This monumental study, the product of many years’ archival research in a rich variety of demographic sources supplemented by the careful use of oral history, deserves the careful and respectful attention of urban historians. It is an astonishingly thorough spatial analysis of working-class localities, family and workplace relationships and behaviour patterns, mapped on to political attitudes and practices, and with particular but not exclusive reference to the distribution and social structures of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism in the city and its surroundings. It has entailed extensive record linkage work, tracing individuals from nominal listings based on (for example) workplace records, tax listings, industrial censuses, union membership and wartime casualty lists, and identifying key characteristics of people, households and neighbourhoods by cross-reference to the padrón or municipal census of 1930, clearly an excellent example of a very rich and detailed source of information on occupation, literacy, migration flows and family and household structure. Demographic historians have been exploiting padrones for some years, as in the case of Manuel González Portilla's work on industrialization in Greater Bilbao, but this use of the source to inform an analysis of community formation, labour history and popular politics is path-breaking and worthy of emulation, although the sheer investment of time and technology in this project will be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Oyón succeeds in providing a convincing delineation of the spatial, and also the social and cultural, structure of working-class (and white-collar) Barcelona between the outbreak of World War I and the early months of the revolutionary struggle against the military rebellion of 19 July 1936. He traces the changing patterns of industrial employment over two turbulent decades, including the rise and decline of employment in construction associated with the big International Exposition and Metro projects, and maps the growth of overcrowding and unemployment in parts of the historic city centre and adjoining districts, and in the outlying industrial and residential suburbs whose growth transformed the urban geography of Barcelona during this period. He also maps migration flows, showing with particular clarity how migrants from the desperate poverty of rural and decayed mining areas of Murcia and Almería clustered disproportionately (though never exclusively) in the new working-class settlements on the urban fringe, making full use of strategies based on chain migration to cope with the new environment. He presents a detailed picture of the problems of working-class housing, overcrowding and sub-letting, including the shanty-towns or barracas that often housed recent migrants; examines the relationships between public transport (especially tramways) and urban expansion, in relation to journeys to pleasure as well as work; and analyses the action spaces and community structures experienced by men, women and children, from stairway, hall and street to corner shop, laundry, cinema and popular festival. Oral history archives are very effectively used to bring the statistics to life, reinforcing the many maps, plans, graphs and tables. All this forms the groundwork, invaluable in itself, for a study of the social context of anarchism and other political radicalisms of the period under review, confirming in outline the widespread stereotype of the unskilled, poverty-stricken, illiterate Andalucian migrant as the mainstay of the anarchist CNT and FAI in what was really ‘black and red’ Barcelona, but adding many nuances to the picture, and cutting down to size another, more romantic stereotype, that of the glamorous female anarchist miliciana of the Civil War.

This is a wonderful piece of sustained, imaginative, disciplined research, scrupulously conducted (though more detail on sources and methodology would have been welcome). It is indispensable reading not only on Barcelona, but as part of coming to terms with the comparative labour history of the great port and industrial cities of twentieth-century Europe, a significance of which the author is well aware, although some of his contextual reading might ideally have been updated. It can be prolix and is certainly unduly repetitive, and reading the whole text is a major operation in itself, although the rewards are great. And it deliberately makes no use of newspapers and other literary sources, concentrating on what can be quantified, and on what can be used systematically to triangulate the quantification, as in the careful selection of appropriate oral interview material.

There are, however, two elephants in the room. There is no sustained analysis of the impact of the language barrier that must have inhibited communication between Catalans and migrants from elsewhere in Spain, with Valencia an intermediate case, even though one of the book's central themes, signalled in the title, is the fracture of the old urban popular culture, partly along these lines, in reaction to the changes and pressures of these years. We learn at one point that early in the revolution the anarcho-syndicalists used their newly acquired (and temporary) powers to change the language of most theatre programmes from Catalan to Castilian, but no broader points are drawn out from this, and this is the only point at which the issue is raised. To an outsider this seems an astounding omission, especially when extended quotations from oral interviews practically alternate between the two languages. And there is absolutely no mention of any positive role played by the Catholic Church, or any other religious organization, in working-class culture, despite the saints’ names given to labour organizations, the association of neighbourhood festivals with saints’ days and the role of the church in the ‘industrial colonies’ established by pious employers. We hear about attacks on the church, but were there really no churchgoing workers, and did the church really play no part at all in the definition of neighbourhood and social space, even in the older working-class and ‘popular’ parts of the city? Neither of these issues should have been allowed to go by default. Nevertheless, this book represents a remarkable achievement, and should be celebrated as such. It opens out new vistas and pathways to urban, social, cultural and political historians, especially in Spain, where so many of its sources have been neglected until recently, but also in other urban settings across the developed and urban world in the first half of the twentieth century.