p. 74), or the ‘upper and middle classes’ (p. 79), and other times crediting a ‘consensus’ (p. xv) encompassing authorities and ‘citizens’ (p. 167) or the ‘public’ as a whole (p. 205). Undoubtedly, ‘the public’ was not a monolithic entity, and attributing to it a ‘consensus’ view calls for more caution than Keller sometimes shows. For instance, she often bases her assessments of public opinion on the writings of major newspapers, without offering an explanation of why the press should be treated as a proxy for the citizenry. Despite these concerns, Keller's book remains a valuable resource for scholars and citizens who want to understand political protest and public space in the past, and how that history continues to shape the cities we live in today.