Reports of the Cook voyages in the Hamburgischer Correspondent

The beginnings of a racialised order in Oceania, and of German involvement in such, reach back a long way. In this article, the author traces elements of this racialisation back to the years before the first formal European settlement on the Australian continent. She examines important aspects of the German journalistic reception of James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific by focusing on one particularly highly networked and very widely distributed newspaper and its reporting in the period 1768–1787. She uses this to show how the editors, and especially London-based German-speaking correspondents, consciously leveraged an Anglophilia that was typical of the Hanseatic city of Hamburg in a way that encouraged their German-speaking readers, wherever they might be, to closely identify with British exploration and even claim ownership of these events themselves. Anglophilia and the German-language reporting of the Cook voyages, therefore, supplied raw materials for an entangled sense of imperial identity.     

“I found the truth in Foot Locker”: London 2011, Urban Culture,and the Post‐Political City

The article begins with an overview of what is implied in the notion of the “post‐political” before looking closely at post‐political interpretations of the 2011 London riots. It presents a critique of the restricted sense of political subjectivity in such accounts. It demonstrates how participation in the riots and their aftermath may be seen as indicative of an embryonic form of urban politics that works with and against the post‐political city. This discussion is illuminated by an analysis of the discursive space of London hip‐hop which reveals an ironic, complex and reflexive dialogue about identity, justice and politics that is far removed from the caricature offered by “strong” interpretations of the post‐political subject. This is then linked to readings of the post‐political city that place a welcome stress not only on the evacuation of the political dimension from the city, but also on the opportunities for the re‐emergence of the proto‐political.     

Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

Representing Commerce in Tallis’s London Street Views

This essay examines how the London Street Views organize the city as a space of commercial interaction, one that is curiously at odds with an image of crowded Victorian streets full of shoppers, street-sellers, advertisements, and window displays. As a commercial directory, it is at once tightly self-referential and open ended, cross referring information between the lists of businesses, the advertisements, and the street elevations while also including advertisements for shops in other streets and neighbourhoods than that focused on in each issue. This essay considers the distinctiveness of Tallis’s project by contextualizing his Street Views within a range of forms of urban commercial information, including directories and advertisements.     

Putting People on the Page: Material Culture as a Way in to Everyday Life behind the Facades of Tallis’s London Street Views

Tallis’s Street Views describe London as a commercial and professional centre but the visual representation of the street elevations gives an impression of quiet emptiness; it is hard to get a sense of the activity in and around the businesses portrayed. The household inventory of one of Tallis’s advertisers, a dentist who died in 1850, suggests a way of redressing this. An interpretive reading of the list of the dentist’s belongings, disposed around the different spaces of the premises, which housed his residence, his business and other households, gives some sense of the complexity and struggle at a daily level behind Tallis’s apparently orderly professional and commercial facades. This indicates that we can look more generally to material culture – whether in textual and visual representations or as actual artefacts – to provide a deeper understanding of people’s everyday life in a developing city.     

Revisiting the growth coalition concept to analyse the success of the Crossrail London megaproject

There is a common perception that infrastructure megaprojects are difficult to implement, as they face many obstacles (cost overruns, political barriers and time delays). This was particularly the case in the UK where many projects were difficult to develop given a complex, centralized and turbulent financial context (e.g. the jubilee Line extension, the Eurostar project). Despite this complex British system, London is developing the Crossrail mega infrastructure project which is recognized to be on time and built within a planned budget. The paper aims to analyse the reasons for the development of this project in a turbulent political and financial British system. The main argument I defend is that Crossrail benefited from the constitution of a specific and localized growth coalition. Revisiting the notion developed by Logan and Molotch, I show how the aggregation of different interests (political and economic) has been essential in the concretization of this project. Actors motivated by the will to promote the growth of London and to sustain the growth of population and jobs have been at the forefront to defend Crossrail. These elements have put Crossrail on a route of success. The paper concludes by characterizing and analysing such a success.     

Deceptive data? The role of the investigators in the New Survey of London Life and Labour 1928–32

The data collected by the New Survey of London Life and Labour between 1928 and 1932 is one of the most significant resources of detailed household information for the interwar period, with data extracted for almost 30,000 households, providing detailed information including birthplaces, hours of work, and wages. This article assesses the process of the original data collection, highlighting issues that mean users of the extracted data must proceed with a measure of caution. In particular, it demonstrates that one investigator employed by the survey, who provided information for around a fifth of households, appears to have regularly submitted generic and estimated information that problematizes the dataset.     

宗教改革与近代早期伦敦葬礼的变迁

近代早期英国经历了曲折的宗教改革,大部分伦敦居民的死亡观念和葬礼实践随之发生了变化.在灵魂得救上,他们接受了"因信称义",摈弃了炼狱观念.在墓地的选择上,由于宗教改革缩小了教区墓地的面积,中间阶层与精英阶层争夺教区内最神圣的墓地--教堂,普通市民不得不葬入郊外新建的墓地.在葬礼仪式上,减少了许多天主教性质的仪式,世俗机构纹章院对葬礼的控制进一步加剧了葬礼仪式的世俗化.归根结底,新教的"入世禁欲"观念极大地推动了葬礼的变迁,同时,节俭、谋利的资本主义精神贯穿葬礼变迁之始终.     

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.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.