698 Urban History to some extent, remains an unwieldy topic. While at times the detail is very fine indeed, Andersson’s discussion is never antiquarian; the theoretical frame provided by Goffman emboldens him to delve into the most minute of details, while at the same time ensuring that his reader is not lost in the process. By contrast, Police Control Systems draws more liberally on a range of perspectives from the sociology of information, surveillance studies, science and technology studies and governmentality. Williams consciously exploits ‘the historian’s luxury of borrowing an idea here, or a concept there, from a general theory without feeling a need to take it (or leave it) intact’ (p. 14). Such borrowing is essential to his purpose of identifying and analysing in a nuanced manner the salient changes to police organization over a 200-year period. Reading both together, one is reminded of the rich and diverse engagement with social theory which marks out such innovative contemporary work in social and urban history. David Churchill University of Leeds William Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xvi + 389pp. 50 figures. Bibliography. £65.00 hbk. doi:10.1017/S0963926815000759 This superb book is the first history to cover the history of British civic universities in 50 years. The title Redbrick, with its evocation of the kind of institution fictionalized by David Lodge as Rummidge, might suggest a limited Victorian focus, but the book has a more expansive timeframe. It covers institutions made out of the eponymous red bricks, but also civic universities from other periods and in different materials, ranging from Greek Revival plaster to megastructural concrete; a whistle-stop tour from UCL to de Montfort. The story starts with decades of growing consensus and faltering steps, leading up to the foundation of University College London. From here on, there was a steady stream of new foundations, each drawing on common sources of inspiration, but also reflecting the particular ambitions of their period. The book could easily have been a celebratory litany of foundation dates and worthy milestones but the texture of Whyte’s narrative is much more interesting. The book’s epigraph, from a poem by John Masefield delivered at Sheffield University in 1946, reads ‘There are few earthly things as beautiful as a university.’ Whyte is apt to puncture and deflate such grandiloquent claims made for universities, juxtaposing the idealistic rhetoric of administrators with tales of bumbling incompetence, errant students and leaking roofs. The effect is often very funny. Whyte draws on a formidable array of archival research, discovering piquant quotes from a range of obscure sources, encompassing student newspapers, such as Nottingham University’s marvellously named Gongster, as well as university minute books documenting wrangles over everything from new halls of residences to academical dress. Although Whyte’s wry style occasionally risks coming across as donnishly supercilious, the portrait of Britain’s civic universities that emerges is, in the end, one that is almost ‘beautiful’ because it is a human portrait rather than an institutional one. Throughout, Whyte is appealingly unsanctimonious,