Bethnal Green Research Articles

Constructing the ‘good Muslim girl’: hegemonic and pariah femininities in the British Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda

Since the rise of Islamic State (IS) in 2014, British Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) policy, Prevent, has increasingly focused on the appeal of jihadist ideology to Muslim girls. This article considers the case of the Bethnal Green girls, who migrated to IS territory in February 2015. Using the concepts of hegemonic and pariah femininities, it shows how gender intersects with religion, race, and class in British PVE to construct the ’good Muslim girl’ as both an aspirational figure that young Muslim women should seek to emulate and the norm against which signs of radicalisation can be measured. The article concludes that the articulation of this neoliberal subject via PVE is deeply problematic in theory and practice: gendering the ‘signs’ of radicalisation, offering neoliberal solutions that fail to account for intersectional structural oppressions and disciplining pariah Muslim femininities in excessive ways.

The Bethnal Green Shelter Disaster

During the Second World War there were large-scale fatalities when air raid shelters were hit by bombs. The greatest loss of life in a shelter was at Bethnal Green in the East End of London on 3 March 1943, where 173 people died in a crush on the stairs at the shelter entrance. The causes of this incident have been distorted by post-war press claims that the reasons why it happened were covered up, and panic was the main cause of so many deaths. A recent publication has insinuated that the Government manipulated the inquiry for political reasons. This article evaluates these claims against the available evidence, to demonstrate that such a catastrophic loss of life was far more complicated than suggested. The victims of this disaster deserve to be remembered as unfortunate casualties of war, rather than as being trampled to death by a terrified crowd.

Hieratic Monkey: SJ Fowler’s Performance at the BSB April Launch

In the following review, we will consider how Fowler faces birth, evolution, grief, literature, religion, and reflects these experiences back to the audience.  We suggest that he is giving form to the space between his face and the audiences’ faces; he is revealing a series of vases. This is based in the ambiguous figure Rubin’s vase-face, which is an important part of gestalt psychology. Fowler brings the religious and zoological meanings of the word primate face to face in his performance. He identifies as a primate to insist that the great apes are a worthy subject for poetry; he is preaching to the audience seated in church pews. Fowler introduces the evolutionary theory into St Johns on Bethnal Green through literature. Bob Bright, Ailsa Holland, Chris Kerr aid in his performance by reading selections from his 10th poetry collection, The Great Apes published by Broken Sleep Books 2022. The primate performance itself comes full circle to ask poets who among them is worthy to read as opposed to sit in the audience. This rigid hierarchal thinking is utterly disrupted by the primate figure enacting birth and grief. Poetry about the sixth great extinction cannot let itself become taxidermy; it must be disturbing, exciting, and deeply visceral as Fowler’s performance.  

Beyond 'stampedes': Towards a new psychology of crowd crush disasters.

The Bethnal Green tube shelter disaster, in which 173 people died, is a significant event in both history and psychology. While notions of 'panic' and 'stampede' have been discredited in contemporary psychology and disaster research as explanations for crowd crushes, Bethnal Green has been put forward as the exception that proves the rule. Alternative explanations for crushing disasters focus on mismanagement and physical factors, and lack a psychology. We analysed 85 witness statements from the Bethnal Green tragedy to develop a new psychological account of crowd disasters. Contrary to the established view of the Bethnal Green disaster as caused by widespread public overreaction to the sound of rockets, our analysis suggests that public perceptions were contextually calibrated to a situation of genuine threat; that only a small minority misperceived the sound; and that therefore, this cannot account for the surge behaviour in the majority. We develop a new model, in which crowd flight behaviour in response to threat is normatively structured rather than uncontrolled, and in which crowd density combines with both limited information on obstruction and normatively expected ingress behaviour to create a crushing disaster.

The Family Life of Peter and Ruth Townsend: Social Science and Methods in 1950s and Early 1960s Britain.

Peter Townsend (1928-2009) was one of the most important British social scientists of the twentieth century, best known for pioneering and innovative research on poverty, as well as his political campaigning, most notably for the Child Poverty Action Group. This article returns to Townsend's influential work on ageing, for which he first became widely known, during the 1950s and early 1960s. It does so to recover the ways in which his research, first in Bethnal Green at the Institute of Community Studies (ICS), and then at the London School of Economics, as well as the professional and political networks he built during this period, were rooted in and shaped by his home life in Hampstead. As will be shown, the most important figure in the interconnecting spheres of Townsend's career was his wife, Ruth (1927-2011), who not only was central to the construction of a way of life in which the boundaries between research, the domestic sphere, and politics were often so blurred as to be non-existent, but also made significant and underappreciated contributions to her husband's research.

Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment

Partaking in some of the material and affective moments and movements that emerged from my PhD research, I map the ontological, epistemological, and ethical possibilities/impossibilities that trans-corporeality and trans-materiality open in my research. Using walking and photo-diary as PhEmaterialist multisensory methodologies, I followed 15 Muslim schoolgirls in two London secondary schools (East Dulwich and Bethnal Green) mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. Employing Jane Bennett’s creative and absorbent I as a partaker rather than either actor or recipient, taking in and being taken up by virtues specific to the moment, this article materializes some partaker agencies and “more-thans” that Maha (my PhD participant) and I walked, made, challenged, and became with in different “spacetimematterings.” I argue that social injustice and inequalities, gendered and racial harassment as political, ethical, and material issues, are not always raised by those represented or able to name and speak up as part of social structures but emerge through complex webs of power relations and ordinary, everyday material moments and affective encounters. I consider bodies of walking as partakers of influx and efflux, many “I”s, moving and making the moments and experiences of racial harassment, affective entanglements, and the potentialities of the virtual, material, and affective that emerge in-between human and more-than-human walking bodies.

Still just victims or villains? The “jihadi brides” and the representation of politically violent women

In February 2015, three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy left the UK to join the Islamic State (IS). Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum became emblematic of the group’s “pull” and ...

Home no.7 (a sample of)

“Home” describes an intangible concept. It is the emotional and meaningful relationship between people and their familiar environment. In living conditions of individuation, temporariness and mobility, personal possessions gain utmost importance in the establishment of a sense of “home”. They become material icons of durability and continuity in everyday life which carry references to people, places, the past and, most importantly, to oneself – one’s identity and history. Home No. 7 (a sample of) is a practice-led study of this hypothesis. The project attempts to record and maintain a sample of a domestic interior – once regarded as “home” – created in the North Room on 262 Bethnal Green Road at the time it was about to be dismantled. The sample of ‘home’ is contained within a box. The interior of the box is divided into compartments, each of which holds a different means of registration: casts, cards, photos, samples, drawings and texts. The quasi-scientific way of registration aims at a clear presentation of the information recorded and an objective point of view. Yet, these means of objective recording inadvertently reveal personal systems of reference created by the inhabitant. The text that accompanies and reflects on the project discusses the relationship between an individual and his/her personal possessions drawing from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, history, critical theory and studies of material culture. Project and text attempt to understand the material “at home” constructed by one’s personal possessions and the immaterial “at home” created by their relationship to their owner.

Promoting Social Sustainability of Urban Neighbourhoods: The Case of Bethnal Green, London

AbstractThe growing significance of neighbourhoods in the urban planning discipline, alongside increasing attention to the social dimension of sustainable communities and societies, has brought to the fore the need to conceptualize socially sustainable neighbourhoods. In this article we reflect critically on the concept of socially sustainable neighbourhoods in two areas, namely definition and operationalization. We then propose a tripartite framework for measuring social sustainability of urban neighbourhoods, which combines the three elements of neighbourhood, neighbouring and neighbours. This framework is tested, examined and discussed for the case of Bethnal Green, London. We then integrate our findings into a social sustainability enhancement index, which encompasses practical recommendations to promote the social sustainability of Bethnal Green. We conclude this article by highlighting the research and policy implications of the proposed framework, and making suggestions for improving the methodology of future research.

Afterlife Writing and Situation of Graves II

This article discusses my practice as an artist and researcher examining the situation and significance of graves. First, in a site-specific installation at West Norwood Cemetery in South London, talking with visitors about whether it matters where human remains are deposited; secondly, in exhibitions at the Crypt Gallery St. Pancras and Lumen Crypt Gallery in Bethnal Green, presenting evidence of the historical circumstances in which human remains were appropriated from graves in the colonies, for the purposes of research into racial ‘science’ in museums during the late nineteenth century.

Evangelical Anglican missionaries and the London Jews Society: Palestine Place at Bethnal Green and related developments, 1813-1895*

Evangelical Anglican missionaries and the London Jews Society: Palestine Place at Bethnal Green and related developments, 1813-1895*

Endochondral growth disruption during vitamin D deficiency rickets in a mid-19th century series from Bethnal Green, London, UK.

