London Suburb Research Articles

The ‘wilds of Brompton’: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Women Writers’ Early Careers in the Sociable London Suburbs

ABSTRACT In this paper, we geocode the residences of nineteenth-century Brompton residents to the level of the building in order to argue that literary sociability and propinquity – leading to face-to-face interaction with writers, editors, artists, actors, and publishers – may have played a more important role in the formation of women’s literary careers than scholars have yet recognized. Taking the popular novelist and poet Dinah Craik as our case study, we argue that the walkability as well as the informal and inexpensive literary sociability of the area made Brompton a fertile ground for the early careers of nineteenth-century women writers. Following Alan Liu’s work in Critical Infrastructure studies, we attempt through mapping to reanimate connections that have been lost to time, establishing the importance of Brompton as a literary, artistic, and intellectual neighbourhood in the nineteenth century, and of propinquity in supporting the careers of women writers. Expanding on Sarah Bilston’s recent work on the suburbs as fertile grounds for the careers of Victorian women writers, we add a spatial dimension to Robert Darnton’s well-known print network, placing the private home, a site of literary sociability, as a central node in public print networks.

The impact of socioeconomic deprivation on the prevalence of gestational diabetes: An observational study

Background Approximately 3.5% of pregnancies in the United Kingdom are complicated by gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Risk factors for this mirror those contributing to type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Though socioeconomic status (SES) is presumed to contribute to GDM, evidence in the United Kingdom is limited. In this unique study, we explored the impact of SES on GDM prevalence in a London suburb population. Materials and Methods Four thousand one hundred and sixty-three pregnant women who booked between July 2018 and March 2020 at Princess Royal University Hospital were retrospectively analyzed. Associations between GDM prevalence and SES trends (using multiple deprivation deciles (MDD)), and body mass index (BMI), age, ethnicity, screening uptake, birth-weights and birth outcomes, were analyzed. Results Patients with BMI >30 kg/m2, older than 35 years, and non-Caucasian ethnicity have an increased risk of developing GDM ( p < 0.0001, p < 0.0001, p < 0.0001, respectively). No association existed between MDD and GDM prevalence ( p-values over 0.05). Patients with risk factors for GDM were highest in the deprived areas p < 0.0001. MDD 1–4 (most deprived) had the highest percentage of missed screening (15% of patients with risk factors missed screening), compared to 8% in the least deprived group ( p < 0.0001). Discussion Our data surprisingly suggest that low SES did not increase the incidence of GDM, despite a higher proportion of women with risk factors for GDM living in the most deprived postcodes. However this unclear finding may be due to low screening uptake of deprived populations, and therefore lack of GDM diagnosis, or indicate that GDM is a result of a different aetiology to T2DM. Further research is needed to explore if access to screening services, lack of health education or other health inequalities were responsible for the high proportion of missed screening opportunities in deprived areas.

Materializing France in exile: Henri, duc d’Aumale, the Orléans family and the transnational politics of collecting c. 1848–80

Abstract Between the 1848 Revolution and the Franco–Prussian War, the fallen Orléans dynasty lived in the western suburbs of London. Deprived of the throne, Louis-Philippe and his sons struggled to uphold their dignity and credentials as a ruling house. In this time of limbo, cultural pursuits—whether art collecting, exhibitions, literature—were a crucial means of integration into the elite tiers of British society. Material culture remained a central means by which the family affirmed and preserved their dual patriotic and dynastic credentials. Focusing on the collecting activities of the duc d’Aumale in London, this article explores how the experiences and opportunities of British exile profoundly shaped how the Orléans positioned themselves as custodians of French history and national identity. An act of cultural resistance against French governments that had banished and ‘denationalized’ them, art collecting offers a valuable window onto the family’s patriotic self-image and evolving political ambitions.

From Clapham to Salina: Locating the Reasonable Man

“The man on the Clapham omnibus” is an often cited but poorly understood name for the standard of reasonable care in tort. It originated in a 1903 decision in which this formula was used not to articulate a legal standard but to describe an average person whose views have no legal significance. This figure finds a cousin in another personification, as “the man who takes the magazines at home, and in the evening pushes the lawn-mower in his shirt sleeves.” Both formulations have complex histories that help to underscore their inaptness as descriptors for the standard they are used to represent. These two examples also help to show, more generally, why a personified standard (“the reasonable person”) tends to introduce problems that do not arise with a more abstract one (“reasonableness,” “reasonable care”). Many critics have shown that the “reasonableness” standard is susceptible to problems of bias and framing. Personifying the standard invites the inappropriate use of individuated figures with particular features (e.g., a bus rider from a London suburb) that only worsen these problems. This article traces the history of these two standards, tries to explain how they moved from descriptive to normative use, and then turns to problems with personified standards more generally, showing how some superficially appealing reasons for using a personified standard prove to be unpersuasive.

