In the century after the Restoration of 1660, English provincial towns experienced a cultural renaissance. This book offers a guide to some of the most striking features of that revival, including the transformation of the urban landscape under the influence of classical architecture, the emergent forces of planning and expansion in the provision of fashionable public leisure, embracing the performing and intellectual arts, arenas of display and sport. The author also penetrates behind the new culture's elegant facade to explore its economic origins and the contrasting forces which stimulated it: wealth, self-interest, idealism and snobbery. Drawing on the disciplines of architecture, music, historical geography, English literature and urban studies as well as history, this book concentrates on the interaction between urban culture and society as a whole. It not only examines the development of the early modern town, with detailed discussion in the text and reference material in a town-by-town appendix, but also the relatively neglected history of England between the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution.