I spent the journey reading up on the history of Loughton, a brief chapter written by W.R. Powell and available from the British History Online website. Travelling on the Central Line past Mile End means you are suddenly surrounded in the best reading light available, leaf-dappled sunlight. From this chapter of Essex history which Dr Vaughan had kindly printed off for me to peruse, I read a series of interesting facts. I expected that Epping Forest, which lies on the borders of Loughton as well as many other Essex suburban town centres, would play a significant role in the landscape of this settlement. Key industries and transport routes developed due to the forest’s proximity.

Moreover the Epping Forest preservation acts from 1870 onwards also shaped Loughton, as building stopped moving into the forest westward and instead developed into the East (Powell, 1956). Another key point was the lack of the cheap workman’s fare on public transport in the late 1800s, meaning that the resident population did not attract a high degree of lower-paid workers.

When we arrived in Loughton, the first sight was a large food supermarket at a mildly busy intersection between Old Station Road, Station Road and Alderton Hill. It was about 10am on a weekday and though the car park for the supermarket wasn’t full, it was still relatively ‘bustling’ with activity. We made our way down Old Station Road towards High Road, an important thoroughfare which bisects the area within what is currently defined as the Loughton town centre boundary. Within a map of Loughton town centre blown up to A3 size (which featured the aforementioned boundary lines) I notated what businesses were contained in each building, unless it was a residential or other classification of property.

Issues about categorization and overlapping locations were resolved through discussion with Dr Vaughan. These issues refer to terminology of certain business types and how to notate a business which was on the floor above or below another separate business. To clarify my notes I also used a digital SLR camera, which I hoped would help me later when I used this collected data to geolocate Loughton’s businesses into a GIS data set. The images within this blog entry are some of those I took, the rest are available on the Adaptable Suburbs’ Flickr photostream.

The route we followed is depicted on the map below.

After exploring the Northern perimeter of Station Road, Dr Vaughan and I went to the library to examine their local history section. This will undoubtedly be a vital resource for my future research, especially as it has a wealth of pictorial records which illustrate the early development of Loughton. As a student with a fascination in visual ethnography, photographic historical records are of particular interest to me.One photograph stood out in specifically, which depicted the town centre in the 1800s. I then took a photograph of that same point for comparison (see below).

At this point Dr Laura Vaughan departed and I finished the business mapping alone. This was a great way to explore the site, get to grips with the project’s methodology as well as cultivate my own routes of enquiry. For example, I couldn’t help but notice the location, architecture and multiple functions of the local churches. I encountered five in my short visit, three of which were along the High Road and within few minutes walking distance of each other. I am sure that this is not unique to Loughton, however the diversifying functions each of these churches seemed to be partaking in may be a matter for further study. As a local café, careers advice centre, leisure centre annex or school, the local churches were facilitating important community participation and development in ways I hadn’t previously considered.

Whether or not an investigation into such activity will be beneficial is still uncertain. However it highlights the importance of becoming familiar with the field as soon as possible when beginning research. It can produce new insights and possible study avenues, in addition to retrieval of the actual data you set out to find.

I will be paying similar visits to other Greater London suburban town centres, especially three key sites within the focus of the Adaptable Suburbs project: High Barnet; South Norwood and Surbiton. Already in the process of inputting the data I gathered from the Loughton field trip, l hope that it won’t be too long before I can be out in the field again.

Session Conveners:

David Jeevendrampillai , PhD candidate, UCL Department of Anthropology

Ashley Dhanani, PhD candidate, UCL Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

Prof. Mordechai (Muki) Haklay, UCL Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering

Prof. Laura Vaughan, UCL Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

Call for papers for a session on sub/urban adaptability, continuity and change

In December 2011 The Portas Review put forward 28 recommendations to the UK government regarding ‘the future of our high streets’. The report and its surrounding publicity give a sense of an apparent crisis associated with such spaces and by implication with the future of key concepts such as the local, community and sense of belonging, associated with the high street.  Such approaches show that attention needs to be paid to the spaces of everyday life in places such as the UK high street in order to understand what these spaces do in an economic, social and cultural sense and how changes to such spaces affect not only economic stability but the ordering and understanding of the aforementioned concepts.

