ABSTRACT
The urban and the industrial were two sites of anxiety in the reform projects of the mid-nineteenth century. Proliferating inquiries into the health of towns and the industrial workplace mark attempt by contemporaries to order and define the boundaries of the social and the economic, the moral and the environmental. This chapter discusses the emergence of conciliation, its visualisation of local space, industrial relations and urban governance. It locates debates on conciliation in the context of a wider discourse on urban and industrial regulation in the mid-century. The combination of communication, negotiation and education was considered as a means of instituting local industrial harmony, a state which would promote the prosperity and social order of the wider community. However, debates faltered on whether or not social and industrial peace was important enough to warrant legislation making conciliation compulsory. The conciliation movement in Nottingham was a factor in negotiating the competing civic and industrial claims.
