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The GLC Housing Authority, the largest municipal housing authority in the world, has more than 200 000 dwellings to maintain. To do this it employs on housing maintenance alone some 4 000 men operating from eight district centres. Every year 800 000 defects are reported by tenants. These defects cover the whole range of household repairs and require the services of carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, electricians, painters and glaziers. There are also mobile teams of drain and dust chute cleaners, fencing and boarding‐up workers and gardeners. In addition to household repairs and preventive maintenance, there is periodic inspection of all high rise blocks, resurfacing of courtyards and estate roads, large scale replacement of fencing and redecoration of all vacant dwellings. Most of the estates in which houses and flats are grouped are in Greater London, but there are also 15 cottage estates outside the area and 18 groups of old people's bungalows in seaside towns.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the research related to “the interplay between accounting and the state, politics, and local authorities in the broad government and administration of food for sustainability of populations” (Sargiacomo et al., 2016). Considering contemporary examples and investigating the genealogy of an 18th-century reform of fishery management (the New Plan), the authors explore the role played by accounting and calculative practices when local authorities intervene using forms of discipline based on control systems that acted on commons (fish), people and space.

This paper is historically grounded on archival research on a fish provisioning case during the 18th century in Ancona, an Italian town on the Adriatic coast. The investigation adopts an approach focussed on the use of disciplinary methods in the terms highlighted by Foucault. This perspective offers a lens capable of revealing the key role of accounting in a period when discipline became “general formulas of domination” (Foucault, 1977) and the Papal States were looking for food provisioning solutions (Foucault, 2007). The study highlights similarities with contemporary fishery management.

The paper shows that governability of fishery in a commons' logic is not limited by the properties of the good, but rather “it is achieved through the objects and instruments that are deployed to make it possible” (Johnsen, 2014, p. 429). It reveals forms assumed by economic calculation in different eras and their contribution in the art of governing realised by the state (Hoskin and Macve, 2016). The study unveils how accounting effectively operates using “naming and counting” activities (Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002) based on a system of documents and accounting registers; these have a pivotal role in redefining fishery management and in keeping goods (fish) and people (fishermen) under control. The investigation also highlights the importance of properly quantifying data in fishery management, confirming the literature on the topic (Beddington et al., 2007, p. 1713). In contemporary situations, data refer to quantifying the fish stock in the sea and the consequent estimation of fish catch. In the historical investigation, although environmental protection was not an issue, quantification refers to the fish that entered the town of Ancona, whose estimation was the result of a new calculative approach adopted by local authorities facing fish needs. In addition, it offers early evidence of organised and rational-based control mechanisms that were the result of Enlightened ideas emerging in the Papal States context.

Despite the fact that fish represent a fundamental good for governments to act on in response to a population's needs, there has been no attention paid to how governmental authorities have used disciplinary mechanisms to intervene in fishery management or the role played by accounting. This study's novelty is its investigation of fishery, using Foucauldian disciplinary methods to understand accounting's contribution in fishery governance. In addition, this investigation permits to unveil the role of accounting to support one of the main principles of the governance of commons that is represented by the congruence between rules and local conditions (Fennell, 2011, p. 11; Ostrom, 1990, p. 92).

Faced with an increasingly open society, retail concentration and population change, the purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges and potential for small towns to compete for custom from their residents.

Retail challenges and potential are considered through exploring the attitudes and behaviour of residents in a range of towns, where the key factors affecting trade are identified using regression analysis and then explored further using more open‐ended approaches.

The resident surveys illustrate a sizeable leakage of retail expenditure out of the towns, particularly for comparison goods. Regression analysis shows that this leakage is more part of a general trend rather than being associated with high levels of migration into the towns. Residents seem to fit into two different groupings: first, those whose expectations can be met at the small town level; and second, those wanting a different offer and tending to go elsewhere. Encouraging trade from the former provides the most realistic policy objective.

Key issues relate to getting the basics right, providing support to independent/specialist shops, encouraging firms to fill missing key elements of the retail offer and, where population change is occurring, ensuring that the expansion of services does not have detrimental effects for town centres.

This paper illustrates that although there are many retail challenges‐facing small towns, there is potential for them to maintain their viability and vitality.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that applied spatial modelling can inform the planning, delivery and evaluation of retail services, offering improvements over traditional retail impact assessment (RIA), especially within localities which experience seasonal fluctuations in demand.

The paper first describes a new theoretically informed tourist-based spatial interaction model (SIM) which has been custom-built and calibrated to capture the dynamics of the grocery sector in Cornwall, UK. It tests the power of the model to predict store performance for stores not used in the original calibration process, using client data for a new store development. The model is operationalised for the evaluation of various retail development schemes, demonstrating its contribution across a full suite of location decision making application areas.

The paper demonstrates that this highly disaggregate modelling framework can provide considerable insight into the local economic and social impacts of new store developments, rarely addressed in the retail location modelling literature.