Authors such as Ingold (2007) and Massey (2005)[1] are part of a growing trend within the social sciences to consider these ideas from the perspective of the role of materiality and spatial practices in everyday social life. There is still scope for more analysis of the relationship between the built environment and the social organisation of everyday life, particularly in the under-researched suburban realm. We invite proposals for papers that present critical work on change or continuity of the ‘public spaces of the everyday’, such as the suburban high street. We encourage contributions that use collaborative and mixed methods across a range of disciplines including GIS, architecture, anthropology and sociology. We particularly welcome papers which combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and work that takes a historical approach.

Participants are asked to use an innovative style of presentation; to prepare a presentation with full-slide images, with a maximum of ten words per slide. We intend to accept only four presentations to allow for discussion time. The abstracts will be circulated to presenters and they will be asked to prepare responses to key ideas from all the abstracts in order to enable a useful discussion at the end of the session. Proposals for papers with up to a 500 word abstract for this session should be sent to either of (or both) the addresses below by 9th January. The session will be of interest to geographers, architects, anthropologists and historians. The conveners are members of the Adaptable Suburbs project team at UCL.

Addresses for submission: David Jeevendrampillai: david.jeevendrampillai.10@ucl.ac.uk; Ashley Dhanani: ashley.dhanani@ucl.ac.uk.

Just this week [12.12.2011] celebrity retail analyst Mary Portas published UK government sponsored report entitled “The Portas Review: An independent review into the future of our high streets” outlining 28 key recommendations and suggesting ideas for the future of the UK high street.  The report has attracted a large amount of interest in the press and reflects wider discussions on high streets and the associated issues of ‘localness’ ‘community’ and an interesting collection of values, morals and ways of thinking about high streets and the social relations they engender.

Through my work with the Adaptable Suburbs team at UCL I have a keen interest in the historical development and changes in the spaces of the Suburbs and in particular the built environment of the ‘high street’ and its land uses.  The Portas Report provides a rich reading for an anthropologist interested in the phenomenon of the high street and its associated notions of neighbourhood, its values etc. and in this post I pull out some of the ways in which I read the document.

My reading can be categorised into two sections, firstly the social values, morals and orderings of these spaces and associated practices and their entanglement with wider discourses of identity.  Secondly how this ordering is either maintained or restored in response to perceived threats through practical measures that reflect both a ordering of social and moral values and an ideological position that could be referred to as post-political [i].

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Despite a number of declarative statements about the report not being about nostalgia there is a layering of a yearning to return to some notion of community, place, localness, perhaps not like days of ‘butcher baker and candle stick maker’ but to locally focused economy and specialist and personalised services.  From the outset the report declares that it is about ‘Our’ high street, that are ‘spaces which….people make their own’ (p46),  ‘people and place come first’ (p31) that there is some sense of public ownership in these spaces.  Portas invokes an idea that people are willing to ‘fight’ for, are enthusiastic about, and care for such spaces and that we have “sacrificed our communities for convenience” in light of internet and supermarket based shopping and service delivery, describing them as ‘key threats’. The report states that the high street is in a ‘dire state’ and that we have seen a loss of ‘street trust’, a sense of belonging and yet people care deeply for the high street and the appetite to fight for the high street is strong.  Throughout the report and surrounding publicity bodily metaphors are used frequently, the high street is said to need life ‘breathed’ into it and its heart putting back through ‘local people’ (p37, 44, 45).

Portas equates the shift in retail practices to a ‘radical and profound shift in our values’ (p13) and asserts the role of the high street in maintaining a sense of belonging, community and maintain social capital.  She asserts that the high street is about “so much more than shopping” (p44) and that the high street should serve community needs.

The above shows how such ideas of community here are based in a particular idea of place;- of the high street that maintains a sense of communal value and way of life that the place of the internet, the supermarket apparently cannot.  Local produce is valued for economic and ecological reasons relating to an idea of sustainability and stable socio-environmental systems and community needs and a ‘sense of belonging’ works through spaces that the high street is able to deliver.  Clearly the report is designed to preserve and boost the high street in its ability to maintain the work it does in these orderings and understanding of such categories.  Through a serious of re-thinking of the spatial practices the high street encourages, supports and engenders and a number of bureaucratic measures Portas outlines 28 recommendations for the high streets.