Vitamin D affects many aspects of cartilage and skeletal development. Inconsistent findings currently exist regarding the impact of vitamin D deficiency on childhood growth. This study aims to evaluate the impact of vitamin D deficiency on childhood skeletal development by exploring long bone growth in children with healed and active rickets. Forty-four known-age children (2 months to 12 years) with rickets and 99 without rickets were compared with modern reference data from North America. Diaphyseal lengths of children with active rickets (34.1%, 15/44), healed rickets (65.9%, 29/44), and without rickets (99/143, 69.2%) were expressed as a percentage of expected length and an average percentage value was calculated across all available long bones. Combined data for all six long bones revealed that children with active rickets had achieved only 75.3% of their expected size whereas, on average, children with healed rickets had achieved 81.6% of their expected size. On average, children without skeletal evidence of rickets had achieved 83.7% of their expected size. Children with severe skeletal manifestations of active rickets had a lower average percentage of expected size (70.4%) than the remainder of children affected by the condition. Pronounced growth faltering existed in children with active rickets and affected the upper and lower limb, indicating systemic growth failures during the deficiency. Poor maternal health, early weaning and inadequate infant feeding, and lack of sunlight exposure likely contributed to the development of rickets. Complex interactions between pathological conditions, nutritional deficiencies and vitamin D deficiency may have exacerbated growth impacts.

Pragmatic urbanism: London’s railway arches and small-scale enterprise

ABSTRACTMarginal spaces are increasingly being taken up for commercial use in London. This includes railway arches, which are appropriated for many different social and economic activities. This article presents the findings of a study on 165 arches in three London neighbourhoods (Hackney, Bethnal Green and Bermondsey), which found the arches to host a disproportionate amount of manufacturing, in addition to concentrations of sectors such as food and drink; and taxi services. Despite being part of Britain’s industrial heritage, the arches have proved highly adaptable ‘hybrid’ spaces supporting office, retail, wholesale and production. They are also modular – businesses move into neighbouring arches as they expand. The arches are therefore well-suited to the postfordist economy of the inner city, which incorporates a highly networked system of small-scale manufacturers and retailers that require flexible and affordable small spaces close to commercial centres. Being arranged side-by-side, and open onto the street, they support knowledge-sharing between firms, while also bringing life to neighbourhoods. The arches have a spatial/functional configuration that might be copied in new forms of industrial development. Indeed, they suggest the possibility of a new spatial form – ‘industrial streets’ as opposed to industrial estates.

Patterns of long bone growth in a mid-19th century documented sample of the urban poor from Bethnal Green, London, UK.

Studies of male and female long bone growth in past populations are limited and usually constrained by the lack of personal identification. This article aimed to evaluate long bone growth in a series of mid-19th century documented burials associated with the urban poor from Bethnal Green, London, UK. Maximum diaphyseal lengths from 74 males and 70 females (2 months to 12 years) were compared to modern reference data from North America. Diaphyseal lengths were expressed as a percentage of expected length and an average percentage value was calculated across all available long bones. An index of growth progression was introduced to explore differences in the progress of males and females towards their projected adult size. Deviation from the expected growth attainment was evident in both sexes in the archaeological series by 2-4 months of age. Only 19.4% (28/144) of the children had attained an average long bone length >90% of the predicted mean in the reference series. The percentage of expected growth attainment decreased steadily in both sexes during infancy and early childhood. Overall, females deviated further from their expected growth progression than males. Growth faltering in both males and females was established during infancy (<1 year) with no evidence for recovery in older age groups. Early weaning and inadequate artificial feeding, together with impoverished living conditions and limited sanitary provision, most likely impacted on childhood growth.

What James Saw: The Bethnal Green Museum and Charles Eliot Norton

This paper draws upon unpublished letters from Charles Eliot Norton to Henry James regarding James’s visit to the Bethnal Green Museum in London; and considers the similarities and divergences between James’s review, “The Bethnal Green Museum,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1873, and a comparable review of Norton’s “The Manchester Art Exhibition,” published in the same magazine some two decades earlier.

