‘Rivalling the Metropolis’: cultural conflict between London and the regions c.1967–1973

ABSTRACT

As a contribution to this special issue on conflict and cultural production in twentieth century Britain, this article examines the relationship between London and the English regions in the second half of the 1960s. It argues that an excessive historical focus on the capital has been to the detriment of the regional scene. This was caused initially by journalistic accounts written in the period under consideration, which were dismissive of the regional city’s contribution and which subsequent historians have reproduced in their narratives. This article moves beyond the capital to revisit the regional city of the period in order to examine the extent to which it contained the features demonstrated by London in the mid-to-later 1960s. Both the ‘swinging’ period of 1964–1967 and the concomitant underground (1965–1973) are considered here and the argument made that the regions rather kept pace with the capital to an extent not seen before this decade. Journalistic accounts of the cities written in the period itself were symptomatic of London-based prejudice and a regional declinist paradigm, but the reality, as far as nightlife and experimental culture were concerned was rather more positive.     

Agricultural potential and actualized development in Hawai’i: an airborne LiDAR survey of the leeward Kohala field system (Hawai’i Island)

Archaeological investigations of Hawaiian agriculture have relied on relatively coarse-grained data to investigate archipelago-wide processes, or on fine-grained data to examine patterning within localized zones of agricultural production. These trade-offs between spatial coverage and data resolution have inhibited understanding of both spatial patterns and temporal trends. Our analysis of 173 km² of high-resolution airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data for leeward Kohala, Hawai’i Island identifies spatial and temporal patterning in regional agricultural development. Differential densities of alignments suggest variable levels of agricultural intensity. Agricultural processes of expansion, segmentation, and intensification can also be discriminated, with distinct zones of the field system having undergone different mixes of development. Areas within the field system with moderate to high levels of both average production and variability in production (determined using a climate-driven productivity model) were utilized relatively early in a highly intensified manner; these areas often underwent processes of segmentation and intensification. Less productive areas were developed later and exhibit evidence of expansion with lower amounts of segmentation and intensification, at set levels of intensity. The spatial and temporal variability in agricultural activities was influenced by the diverse environmental conditions across the landscape as well as variation in cultivars and cultivation techniques. Combining the high-resolution LiDAR data from a large area with potential productivity modeling allows for a more fine-grained understanding of agricultural development in this region of the Hawaiian archipelago.