Streets Of London Research Articles

‘Lift me up!’: The New Major Discourses of Care and Ageing in Doris Lessing’s<i> The Diaries of Jane Somers</i>

The genre of <i>Reifungsroman</i> considers different temporal aspects of individuation. It aids and assesses the capacity of an older person to re-story their life, enter meaningful relationships, make amends with the past and productively evolve as an individual. Instead of focusing solely on the present, time is seen as a continuum in <i>Reifungsroman </i>with a special emphasis on the past events and narratives. This article will trace the late life transformation that Jane and Maudie undergo as all life is mutable and finite, awareness of which can make us more compassionate. In <i>The Diaries of Jane Sommers</i>, written by Doris Lessing and published in 1984 the narrator tells the story of the relationship she constructs with an elderly friend, Maudie, whom she meets in the streets of London and who triggers her identarian metamorphoses. Maudie embodies all the stereotypes of an old woman, she has crone-like features and an unforgiving temper. From the physical maladies to emotional suffering, Jane Sommers is herself a source of discomfort and displeasure to those around her. As the narrative unravels and cleanses Jane from rampant egoism, as she bathes after each visit to Maudie’s home, she deconstructs her old narratives and transitions into an empathetic self. As Maudie shades her trauma in words and being bathed by Jane, both undergo a process of healing. Maudie dies with dignity and out of this sacrificial moment of catharses, the meeting of the now and then, new Jane is born. She erases the old wry Jane, an ambitious and vain journalist in a women’s magazine, only concerned with success and everlasting youth, who spends time and her financial gains on material goods. This article will look into the discourses on ageing and the genre of <i>Reifungsroman</i> in <i>The Diaries of Jane Sommers</i>, Lessing’s fifth novel, published under a pseudonym and separately as two separate books: <i>The Diaries of a Good Neighbour</i> and <i>If the Old Could</i> against criticism from various editorial boards. I will analyse the processes of resignification of the minor discourses and their relationship towards the major discourses on growing older. I will consider Jana and Maudie as a two-faced Janus and a dyad of the old and the new, the ich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful: a crone, a witch and young woman whose polyphony of voices can re-story the narratives of women and ageing.

Locating Anglo-Italian Communities in Bevis and the Naples Manuscript

This article contextualises the Anglo-Italian aspects of Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29. This fifteenth-century paper miscellany contains Bevis of Hampton, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, St Alexius, Libeaus Desconus, as well as a recipe collection, a section of Lydgate’s “Doublenesse”, and a fragment of Sir Isumbras. The book is among a very select number of codices containing Middle English texts that are presently preserved in an Italian institution. Previous research has demonstrated XIII.B.29 must have travelled to the Italian peninsula at a relatively early date, but the exact reason behind its compilation and the method by which it arrived in Italy remain uncertain. This article reviews the manuscript’s design, provenance, and contents, arguing the book is not just an English manuscript in Italy, but also to some degree an English manuscript about Italy and Italian experiences. Specifically, the article contends that an episode in the manuscript’s Bevis, which describes a street fight near Lombard Street in London, benefits from a reading that acknowledges late medieval developments in finance and long-distance Anglo-Italian commerce, as well as the emergence of Italian communities in Southampton and the capital.

Experience(s) of Decorporation: The Invisibilisation of Care in John Lanchester’s Capital (2012)

Abstract In The Ethics of Care (2006), Virginia Held underlines that care cannot be conceived without recognising our interdependence and responsibility for one another. Despite recent efforts to divide our society between private and public spheres, no such clear delimitation is possible in the ethics of care. Yet, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, the neoliberal financialisation of healthcare systems is redefining our ability to look after others. John Lanchester’s ‘crunch lit’ novel Capital (2012) draws attention to what I call “experiences of decorporation”: the vulnerable ageing body and the medical system both become victims of a market-logic which invisibilises the cared for, the carer, and the caring. Taking place on a single street in London, the metonymic construction of the novel calls for an analysis of how the illness and death of Petunia Howe, the oldest resident on Pepys Road, is symptomatic of the ethical effacement of the body politic under the clout of neoliberal politics.