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The report suggests a number of measures including setting up town teams that will run the high street ‘like a business’ and develop strategic local plans.  Local histories and pride are conceived as selling points and building blocks for a type of space different to the ‘general’ experience of the supermarket. She requests more considerate planning in regard to the perceived threats of out of town shopping centres and supermarkets and wants to free up parking spaces and empty buildings so that they can be used by small businesses and costumers without large bureaucratic or capital obstacles.  She talks with business like efficiency about social capital and how the civic pride and goodwill of local people of local people is essential to maintaining high streets.  She invokes the recent Localism Act in stressing that local people should have control of the resourses around them and encourages creative and community-based use of spaces such as second floor building space and market halls.  Many of the recommendations follow case studies of best practice or exist elsewhere already but my aim here is not to run through them in terms of their effectiveness and impact but rather to reflect on them in regard to what they do in relation the above assertion of the way in which the high street is a conduit of categories of identity, neighbourhood and whose spaces engender a becoming of a particular place with its associated values.

These measures clearly aim to assert the high street as a place that needs to be maintained against a danger of their decline in the face of a threat of changing spatial practices born out of convenience.  The mechanism of doing that is a re-ordering of bureaucratic measures and policy to ensure that town centres become central to priorities. Social relations and healthy community is premised here not only on particular spaces but on particular ways of managing spaces.  This management takes the form of shaping and influencing the retail practices and flows of capital which is seen as key to social relations and current understandings of positive social values.  The bodily metaphors indicate a relation to the spaces of the high street as something that holds life, has lungs and a heart and that people care about.  The resulting media responses may differ in their agreement on the minor issues of policy of such things as the category of betting shops to the large ideological differences that come about in discussions over ownership of community resources and the use of the localism act.

However, anthropologically, the report and the resulting attention demonstrate the extent to which social relations in everyday British life work around, through and with the spaces of the everyday such as the high street, the supermarket and the betting shop.  The ‘crisis’ – the panic and decline in the state of the high street – has resulted in considerable government resources and press attention with a ‘minister for shops’ a possibility and much debate occurring over what to do with the high street.  Few if any commentators have considered the impact of directing such resources to a form of social relation measured through such spaces and practices.  What are the historical conditions for these social relations, for ideas of localness and the social values that occur through these spaces?  What does it mean to maintain social relations through a strong correlation to retail practices, the high street and so on?  What might supermarkets, global flows of food, money and the internet do to these orderings and what might the range of possible futures be?

With a critical analysis of the changes in the spaces of the high street, the understanding of what the high street does in terms of social relations and a developed historical context it might be possible to not only to discuss what people might do maintain high streets or if we should have them at all but further to ask in what ways and through what spatial practices do we wish to construct our social relations.  We need to ask what are the current ways of understanding social relations and where we place the emphasis for action and change does, but also: who is it for and who is left out?  With such critical insights we may be better placed to develop understandings of social relations that move beyond reductionist ideas of ‘consumer society’, and readings of events such as the recent riots and the ‘decline’ of the High Street and postulate a position in which we might be able to discuss real ways to alternative and progressive futures in which our discussions around the spaces of our everyday social relations offer real progressive futures in how to shape the spaces in which we live our social relations.

This post was first publish on http://spatialdisjunctures.wordpress.com/ by the same author on 16.12.2011.

For more information, please go to http://bit.ly/uRgiok

Following the award of a grant from the EPSRC, the Adaptable Suburbs project is advertising a PhD studentship, as follows:

UCL Department / Division: Department of Anthropology, Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
Duration of Studentship: 3 Years
Stipend: Stipend of £15,000 per annum, subject to nationality and residence status

Vacancy Information: The UCL ‘Adaptable Suburbs’ project (see www.ucl.ac.uk/adaptablesuburbs/) invites applications for one 3 year fully-funded EPSRC studentship at University College London commencing 1st December 2011 (or soon after). The scholarship is for a bursary and tuition fees. The student will be joining a team of researchers and two other PhD studentships from the disciplines of built environment, anthropology and geomatic engineering. The studentship will be hosted by UCL Anthropology and will be supervised by two members of the project team: Dr Victor Buchli (Anthropology) and Professor Laura Vaughan (The Bartlett).