The Victoria and Albert Museum: Rethinking the Context

The Victoria and Albert Museum: Rethinking the Context Bruce Robertson (bio) It is useful to remember that the Victoria and Albert Museum did not receive its current name until 1899; before then it was the South Kensington Museum (or Museums). When it opened, it was effectively a condensation of the Great Exhibition’s compendium of Art and Industry: the collection included the Museum of Ornamental Art and the Sheepshanks Gallery but also the Patent Museum, the Museum of Animal Products, the Food Collection, the Museum of Construction, the Educational Museum, the Economic Museum, and a few other odds and ends; a few years later, ship models, paintings and oils by J. M. W. Turner, and an active fish hatchery were added. The purpose of this collection of collections was to educate, with two audiences in mind: the general public and students in the schools affiliated with the museum, beginning with the School of Design. The museum was a classroom, not only for those formally enrolled in courses but also for self-education. The museum was also effectively a workshop and laboratory (where different design and building techniques could be developed), as well as a gift shop and the first museum café. By 1899, the museum had largely become a museum of decorative arts but still retained elements of its heterogenous past at its Bethnal Green outpost (fig. 1). It is also useful to know that the person responsible for the name change from South Kensington to Victoria and Albert was Lyon Playfair, a member of Prince Albert’s circle from 1850 and the museum’s cofounder, with Henry Cole, as one of the two secretaries of the Science and Art Department, the institution that housed the museum and its affiliated schools. In histories of the V&A, Playfair’s name is seldom mentioned; his departure from the department in 1858, one year after the museum opened its doors in South Kensington, has been taken to indicate that his tenure was a [End Page 41] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Sketch-layout of the 1851 Commissioners’ Estate suggested by Prince Albert in 1853. A, National Gallery; B, C, Colleges of Art and Science; D, E, Museums of Industrial Art, Patented Inventions, Trade Museums, etc.; F, G, H, private houses, official residences, or other institutions; I, possible site of hall for Academy of Music; K, possible site of Learned Societies; L, Hall of Glory; K, Approximate site of the current V&A. From Survey of London, vol. 38, The Museums Area of South Kensington and Westminster (1975). failure.1 In fact, as one of the commissioners of the exhibition of 1851, and as the long-time representative of the Scottish universities to Parliament, among his many other governmental and royal duties, he remained vitally interested in the functions of the museum and its success; in 1885, the museum reported directly to him, as vice-president of the Privy Council. But the erasure of Playfair’s role is indicative of a larger amnesia, one that discounts the fundamental fact that the museum was conceived as a function of the Science and Art Department and given the task of putting into [End Page 42] concrete action the department’s goals to improve and spread technical education throughout Britain. The V&A was primarily an institution for the production and transmission of knowledge across the disciplines. This purpose was shared by the first civic museums in the United States, almost all of them created in alliance with schools: New York’s Metropolitan Museum had a school; Boston’s and Chicago’s still do. The goal of technical education is a prism through which the creation and programs of museums in Victorian Britain, and then throughout the colonies and much of the Western world, needs to be seen. Museums were emphatically conceived of as part of the great reform of education that was set in train in Britain with the election of the Reform Parliament in 1830, an approach mirrored by similar developments throughout Europe and the United States. In Britain, the Museum Act of 1845, followed by legislation in 1850 and 1855, created public libraries and parks in addition to...

Ten in a Bed: literacy, intermediality and the potentials of low-tech

ABSTRACTTen in Bed was a project led by participatory arts organisation Phakama, in partnership with Queen Mary University of London. Over an eight-week period we ran a series of intermedial arts workshops and staged a performance with under five-year-olds and their families at a community centre in Bethnal Green, London. We attempted to enhance creative and communication skills, which are a key feature of critical literacy. In this article I use Lars Elleström’s ‘modalities’ to parse the project’s material, perceptual and social aspects and to consider the ways in which the intermedial process operated affectively to develop critical literacy skills.

INVENTING THE ‘TRADITIONAL WORKING CLASS’: A RE-ANALYSIS OF INTERVIEW NOTES FROM YOUNG AND WILLMOTT'S FAMILY AND KINSHIP IN EAST LONDON

ABSTRACTThis article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book Family and kinship in East London. These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful a priori models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji, M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

ABSTRACTThis article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.

Going east: the Wallace Collection at Bethnal Green, 1872-1875

The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic expansion of the exhibitionary field, during which private art collections became increasingly removed from their socially exclusive exhibitionary settings to be made available for public scrutiny. The South Kensington Museum was a key agent in the promotion of temporary displays of patrician collections and, between 1852 and 1880, the institution staged twenty-two exhibitions of privately owned works of art. Avidly acquired by British collectors, eighteenth-century French decorative arts occupied a prominent place in those exhibitions, prompting a French writer to comment that ‘les Anglais . . . depuis soixante ans viennent chez nous faire des rafles [et les expositions] de Kensington [en] contiennent les incroyables resultats’. The display of French decorative arts at South Kensington culminated in 1872 when Sir Richard Wallace, heir to the 4th Marquess of Hertford’s collection and fortune, agreed to lend his collection to the museum’s outstation in Bethnal Green for three years. This article will locate the public display of the Hertford–Wallace collection within the context of the contemporary discourse on the didactic mission of art and the perceived supremacy of French goods. It will examine the taxonomies and display strategies prevalent at Bethnal Green, and problematize the contemporary responses to Richard Wallace’s loan.