The Association of Literary Urban Studies organised a symposium last week at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London. Scholars came Finland, Estonia, Australia, Italy and all over the UK to share their research. The theme was The City: Myth and Materiality. There were excellent papers on a wide range of topics. The ones that resonated with my own interests were those that explored how stories are told about the metropolis by marginalised groups, and how those stories – sometimes nostalgic – can be employed to challenge official urban histories. The city, as so many urban commentators have argued, is unknowable in it scale and complexity. Stories, then, become a strategy for controlling and ordering the seeming chaos of urban life. Diverse papers on urban planning in Rochdale, anti-austerity demonstrations in Athens and New York baseball in Don DeLillo’s Underworld revealed the power of personal myth to comprehend the materiality of the city. Jennie Bailey (MMU) described her project to capture the stories of social housing tenants displaced by regeneration projects in Rochdale. Markuu Salmela (University of Tampere) explored a ‘Subway playoff’ between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, portrayed in DeLillo’s epic novel, to reveal the nostalgic narratives of sports teams after they have been relocated away from their original communities (work which echoes my own concern with portrayals of the Dodgers and Ebbets Field in Paul Auster’s fiction and films). Maria Mitsoula’s (Edinburgh) paper on the marble mythologies of Athens, and particularly how protesters used marble from a recently regenerated city square to violently challenge the authorities, showed how unofficial mythologies can remake city spaces and provide a radical alternative to official myths of the city.