The experience of suburban modernity looks at the history of the London suburbs in the interwar years. It shows that, contrary to those accounts that portray suburbia as static and boring, these ...suburbs were in fact at the heart of the adoption of private transport and new mobilities. Wealthier middle-class suburbanites enjoyed driving at speed on new arterial roads, visiting roadhouses for a transgressive night out, taking five-shilling flights from the local airport, and joining cycling and motorcycle clubs. All this fun came at a price for some in the form of thousands of deaths in road accidents, plane crashes on suburban housing and in the despoiling of the countryside through road development. This book will be welcomed by academics and students working in suburban studies, historical geography and interwar British history and can also be enjoyed by anyone interested in the history of London.
All roads lead to London - and to the West End theatre. This book presents a new history of the beginnings of the modern world of London entertainment. Putting female-centred, gender-challenging ...managements and styles at the centre, it redraws the map of performance history in the Victorian capital of the world. Bratton argues for the importance in Victorian culture of venues like the little Strand Theatre and the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street in the experience of mid-century London, and of plays drawn from the work of Charles Dickens as well as burlesques by the early writers of Punch. Discovering a much more dynamic and often woman-led entertainment industry at the heart of the British Empire, this book seeks a new understanding of the work of women including Eliza Vestris, Mary Ann Keeley and Marie Wilton in creating the template for a magical new theatre of music, feeling and spectacle.
The Virago story Riley, Catherine; Fahlenbrach, Kathrin; Klimke, Martin ...
2018., 2018, 2018-05-14, Letnik:
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The 1970s witnessed a renaissance in women’s print culture, as feminist presses and bookshops sprang up in the wake of the second-wave women’s movement. At four decades’ remove from that heady era, ...however, the landscape looks dramatically different, with only one press from the period still active in contemporary publishing: Virago. This engaging history explains how, from modest beginnings, Virago managed to weather epochal transformations in gender politics, literary culture, and the book publishing business. Drawing on original interviews with many of the press's principal figures, it gives a compelling account of Virago’s place in recent women's history while also reflecting on the fraught relationship between activism and commerce.
This book is a study of political exile and transnational activism in the late-Victorian period. It explores the history of about 500 French-speaking anarchists who lived in exile in London between ...1880 and 1914, with a close focus on the 1890s, when their presence peaked. These individuals sought to escape intense repression in France, at a time when anarchist-inspired terrorism swept over the Western world. Until the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain was the exception in maintaining a liberal approach to the containment of anarchism and terrorism; it was therefore the choice destination of international exiled anarchists, just as it had been for previous generations of revolutionary exiles throughout the nineteenth century. These French groups in London played a strategic role in the reinvention of anarchism at a time of crisis, but also triggered intense moral panic in France, Britain and beyond. This study retraces the lives of these largely unknown individuals – how they struggled to get by in the great late-Victorian metropolis, their social and political interactions among themselves, with other exiled groups and their host society. The myths surrounding their rumoured terrorist activities are examined, as well as the constant overt and covert surveillance which French and British intelligence services kept over them. The debates surrounding the controversial asylum granted to international anarchists, and especially the French, are presented, showing their role in the redefinition of British liberalism. The political legacy of these ‘London years’ is also analysed, since exile contributed to the formation of small but efficient transnational networks, which were pivotal to the development and international dissemination of syndicalism and, less successfully, to anti-war propaganda in the run up to 1914.
London Bucholz, Robert O.; Ward, Joseph P.
07/2012
eBook
Between 1550 and 1750 London became the greatest city in Europe and one of the most vibrant economic and cultural centres in the world. This book is a history of London during this crucial period of ...its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles, as never before nor since. London incorporates the best recent work in urban history, contemporary accounts from Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to trace London's rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity, while examining how its citizens coped with those achievements. London covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor's Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city's pleasure-gardens, coffee-houses and taverns.
Indigenous London Thrush, Coll; Shanley, Kate; Blackhawk, Ned
10/2016
eBook
An imaginative retelling of London's history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuriesLondon is famed both as the ...ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. InIndigenous London,historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.
This book provides concrete examples of the ways in which shifting academic debates, policy and political approaches have impacted on a specific place over the past 30 years. It offers a critical ...analysis of the history, politics and social geography of the high profile London Borough of Haringey, in the decades prior to the 2011 Tottenham riots. The Haringey case study acts as a lens through which to explore the evolution of theoretical and policy debates about the relationship between local institutions and the communities they serve. Focusing on the policy areas of planning and regeneration, it considers the local implementation and outcome of central government strategies that have sought to achieve such accountability and responsiveness through community participation strategies. It examines how the local authority responded to central government aspirations for greater community involvement in planning, in the 1970s, and regeneration, from the late 1980s onwards, before looking in detail at the implementation of New Labour neighbourhood renewal and local governance policy in the borough. In doing so, the book provides a longitudinal case study on how various central government community empowerment agendas have played out at a local level. It offers important lessons and indicates how they might work more effectively in future.
This book is about the political views of the 'classic' poor of London's East End in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The residents of this area have been historically characterized as ...abjectly poor, casually employed, slum dwellers with a poverty-induced apathy toward political solutions interspersed with occasional violent displays of support for populist calls for protectionism, imperialism, or anti-alien agitation. These factors, in combination, have been thought to have allowed the Conservative Party to politically dominate the East End in this period. This study demonstrates that many of these images are wrong. Economic conditions in the East End were not as uniformly bleak as often portrayed. The workings of the franchise laws also meant that those who possessed the vote in the East End were generally the most prosperous and regularly employed of their occupational group. Conservative electoral victories in the East End were not the result of poverty. Political attitudes in the East End were determined to a far greater extent by issues concerning the 'personal' in a number of senses. The importance given to individual character in the political judgements of the East End working class was greatly increased by a number specific local factors. These included the prevalence of particular forms of workplace structure, and the generally somewhat shorter length of time on the electoral register of voters in the area. Also important was a continuing attachment to the Church of England amongst a number of the more prosperous working class. In the place of many 'myths' about the people of the East End and their politics, this study provides a model that does not seek to explain the politics of the area in full, but suggests the point strongly that we can understand politics, and the formation of political attitudes, in the East End or any other area, only through a detailed examination of very specific localized community and workplace structures. This book challenges the idea that a 'Conservatism of the slums' existed in London's East End in the Victorian and Edwardian period. It argues that images of abjectly poor residents who supported Conservative appeals about protectionism, imperialism, and anti-immigration are largely wrong. Instead, it was the support of better-off workers, combined with a general importance in the area of the 'personal' in politics emphasized by local social and workplace structures, which delivered the limited successes that the Conservatives did enjoy. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780199270552/toc.html
Pageantry and Power is the first full and in-depth cultural history of the Lord Mayor’s Show in the early modern period. It provides new insight into the culture and history of the London of ...Shakespeare’s time and beyond. Central to the cultural life of London, the Lord Mayor’s Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments produced by some of the most talented writers of the time. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Pageantry and Power explores various important factors, including the relationship between the printed texts of the Shows and actual events. This full-scale study of the civic works of important writers enhances our understanding of their other, often better-known, dramatic works contributing to a fuller estimation of their literary careers. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of early modern literature, drama, history, civic culture, pageantry, urban studies, cultural geography, book history, as well as the interested general reader.