The ‘Adaptable Suburbs’ project is focused on understanding how small centres of socio-economic activity emerge through time, using Greater London as its geographical focus. It stems from a previous project which looked at twenty of London’s outer suburbs, see www.sstc.ucl.ac.uk. The research will provide evidence for policy decision making and for planning and design to improve the future sustainability of the aging built environment. It will also develop innovative methods for the integration of socio-economic data with information about the layout of urban areas. The project is funded jointly by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the ESRC (Economic and Social Sciences Research Council).

Eligibility: For nationality and residence requirements, please see http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/PostgraduateTraining/StudentEligibility.htm. Candidates must have obtained a 2.1 or equivalent and a Master’s degree in the relevant subject – see person specification for details. For 2010-11 EPSRC has stipulated that the minimum stipend will be £15,590, in addition to the tuition fee, which will be paid to the university from the project funds.

Applications should include a two-page CV, academic transcripts and a two-page statement explaining how your research experience and academic knowledge relate to the project in general and to the studentship in particular. Applications should be sent to: Professor Laura Vaughan <l.vaughan@ucl.ac.uk>, copying to Dr Victor Buchli <v.buchli@ucl.ac.uk. Please include a contact telephone number and an email address where you can be easily reached. Academic references will be taken up for all short-listed candidates. Applications are due November 7 2011.

NO AGENCIES PLEASE

Download the Studentship details

The task of this post is not to tackle questions such as these but it worth considering their indistinct, ungraspable and malleable nature and how it is that such questions arise out of a need to understand the   ‘real’ qualities of terms that in themselves are abstract notions (society, place, space, local and community might be some others to be found in this project).  These abstract terms are formed, used and   understood in different ways by different people and groups for differing reasons which can then be interpreted again in different ways.

In the introduction to his book The Social Logic of Space Bill Hillier claims that it is in the public spaces of cities where ideologies are generated and contested (see pp19-21).  Public space is then, in a sense, political in that it is an arena in which ideas and beliefs are made, contested and debated.  This is enabled through the permeability of the area and the high co-presence with others and the high number of encounters that  happen there, encounters which are relatively unplaced.  It is here where ideologies are made, created, debated and contested.  These public domains then become vocal in their communication with us, they involve    us in a dialogue over who ‘we’ are, ‘we’ being the community, the society, the nation and the self as individual situated in these multiplicious spatial dialogues.  This can be seen to contrast to the spaces of the domestic where the categories and terms of ‘being’ are fixed and re-affirmed by the users of the space.  These users are few, expected (usually owner or occupier and the invited) and policed.  Outside space is characterised by weak     barriers or permeability allowing movement and co-presence in which events that create dialogue and debate are generated.  Whereas domestic barriers that control and define the use of space are strong, they prevent un-   policed movement, co-presence of the unexpected or conflictual kind and aid in the re-affirming ideologies by the users of the space.

If this is the case then a ‘suburb’ could be conceived of as a space in which co-presence is less intense than say a city centre.  The types of co-presence that will occur are to be understood by the character of the  neighbourhood, (as in the city = business workers, West End = tourists) and as such a definable character to the suburb could be built up (Brixton has its own character).  Suburbs, it could be said are also characterised by a higher amount of residential use.  As such co-presence and movement may be less resulting in fewer generative events.  In this sense a ‘suburb’ could be seen as sliding towards the more domestic elements of space, less a place of debating and contesting ideologies and more a place for affirming them at a local level (hence the ‘BE OUR GUEST’ painted on the rail bridge on the Brixton road as you enter Brixton).   Through an increase in the amount of social policing of the permeability of the space and through a build-up of the knowledge of social encounters that are likely in a space one can start to sense the increasingly local sense of a place.

I want to turn my back on the city and take the above idea further.  If suburbs allow less capacity for generative events then the rural would have even less still.  This is a domain in which contestation of ideologies does not occur explicitly (please note the huge body of work assessing landscape as text and representational by Dennis Cosgrove, Bruce Braun, William Cronan and work by phenomenologists  such as Chris Tilly and David Seamon on the affective aspects of landscape).  The actors (trees, lakes, grass, stones) here have to speak for themselves in the silence.  These actors then are non-human; they constitute our idea of being a non-human actor in a non-human environment.