“A Ceremony of National and Representative Character”: The Four-Nations Politics of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

AbstractIn June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this proved a difficult undertaking for a multinational kingdom with a vast overseas empire. Grievances over seating in Westminster Abbey, jubilee honors, and an absent royal family fostered varying degrees of solidarity and rivalry among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations. The Irish Question and imperial expansion—matters in which Victoria was personally invested—heightened four-nations sensibilities and influenced participation in the festivities. The queen's Golden Jubilee both reflected and inspired four-nations thinking, and it revealed public concerns that the British union might exist as a hierarchy of nations rather than as a collaborative venture among equal members. As the institutional embodiment of tiered society, the Crown became an outlet for subjects to explore questions and modes of belonging within the global British world. A four-nations analysis of Victoria's 1887 jubilee shows that despite its unifying function, the modern British monarchy has struggled to harmonize the United Kingdom's multinational perspectives.

THE 2000S: SIGNS OF THE TIMES IN IAN MCEWAN’S NOVEL, SATURDAY

This paper seeks to present Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday (2005) in the prism of the new century, manifesting itself in the cluster of signs of the times. It discerns seven key attributes of the first decade which collectively outline the contour of the 2000s.The novel which spans a day is evocative of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway as it centres on the life of a middle-class 48 years old Henry Perowne - a successful neurosurgeon, and rationalist who moves through the streets of London in anticipation of a dinner with his dearest ones at the evening’s familial reunion. His dense observation of the time he lives in combines rationality and spontaneity.Perowne (and McEwan) catalogues signs of the 2000s. They include a fear of global wars in the aftermath of 9/11, which is recognised by both generations of the Perownes (of the 1950s and 1980s); growing awareness of the exhaustion of natural resources and its disastrous consequences; increasing secularisation in the post-Christian Great Britain; unprecedented scientific progress with technologies impacting the whole society; excessive mediasation in the digital era resulting in lack of scepticism.In the novel’s fictional world, the tension between private and collective is epitomised in the protagonist’s acknowledging the threat of unprovoked violence as well as accepting his own increased personal vulnerability and precarity as a mode of existence.Henry Perowne reaffirms domesticity as his response to the new global world; he also finds consolation in the profession of neurosurgeon as it provides a unique control of reality where he can give life to those who balance life and death.Typical of Ian McEwan is his reliance on the English literary tradition — first and foremost on the Modernist writing of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, prioritising the individual perception of the world. The author also refers to the resources of the ‘Man-in-Society’ tradition, evoking the conventions of realistic writing which he combines with postmodernist techniques such as play with the reader, dramatic turns, hybridisation, emphasised intertextuality (from Shakespeare onwards) and indeterminacy.

Can Paper Waste Be Utilised as an Insulation Material in Response to the Current Crisis

Recently, the climate and landfill crises have raised concerns in the UK as the country is struggling to meet the sustainability goal it set to achieve. One of the major reasons is due to the inadequate recycling rate of waste paper. Therefore, as an alternative solution to the issue, the aim of our research was to exploit the potential of waste paper as an insulating material to see whether it can be feasible to improve the recycling rate of waste paper in the country. Waste paper has already been in the construction industry for a while, and the use of cellulose insulation is a standard in the Passivhaus construction approach. The study examines cellulose’s performance as an insulation material and its potential to combat the climate crisis by creating four separate comparisons and calculations using Life-Cycle Assessment and Standard Assessment Procedures. The study will investigate the benefits and limitations of the material as well as a case study to justify the use of it. A pioneer project in the field is a retrofit and new-built building project—54–58 Akerman Road in London. It utilises cellulose fibre insulation as the main material for the new-built part. The study will use this project as a context to compare whether cellulose fibre insulation is the best solution for the project. Also, the study will compare cellulose insulation with other conventional insulation materials in a more general setting as well as with the traditional paper recycling approach, by providing an indication of the carbon footprint of the insulation, the energy resources involved and the amount of raw material. By conducting the study, we can know whether recycling waste paper into cellulose insulation is the best solution to the crisis we face. This research can guide the UK’s recycling and use of waste paper, reduce paper waste and energy consumption and improve the sustainability of building insulation materials.

