London versus Sydney, 1815–1823: the politics of colonial architecture

This paper investigates the architecture designed by transported convict, Francis Greenway, and erected under the reforming Governorship of General Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney from 1815 onwards. It analyses how that architecture articulated Macquarie's ideas on how the planning and fabric of the city could facilitate the policies of reformation that he was implementing, and shows how this could have been perceived as oppositional to British Government policy after 1815. It affects this principally through considering the report of Commissioner of Inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, who arrived in Sydney in 1819, other literary sources, and the urban fabric of Sydney itself. In addition, it considers contemporary thinking on the built environment and social control, particularly as manifested in Scotland. It closes with more general observations on the ways in which Sydney contrasted with London, which city was perceived as falling short of what was expected of a great metropolis, and how its early nineteenth-century evolution into a new type of city itself affected the way in which Sydney was perceived.     

Time–geography,gentlemen, please: chronotopes of publand in Patrick Hamilton’s London trilogy

This paper considers the time and the place of drinking in modern British life, as represented in Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels set in the publand of London’s West End in the interwar years, through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and with critical nods to Hagerstrand’s time–geography corpus. The chronotopes of pubs and their neighbourhoods, which we term ‘publand’, are discussed initially in their novelistic presentation in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), and then in relation to the ‘character zones’ of the novels’ principal protagonists. The key themes, defined in the paper, are the asynchronicity of personal and social relations, the dialogic construction of heterochronicity, and the presentation of a prosaic chronotope. Though the paper is a contribution to literary geography, we aim to contribute to the cultural geographic understanding of the time–space rhythms and routines of everyday leisure drinking, making claims for the wider significance of chronotopic analysis.     

Ideology and the by‐passing of the planning system: Case studies of Canary Wharf,London, and the Globe,Stockholm

This article explores the relationship between political ideology and planning in Britain and Sweden, with a particular emphasis on the by‐passing of the planning system. The prevailing ideology in each country over the last 10 years is outlined and the impact on planning identified. The argument is then given greater depth through case studies of two major projects. For Britain, this involves setting out the main features of Thatcherism and the way this has changed the purposes underlying planning and created a diversified planning system. This is followed by a case study of Canary Wharf. For Sweden, the consensus culture and the emphasis on participation and decentralization are discussed. The new planning legislation of 1987 is outlined. These aspects are then contrasted with the fiscal crisis and the development of ‘negotiation planning’. These themes are illustrated in the case study of the Globe in Stockholm.     

Lessons in Seeing: Art,Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898

In 1881 the Reverend Samuel Barnett, Anglican incumbent of St Jude's Church, Whitechapel, established the Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibitions with his wife Henrietta. These quickly became an important part of the parochial programme ofSt Jude's. The Barnetts followed the art theories of John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold and argued that exhibiting famous and beautiful paintings would revive the spirituality of poor East Enders. In order to test this theory, they introduced the practice of ‘Voting for Your Favourite Picture’. The result, however, did not bear out straightforwardly the Barnetts' belief that paintings are ‘Windows into the other World’. The gap between the intended outcome and the actual reception of the Whitechapel Exhibitions reveals that, although they may not have adopted the Barnetts' religious aestheticism, working-class visitors were keen to engage with art on their own terms.     

Measure of Despair: the Syndicate for Commerce and Industry,the London Tribune,and German Foreign Policy, 1906–8

Based on fresh archival sources in Germany and Britain, this article offers new insight into the mindest of the German Foreign Ministry in the aftermath of the First Morocco Crisis of 1905/06. Eager to arrest the deterioration in the Anglo-German relationship and concerned about its fallout for US-German relations, the German Foreign Ministry, in league with twenty of the country's top financiers, took a radical initiative which resulted in Germany's largest expenditure, before the First World War, on influencing the press. The article closes with a transnational comparison, detailing a similar influence-buying scheme masterminded by a high-level British political wire-puller.     

Seeing like an investor: urban development planning,financialisation, and investors’ perceptions of London as an investment space

There is a growing orthodoxy that since the global financial crisis European policy-makers and planning systems have become more dependent on inward investment and the availability of global finance to fund welfare services and projects. This process of financialisation, it is claimed, is driven by the needs of developers and investors, who are focused on maximizing returns and limiting their social and economic liabilities. Planning agencies and traditional territory-based arrangements are viewed with increasing suspicion, as standing in the way of investment and acting as a brake on much needed house-building and regeneration. However, in this paper, drawing on detailed research with investors and developers in London, we argue that there needs to be a stronger focus in academic and policy writing on the multiple, variegated, and diverse calculations and framings that private sector actors take when making investment decisions. Too often their perspectives are caricatured and/or over-simplified. We show that and imaginations of planning and regulation are complex and that many firms have realized that market success results from becoming more deeply embedded in the local political, social, and regulatory environments in which they are investing. A greater understanding of these multiple forms of calculation, in turn, opens up opportunities for the maintenance and/or implementation of more effective forms of territorially-based soft and hard regulation. The paper concludes by outlining a broader research agenda for planning and urban studies.