It was with this thinking in mind then that I came to be made nauseous by the sight of unwanted, unloved and naked Christmas trees.  Scattered around the paths of Brixton’s residential streets they lay, at odd angles, slowly seeping life from their once green and decorated branches.

The origins of the Christmas tree are unclear but the tree has been seasonally brought into the home and decorated for hundreds of years.  Some say it is a celebration of the natural at the time of the winter solstice, certainly this is one reading that resonates with me others see it as an implicit part of the Christian celebration or perhaps just tradition.  Either way the tree has been invited, revered, celebrated and focused upon, the tree is a celebration of the ‘natural’ and the living elements of earth, of being in the middle of a cold dark season.  It was these thoughts then that the Christmas trees I saw lying around Brixton invoked a Sarterian sense of nausea.  The encounter was not unexpected (its January, people throw trees out), but there was an oddity in the way it conflated nature, human, domestic, public, private, revered, rejected, organic, concrete and urban and natural systems.  Further the marks of a felled stump, clear wood, fallen needles on hard concrete and the odd de-branched tree evoked the sense of movement.  The trees, usually static from seed to death, have felled early, collected, packaged, transported, bought and sold, they have moved and in doing so have been commoditised, personalised and bureaucratised.  The trees are a once annually co-presence that seems to disturb the spaces of usually dormant categories of definition, rural, natural, domestic, public.  Their co-presence and their being ‘in place’ and then ‘out of place’, their disturbances and agency interest me.  Their location, their timings and the subtleties can be explored, thought about and considered and it struck me that here might be a good place to do some exploring.  Perhaps other bloggers can suggest other aspects of co-presence they have encountered and their feelings on such meetings.  What agency do things such as graffiti, ruin, architectural abnormalities and other things have?  What feelings do they evoke, why do you not expect to see such things?  Perhaps the lack of presence is an issue for you, clean, ordered and safe? Too much so?  Post, blog away

References and Readings

Braun, B. & Castree, N. eds. (1998). Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London: Routledge.

Cronon, W. (1996) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co

Cosgrove, D, & Daniels, S. eds (1998) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Griffiths, S. and Vaughan, L. and Haklay, M. and Jones, C.E. (2008) The sustainable suburban high street: a review of themes and approaches. Geography Compass, 2 (4). pp. 1155-1188.

Vaughan, L. and Jones, C.E. and Griffiths, S. and Haklay, M. (2010) The spatial signature of suburban town centres. The Journal of Space Syntax, 1 (1). pp. 77-91. ISSN 20447507

Tilley, C. (1994)Y, A phenomenology of landscape : places, paths, and monuments, Berg.

eamon, D. (2007). A lived Hermeneutic of People and Place.

This year’s theme was ‘the geographical imagination’.  I’m not sure how much these themes actually direct the conference, it being the annual conference for British geography, but there certainly seemed to be some interesting papers.  I approached the conference with an eye open to the ways in which geographical theory and practice could inform the work that I’m doing on the Adaptable suburbs project from within the UCL school of Anthropology.  In a way this is a natural thing for me to do as the project is very interested in the ways in which ‘space’ works in the emergence of a place in both the physical configurational sense and the social sense.  I also have my undergraduate and Masters education from schools of geography and naturally pull ideas from within the disipline.

In particular I have been interested in the methods used to get at the ways in which people relate to their built environment.  I was struck in new ways by the way that much social science research seems to concentrate on ‘events’, eruptions in the normal everyday practice of place.  I saw presentations on riots, urban at interventions and light festivals.  Through such presentations the ways in which place making works through social practice, a practice which works with and through space and the material objects of the built environment, was brought to the front of consciousness to highlight the politic of place.  However whilst enchanted by such insights I was wondering how such work could be relevant to the suburbs, a place of the everyday, the ordinary, dare I say it the banal.