Conjuring Up a King

Conjuring Up a King

London's little histories of the Sikhs: Rav Singh in conversation

ABSTRACT A little History of the Sikhs is a London-based initiative that explores traces of Sikh history found within the museums, memorials, parks, and streets of London. Through walking tours, they work to introduce their audiences to the shared history of the Sikhs and Britain and touch upon critical moments in the making of British Asian history, such as Partition. In this interview with the Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination project team, Rav Singh, founder of A little History of the Sikhs, will discuss the role of urban space in London in the preservation of cultural memory, reflect on participants’ engagement with the tours and the significance of preserving and transmitting memories of empire, Partition, and migration in the diaspora.

Transparency and Rigor: Target Trial Emulation Aims to Achieve Both.

1Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London, UK 2Institute of Epidemiology and Health, University College London, UK 3MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Aging, University College London, UK Conflicts of interest: the three authors have no conflicts of interest Financial support: none No data were used Editor’s Note: Related articles can be found on pages XXX, XXX, and XXX. Corresponding author: Bianca L De Stavola UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, 30, Guildford Street London WC1N 1EH, UK [email protected]

London's Godonymic System as a Reflection of the Cultural and Linguistic Landscape

The article examines the cultural and linguistic landscape of London through the prism of its godonymic system. The research materials are the names of London streets obtained by a continuous sampling method from toponymic dictionaries, topographic maps and Internet resources. As a result of the analysis of the motivational basis of the godonymic vocabulary, the studied units are divided into the following types: anthropogodonyms, topogodonyms, zoogodonyms, phytogodonyms, landscape godonyms, characterizing godonyms and godonyms related to human practical activity. The conducted quantitative analysis of the studied material makes it possible to identify the features of the godonymic system of London and its cultural and linguistic landscape. Godonyms are an integral part of the image of any city, they form a system that generates a vivid picture of the cultural and linguistic space of the city. The study of this system makes it possible to identify cultural value priorities of the nation, as well as to trace the dynamics of their development.

Spatial assessment of the attributable burden of disease due to transportation noise in England

BackgroundNoise pollution from transportation is one of the leading contributors to the environmental disease burden in Europe. We provide a novel assessment of spatial variations of these health impacts within a country, using England as an example. MethodsWe estimated the burden of annoyance (highly annoyed), sleep disturbance (highly sleep disturbed), ischemic heart disease (IHD), stroke, and diabetes attributable to long-term transportation noise exposures in England for the adult population in 2018 down to local authority level (average adult population: 136,000). To derive estimates, we combined literature-informed exposure-response relationships, with population data on noise exposures, disease, and mortalities. Long-term average noise exposures from road, rail and aircraft were sourced from strategic noise mapping, with a lower exposure threshold of 50 dB (decibels) Lden and Lnight. Results40 %, 4.5 % and 4.8 % of adults in England were exposed to road, rail, and aircraft noise exceeding 50 dB Lden. We estimated close to a hundred thousand (∼97,000) disability adjusted life years (DALY) lost due to road-traffic, ∼13,000 from railway, and ∼ 17,000 from aircraft noise. This excludes some noise-outcome pairs as there were too few studies available to provide robust exposure–response estimates. Annoyance and sleep disturbance accounted for the majority of the DALYs, followed by strokes, IHD, and diabetes. London, the South East, and North West regions had the greatest number of road-traffic DALYs lost, while 63 % of all aircraft noise DALYs were found in London. The strategic noise mapping did not include all roads, which may still have significant traffic flows. In sensitivity analyses using modelled noise from all roads in London, the DALYs were 1.1x to 2.2x higher. ConclusionTransportation noise exposures contribute to a significant and unequal environmental disease burden in England. Omitting minor roads from the noise exposure modelling leads to underestimation of the disease burden.

Criticising Capitalism in the City and on the Stage: The City Street Movement Occupy Wall Street and Tim Price’s Protest Song

Abstract Following the 2022 CDE conference’s concern regarding “how theatre and the city are productively embroiled and [. . .] how contemporary Anglophone theatre has redefined [. . .] [and blurred the] borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator” (Garson et al.), I will focus on Tim Price’s Protest Song, which was commissioned by the National Theatre and was staged there in December 2013. Setting the play in the streets of London in front of the iconic urban space of St Paul’s Cathedral, starring a homeless main character, and transgressing the boundaries between theatrical and actual spaces, Price arguably questions conventional urban and social binaries as well as economic and social hierarchies. With the help of experimental and critical strategies, he examines the city street movement Occupy Wall Street and its repercussions. The present article analyses these strategies and asks how they represent, perform, question, and assess urban hierarchies, city street activism, and the financial sector, as they are symbolised by the (urban and mental) spaces of London as capital and London as city of capital. I will furthermore look into how Price’s strategies reframe social inequality and turbo-capitalism as well as to what extent they redefine the borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator.

