Existing studies of British geographical societies in the nineteenth century largely interpret them as bodies geared towards the development of municipal imperialism, which was a combination of commercial geography and British imperial interests expressed in overseas trade and in local advantages to the societies’ towns. Commonly, distinction is drawn between the London-based, “metropolitan” Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830, and “provincial” societies, established for the most part either in northern England or in Scotland and later in the nineteenth century. This chapter offers a different interpretive perspective, derived from the historical geography of science: that of professionalisation. The latter’s criteria allow for a better understanding than other typologies of why and how those societies worked. Each society operated to promote geography as part of nineteenth-century urban civic culture. Considered in relation to the criteria of professionalisation, Britain’s eleven geographical societies were differently “professionalised”: London and Edinburgh strongly so, Manchester variably, and the remainder hardly at all. Geography’s civic history is as important, and as complex, as its more commonly researched academic history.