| Abstract: | The concept of community as a way of describing a particular social reality has fallen into general disfavour, and geographers appear to have dropped the term almost entirely. Certain historians have refused to abandon it however, since “community” retains its popular emotional legitimacy and its meaning remains a central site of political struggle. To these writers, community is an imagined but none the less powerful discursive reality with material consequences too important to be ignored. Exploring this argument, this paper recovers the senses of community of people living in the east London borough of Poplar in the interwar period. Their strong attachment to neighbourhoods as communities is described and some explanations for it offered, and the political processes leading to a brief period of identification with their borough as a community are examined. The conclusion stresses the specificity of these imaginings of community, their precariousness and their politics, and notes the need for geographers not to work with definitions of a community meaningless to its inhabitants. |