Punchdrunk’s Kabeiroi: Taking Immersive Theatre to the Streets

Abstract Punchdrunk is often considered the pioneer within the field of immersive theatre, which “[places] the audience at the heart of the work” (Machon 22) and abolishes the distinction between stage and auditorium to merge them into one single space. Founded by Felix Barrett in 2000, the British company is known for creating detailed theatrical worlds that inhabit the space of disused buildings in which the audience is invited to roam free. Whilst most of Punchdrunk’s productions maintain a separation between the real world and the imagined world by staying within the confines of a building, Kabeiroi (2017) opens up to the busy streets of London and immerses the participants in real life. This ambulatory theatrical exploration superimposes the world of fiction onto the geography of the city, weaving a web of complex interactions between the two. How does Kabeiroi interact with the city it pervades? To what extent does the urban space inform the performance, and, conversely, does the immediate reality impact the participants’ experience and immersive feeling? Using concepts such as performance walks (Tomlin), “host” and “ghost” (McLucas), frames (Goffman), and errant immersion (Alston), this article explores the way Kabeiroi blurs the boundaries between street and stage, participants, performers, and passersby, reality and fiction.

Near Real-Time Social Distance Estimation In London

Abstract To mitigate the current COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers at the Greater London Authority, the regional governance body of London, UK, are reliant upon prompt, accurate and actionable estimations of lockdown and social distancing policy adherence. Transport for London, the local transportation department, reports they implemented over 700 interventions such as greater signage and expansion of pedestrian zoning at the height of the pandemic’s first wave with our platform providing key data for those decisions. Large well-defined heterogeneous compositions of pedestrian footfall and physical proximity are difficult to acquire, yet necessary to monitor city-wide activity (busyness) and consequently discern actionable policy decisions. To meet this challenge, we leverage our existing large-scale data processing urban air quality machine learning infrastructure to process over 900 camera feeds in near real-time to generate new estimates of social distancing adherence, group detection and camera stability. In this work, we describe our development and deployment of a computer vision and machine learning pipeline. It provides near immediate sampling and contextualization of activity and physical distancing on the streets of London via live traffic camera feeds. We introduce a platform for inspecting, calibrating and improving upon existing methods, describe the active deployment on real-time feeds and provide analysis over an 18 month period.

Social Economy in the Classroom: The London Birkbeck Schools

The London Birkbeck Schools represent a hitherto largely unexplored episode in the history of British education. They embody the contradictory faces of mid-nineteenth-century radical Liberalism and are of interest, first, because they were determinedly secular and pioneered what was for their time a novel and progressive pedagogy. Second, they had an explicit social purpose. ‘Social economy’—the antithesis of the ‘political economy’ of the founders of the London Mechanics’ Institute in whose lecture theatre the first school was established by William Ellis in 1848—was a central element of the curriculum. The schools and their values were contested. Their curriculum was attacked by the Church for its godlessness. Their teaching methods, advanced for the times, were lampooned by Dickens for being little better than the rote learning they challenged. Following the 1870 Elementary Education Act, some collapsed or were incorporated in Board schools, but others went ‘up market’ in competition with them. Only one school building remains nearly intact today, reflecting in its architecture some of the most progressive elements of Ellis’s philosophy, but London streets and roads bearing Birkbeck’s name mark the locations of schools long gone and the curriculum issues are rehearsed in present-day debates.

