Abstract
10 Rillington Place names the site of temporally extensive practices of murder (1943–1953), and offers an empirical entry point for critically advancing the conceptual innovations of relational approaches to the criminological study of ‘home’. In so doing, the paper, firstly, (re)conceptualises serial homicide as practice, more specifically as a mode of domestic labour which materialises in and is enacted through the relational dynamics of everyday residential life; and secondly, rejects the notion of ‘home’ and argues for the concept of dwelling to better capture the active, generative and fluid dynamics of domestic life. This subtle shift in conceptual approach acknowledges how domus horribilis is etched from, and woven through the topological entanglements of everyday and extreme practices, and moves us toward an alternative set of conceptual commitments in our research of domestic space. Drawing from a mixed portfolio of cultural media (including archival, epistolary, journalistic, photographic, filmic, architectural, museological and dramaturgical data), the paper takes forward Schatzki’s site ontology as an organising framework for practice-based analytics, and advances the critical insights of an embryonic criminology of the domestic.
Highlights
DiscoveriesOn 24 March 1953, Beresford Dubois Brown, a jazz musician from Jamaica, had made a start on some minor DIY repairs to the kitchen in the ground floor flat of 10 Rillington Place, a rundown residential street located in Kensington, London W11
With the loss of his discursive, technological, spatial and performative jurisdiction over entry into, and movement within and through the house and garden, and lacking any reputational wherewithal to recover a regime of dwelling as practiced, domus horribilis was disassembling as a new configuration of social practices, cultural markers and spatio-temporal motilities took hold of the prosaic rhythms and routines of daily life in a multiple-occupancy residence
This paper has questioned the binary logic which separates the normal from the pathological ‘home’, and which regards extreme acts of killing as exceptional events which violently disrupt the humdrum of everyday residential life
Summary
DiscoveriesOn 24 March 1953, Beresford Dubois Brown, a jazz musician from Jamaica, had made a start on some minor DIY repairs to the kitchen in the ground floor flat of 10 Rillington Place, a rundown residential street located in Kensington, London W11.
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