Here David Bissell’s short presentation in a discussion panel called ‘politics, events and spaces of affect’ was useful.  Bissell wanted to re-direct attention from the politics of the ‘event’ to the politics of the habit, that is to say the everyday.  He claimed that it is here that the mimetic practices of everyday inscribe an understanding of politic, of meaning, of being in place.  He notes that small changes in the everyday allow a gentle flow of meaning, of politic of being.  It is when these gentle flows are not listened to, understood or addressed that they build into a potential that becomes in the event.  His argument was attractive and useful in the abstract sense but for me it lacked a certain pragmatism.  How does one here the murmur of the everyday, what is the new politic that can be heard?  In a sense I came back to my research question, how does place, everyday place work?

On a more practical level I enjoyed the presentation by Rachel Hill.  In her work she has attempted to understand the ways in which place becomes and maintains, particularly in places of population flux.  She carried out a number of research/art projects on the streets of Enfield and Whitechapel, places of immigration and emigration, to understand the social-spatial dynamic.  Namely this involved sitting on a street and asking people to have a cup of tea with her.  Over time she was invited in some homes.  She also noted how people’s route through the street changed with her presence.  It was a fun and useful way ‘in’ to the social dynamic of an area.  I may well be talking to her again on that one.

I was also impressed by the presentation by Tim Edensor who has a particular knack of using often abstract concepts, such as affect, more-than representation, performance in simple pragmatic ways.  His research, where he talked to people about the Blackpool illuminations, showed a simple and productive way to ‘get at’ emotional affect of place through informal and semi-structured interviews.  I was also struck by the understanding of place brought by Brian Rose whose work on light and trace in Wendover showed the potential for research to move into the realms of the poetic and artistic yet enable a pertinence in ways that sometimes the text restricts.  Finally the work of Kim Kullman on the spaces used by children on their walk to and from school really had a relevance to the ways in which the everyday space of suburbs is used.  His work pulled on Deluzian ideas of the fold and invoked moments of slippage where children find time and space to be alone, to look and listen to city, to feel their place within their environment.

Initially I had reservations about going to the conference as I feel I have pressures with my own work with impending upgrades, presentations and conferences however the step back was in many ways therapeutic.  Firstly in the sense that I could reflect through others what is was I was attempting to do and how current thought and practice might help.  Secondly it gave me a confidence in the stylistic quality and importance in delivering research, one that I should carry forward to allow a more nuanced understanding of just what it is I am doing.

]]> http://uclsstc.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/royal-geographical-society-annual-international-conference-2011/feed/ 0 ascontributor http://uclsstc.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/a-21st-century-agora/ http://uclsstc.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/a-21st-century-agora/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:00:00 +0000 (sub)urbanite http://uclsstc.wordpress.com/?p=532 ]]> Urban Pollinators’ response to Mary Portas’ high streets review makes interesting reading. They recognise the importance of town centres beyond the narrow definition of commercial centres; needing to be ‘multifuncitonal social centres’. They state they need to be for “enjoyment, creativity, learning, socialising, culture, health and wellbeing and democratic engagement: a 21st century agora”.

There is a recognition of the importance of local spatial layouts (here they cite Jan Gehl’s seminal work on ‘Cities for People’: ‘wanting to go into town is different from wanting or needing to shop. It is about an experience. It is about sociability and relaxation, creativity and being part of something you cannot get at home or at work.’

There is also a recognition of the importance of larger scale connectivity and design considerations such as maintaining a diversity of ‘space typologies’ – ensuring a range in terms of ‘ownership, unit size, rental levels and lease types’. This is said to be crucial to make sure that local ventures can have access to affordable and flexible space and thus to the wider market at all stages of the economic cycle.

It’s worth looking at the second part of the report for the range of case studies of local projects that seem to be working.

At the very beginning of the month I ventured up to Sunderland to attend the Annual Conference of the Oral History Society http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/.

The theme for 2011 was ‘Creation, Destruction, Memory: Oral History and Regeneration.’ This is a theme that excellently ties with my interests in the historical emergence of London’s outer suburban built environment and the relationship this has to the many social narratives of place that concern an area at a variety of scales.