Group riding: Cyclists exposure to road vehicle emissions in urban environments

A series of wind tunnel experiments were conducted in the University of Surrey’s Environmental Flow wind tunnel with a 1:50 scale of a typical London street canyon to assess the exposure of cyclists riding in a group to the emissions of polluting vehicles. A propane source emitted from an Ahmed body was used to model a car exhaust and a fast flame ionisation detector was used to measure pollutant concentration around four cyclists for multiple configurations of the source, cyclists, and wind directions. Two cases were investigated with a vehicle driving in front of a line of cyclists and adjacent to them (as if it were overtaking them).In the first case, for small wind incidence, findings confirm that the cyclists exposure decreases exponentially with their distance from the source with a small dependence on wind direction but largely independently of the riders position within the group. For large wind incidences, typical of urban canyons, the rider position within the group becomes more important.For the second set of experiments, with the vehicle positioned adjacent to the riders, it was found to be preferable for a rider to be in front of the group regardless of the distance from the source, as this results in lower exposure to pollutants. This is likely linked with the complex aerodynamic field generated by the group of riders that can trap the vehicle exhaust fumes amongst the cyclists, hence increasing the exposure.This research suggests that group riding should be considered when designing mitigation strategies to minimise cyclists exposure to road traffic pollution within urban environments, where busy and narrow cycle lanes often results in cyclists riding in line.

Futurism on the streets of London

Obvious evidence does not exist linking the Italian Futurists’ conception of men’s fashion in the 1910s and 1920s with the tastes of the Mod subculture in London of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the aesthetic behind both Futurist fashion and the Mod subculture is strikingly similar and suggests that ideas on style and lifestyle can cross-pollinate each other across decades and countries, given the right circumstances. Both Futurists and Mods wanted to be, as Giacomo Balla put it in a 1913 manifesto, ‘Dynamic/Aggressive/Shocking/Energetic/Violent … [with] Pattern changes […] available by pneumatic dispatch; in this way anyone may change his clothes according to the needs of mood’. London’s Mod subculture came from a directly coincident desire to abandon traditional aesthetics and methods of expression in favour of a constant turnover. The Futurists promoted an artistic movement as a lifestyle, declared in manifestos and acted out in the streets and in politics and that bled into fashion as a manifestation of their ideas, worn literally on their sleeves. The Mods promoted a lifestyle as an art, acted out on the streets, with fashion as the manifestation of their individuality, brought down to the level of the tapering of their pants legs. In both cases, the expression of their lifestyle and values was consciously manifested in the clothes one wore on an everyday basis and connected through the talents of Italian tailors for quick, inexpensive alterations. The similarity suggests an association between Futurism and the Mod subculture, in the appeal of Italian men’s fashion to both groups and demonstrating that certain avant-garde ideals in western art had filtered to the level of the average person over the course of five decades.

“Hark! I Hear the Cannons Roar”: Twenty years in the life of a “new tune”

In 1683 the Ottoman Turks were defeated at Vienna in what was to be a last serious bid to extend their empire further west, crushing the Habsburg dynasty as they did so. They had had good reason to believe the venture viable, as there existed no stable unity among the western powers. But for once the Holy League, a pan-European force comprising representatives from a variety of kingdoms, dukedoms and disinherited adventurers, cohered when it needed to do so and the several-century-long Ottoman threat essentially came to an end, or at least the beginning of the end. In the same year a street ballad appeared on the streets of London relating the defeat of the Turks at Vienna. A Carrouse to the Emperor, the Royal Pole, and the Much-Wrong’d Duke of Lorrain2 is a whimsical piece penned by the irrepressible Thomas D’Urfey that suggests that had the Islam religion permitted the Turkish soldiers to imbibe something stronger than coffee then the Ottoman host would have pressed on further, at least as far as the Rhine.

K.Bowrey, Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author, Routledge, 2020, 228 pp, hb, £36.99.

The Modern Law ReviewEarly View REVIEW K. Bowrey, Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author, Routledge, 2020, 228 pp, hb, £36.99. Luke McDonagh, Corresponding Author Luke McDonagh L.T.McDonagh@lse.ac.uk LSE Law School, LSE Houghton, Street London WC2A 2AE Assistant Professor of Law, LSE Law School. Correspondence Luke McDonagh LSE Law School, LSE Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE Email: L.T.McDonagh@lse.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Luke McDonagh, Corresponding Author Luke McDonagh L.T.McDonagh@lse.ac.uk LSE Law School, LSE Houghton, Street London WC2A 2AE Assistant Professor of Law, LSE Law School. Correspondence Luke McDonagh LSE Law School, LSE Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE Email: L.T.McDonagh@lse.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 January 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12790 Section editor: Vanessa Munro V.Munro@warwick.ac.uk Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

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