Whilst SIMs have been widely used in retail location research by the private sector, the paper shows that such a model can have considerable value for public sector retail planning, a sector which seemed to have abandoned such models from the 1980s onwards, replacing them with often very limited and crude RIA.

The ability to review the forecasting capabilities of a model (termed post-investment review) are very rare in academic research. This paper offers new evidence that SIMs can support the RIA process.

We issue a double Souvenir number of The Library World in connection with the Library Association Conference at Birmingham, in which we have pleasure in including a special article, “Libraries in Birmingham,” by Mr. Walter Powell, Chief Librarian of Birmingham Public Libraries. He has endeavoured to combine in it the subject of Special Library collections, and libraries other than the Municipal Libraries in the City. Another article entitled “Some Memories of Birmingham” is by Mr. Richard W. Mould, Chief Librarian and Curator of Southwark Public Libraries and Cuming Museum. We understand that a very full programme has been arranged for the Conference, and we have already published such details as are now available in our July number.

British New Towns represent not a single homogeneous set of experiences, but lessons learned derive as much from their differences as their similarities. The chapter studies two British New Towns– Harlow and Thamesmead – identifying the main features of their master plans and analysing their trajectories and outcomes as actually built.

Harlow could be regarded as a typical British New Town. Designated in 1947, it is one of the first New Towns built around London, following design principles of the first (Mark I) generation. In contrast, Thamesmead was built within the city limits of London, but could be included in the second generation of the New Towns.

The towns’ plans have a number of commonalities, in the provision of green areas, employment, commercial areas and services for their population; but their locations, urban structure, land use and physical relation to their surroundings are quite different as they followed different concepts and evolving planning ideas. Even more striking contrast may be found in the way that these towns have grown and matured in different ways. This chapter therefore scrutinises the two towns’ plans, and what was actually built, drawing lessons for New Towns more generally.

THE Classification of Technology has long been a fruitful source of controversy and discussion, and the problems presented by such discussions are becoming more prominent every day and are among the most interesting to the librarian with a speculative turn of mind. Dr. Richardson in his synthesis of classification arrives at the conclusion that the order of knowledge is the order of things, and that the order of classification is the order of things. Therefore the correct order or arrangement of Technology should follow the same order as that placed before us by Dr. Richardson. To make provision for the better and more systematic classification of Technology for the student and craftsman is the office and responsibility of the librarian.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

One of the commonest excuses put forward in defence of the practice of treating milk, butter, meat, and other foods with ‘preservative’ drugs no longer possesses even the appearance of validity. Several of the large railway companies are adding refrigerator vans in considerable numbers to their rolling‐stock, and this fact should make it no longer possible for defendants to plead that the necessity of sending food‐products a long distance by rail involves the necessity of mixing preservative chemicals with them. Although the excuse referred to will not bear examination, it is a very specious one, and in those instances where evidence has not been brought forward to refute it, it has produced some effect on the minds of magistrates and others. It cannot be too often pointed out that such substances as boracic acid, salicylic acid, and formaldehyde are dangerous drugs, and that their unacknowledged presence in articles of food constitutes a serious danger to the public. Such substances are not foods, and are not natural constituents of any food. In most instances they are purposely introduced into food‐products to avoid the expense attending the proper production, preparation, and distribution of the food, or to conceal the inferior quality of an article by masking the signs of commencing decomposition or incipient putrefaction, and thus to enable a dishonest producer or vendor to palm off as fresh and wholesome an article which may be not only of bad quality, but absolutely dangerous to the consumer. The use of these substances, in any quantity whatsoever, and the sale of articles containing them, without the fullest and clearest disclosure of their presence, is as gross and as dangerous a form of adulteration as any which has at any time been exposed. In no single instance can it be shown that these drugs are, to quote the words of the Act of 1875, matters or ingredients “required for the preparation or production of a food as an article of commerce,” nor, of course, can it be contended that such substances are “extraneous matters with which the food is unavoidably mixed during the process of collection or preparation.” In reality, even under our inadequate and unsatisfactory adulteration laws, through which the proverbial coach‐and‐four can be so easily driven in so many directions, there ought to be no loophole of escape for the deliberate and dishonest drugger of foods. While the presence of preservative chemicals in any quantity whatever in articles of food constitutes adulteration, wherever the quantity is sufficient to allow the production of the specific “preservative” effect of the substance added, that fact alone is enough to make the food so drugged a food which must be regarded as injurious to the health of the consumer—in view of the inhibitory effect which, by its very nature, the antiseptic must produce on the process of digestion. To our knowledge the food market in this country is flooded with all sorts of inferior food‐products which are rarely dealt with under the Adulteration Acts, and which are loaded with so‐called preservatives. There will be no adequate protection for the public against the consumption of this injurious rubbish until the consumer sees the advantage of insisting upon an authoritative and permanent guarantee of quality with his goods, and until manufacturers of the better class at length find it to be a necessity for their continued prosperity that they should supply, apart entirely from their own statements, an independent and powerful guarantee of this kind.