Two talks seemed particularly exciting and relevant to my work.  Firstly the work of Simon Bradley (http://hud.academia.edu/SimonBradley/About) aims to uncover the ‘competing conceptions of place within a regenerational context’.  Bradley presented his work so far as an investigation into the historical sense of place in Holbeck, Leeds which has been compiled from archive materials, reportage, and field recordings but most prominently interviews.  The work aims to develop a ‘archaeology of the voice’ in Holbeck, on of the most exciting aspects of which is the way that media technologies will be employed.  The use of augmented reality was discussed as a future potential as well as the more familiar audio recordings.  These recourses will be embedded in place as Bradley develops an audio (and perhaps visual) walk.

Overall the work seems to lean towards opening up new ways of understanding the ways in which the changes in the built environment take place in a complex milieu of notions of place.  Bradleys work here aims to explore that milieu and in his words ‘promote cultural cohesion and lead to a more nuanced understanding of place in a divided area of Leeds’.  It is my hope that my work within the Adaptable Suburbs project can achieve, in different yet related ways such noble and important aims.

The second talk was by Ulla Pohjamo whose work explores the idea of ‘suburban heritage as lived’ on the Finish Island of Hietasaari.  Pohjamo’s presentation used oral histories to explore the planning history of Hietasaari, interviewing both planners and residents she was able to shed light on the complex notion of multiple subject positions in the social production of place, heritage and suburbs.  Such focus on both the residents AND the planners and those who aren’t traditionally viewed as the ‘victims’ in such histories was a refreshing approach to a theme that too often fails to at least attempt to deal with the multiple scales of approach to place and space and further, the lived experiences of the consequences of such competing approaches.

Overall the conference was lively; talks came from local historians, Liberians, PhD students, residents, radio documentary makers, the national heritage fund and more.  The diversity gave the conference a stimulating variety of angles to the theme.  The conference also served well to allude to some of the ways in which I might be able to ‘get at’ the notions of multiple scales and positioned subject experiences of place(s) through which the built environment and the experience of it are made, destroyed and re-made.

Sport and Leisure in Suburbs

The two day conference hosted by the Institute of Historical Research had the sub-title ‘communities, Identities and Interactions’.  In the words of the organisers the symposium marks a growing interest in the suburbs.  Aren’t the suburbs however are a vacuous element into which almost any socio-economic aspect of society can be studied?  What this conference served to do was to shed light upon the ways in which suburbs, far from being ahistorical, banal and empty of interest, as they so often described in the popular imaginary, actually offer a multitude of affordances through which important aspects of our lived experience are shaped.

An excellent key note address by my former MA thesis advisor Professor David Gilbert really brought some of these ideas to light.  Professor Gilbert discussed sporting femininity and bodily practice in Edwardian suburbs.  Focusing on the 1919 Wimbledon Ladies final between Suzanne Lenglen and Dorothea Lambert Chambers, Gilbert discussed the ways in which Lenglen’s bodily movements and dress style marked in many ways a shift from ‘tennis as niceties’ to ‘tennis as competitive’ acting as metaphor for social changes.  Further the changes rife in the spatial configurations in which people lived, namely the advancement of the suburban dwelling with private garden, local sporting clubs and the possibility of private tennis courts for the upper middle classes resulted in an affordance of narratives in which the body could move in new ways.  The history of women’s tennis then in many ways could be understood as a history of bodily practices in relation to modernity.   Chambers then could be re-positioned as a character of what has fashionably been termed a ‘more-than-representational’ figure who, with her body and sporting philosophy performs a modern femininity.  This femininity, this modernism then exists and affects spaces of the times, the role of the local club, the garden and such suburban spaces then take on new, little yet explored significance.

Other talks hinted at such a theme, a theme that admittedly I was seeking to find.  Mark Sampson drew attention to the ways in which football club trusts (the community aspect) in many ways buys social capital for the club so that it maintains a viable social position in the community.  Dr Andrew Hignell looked at the ways in which Cricket grounds had been allowed in some suburbs yet not others by the same estate owners so that political or economic motives could be served.  Dr Hignell’s talk built on the thoughts I was having about the affordances of space in allowing and shaping social narratives to emerge and also showed how the reverse can be true, socio-economic narratives also shape special form.  This is a returning theme which I am thinking about, the co-emergence of the social and the spatial and how this works through the various vested interests.  I’m sure I’ll return to this.

http://www.history.ac.uk/events/event/3045