Suburban Labour: The Labour Party in Penge to 1919

This article examines the efforts of the early Labour Party to establish a foothold in a Conservative-dominated London suburb. It revisits the notion of a divided working class and ‘labour aristocracy’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and argues for its relevance in understanding the early Labour Party. Within this framework it provides an account of the labour movement in south London and presents a class analysis of Penge. It finds that skilled manual workers provided the party’s initial support, and that they were forced to adapt to a local political culture of working-class Toryism. It argues that their main motivation was to win recognition for the working class as a legitimate ‘interest’ in the local community, with the Labour Party as a vehicle of class dignity. But by the time the party achieved some modest success in 1919, it was already moving on to a broader conception of its working-class identity.

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Hatch End

This paper is concerned with what is now the north-east London suburb of Hatch End and the feelings thoughts and memories it had for the author during his formative years. It deals with the quotidian and the reflections it can arouse. There is no attempt to produce a formal local history of Hatch End but rather there is employment of the author’s autobiographical memory to record how temporal change influenced (and to a degree formed) him as an individual. The mix of perspectives to perform this task involves, in the main, considerations of physical and symbolic space from (a) solid and identifiable features of Hatch End (housing, public buildings, transport links, recreational spaces, etc) to (b) the meanings of countryside, family life, social class and modernity. For the author Hatch End does not carry with it the freight of being a place with deep historical roots or of having a high public profile. In general critiques of suburbia Hatch End could be classified as dull and uninteresting. In fact, the author ventures that Hatch End could be regarded as “no particular place”. This is not however how the author personally regards Hatch End. For him there was in Hatch End plenty of exciting material for the construction of a self in a real place. As he says, “no particular place” can be, autobiographically speaking, a rather special place.

Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, by Lee Jackson

Reviewed by: Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment by Lee Jackson Peter Bailey (bio) Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, by Lee Jackson; pp. xii + 304. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, $30.00. In this congenially informative study, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment, Lee Jackson tours the major sites, promoters, performers, and publics involved in the dramatic growth of Victorian entertainments. The music hall is the lynchpin account occupying the first third of the book; further chapters cover the commercialized dance scene, the pleasure garden, and the exhibition ground; concluding excursions to the seaside and football ground move beyond the book's main focus on London. The gin palace, a novel enhancement of the pub, foreshadows the music hall in the opulence of its amenities amid the cramped and dismal conditions of city life in the 1840s. Jackson captures the alluring ambience of its "gaslight and gilding," its efficient service and logistics likened by contemporaries to the new retail stores of the day (6). The same sources labeled gin palace proprietors as capitalists, a term and phenomenon Jackson seems to resist. Pubs were also the site of the traditional "free-and-easy," or local amateur entertainments that expanded into singing saloons to accommodate surging demand from the growing working-class population (33). Crucial for business were annual licenses for music and dancing and the sale of alcohol. These were contested by temperance and moral reform lobbies, who charged the halls with drunkenness and prostitution encouraged by licentious songs and performances. Jackson pays new attention to the magistracy in the ongoing struggle. The music hall, Jackson emphasizes, was "the century's greatest entertainment innovation" (33), and he re-examines the mythical figure of Charles Morton of the Canterbury Hall in suburban Lambeth as "Father of the Halls" (61). Morton's "ostentatious respectability" is credited with countering the music hall's dubious public image as the haunt of prostitutes and drunks, attracting working-class families, middle-class visitors and respectable females with more refined professional entertainment (58). Performers in a professionalizing work force played several halls across town a night in the "turns system," and the first national stars emerged (61). Competition from the new halls provoked fights over artistic trespass with the legitimate theater, as well as continuing charges of obscenity and a government enquiry in 1866. Jackson demonstrates how the halls' signature comic song exploited its sexualized double entendre to the delight of the crowd and exasperation of reformers. He also revisits notorious clashes between managements and [End Page 126] reformers, including the controversy over prostitution at the Empire in Leicester Square in 1894, which the young libertine Winston Churchill riotously joined. By then music halls were the prime site of a mass entertainment industry: they were purpose-built variety theaters, corporately financed and managed, truly palatial in size and appointments, and they attracted audiences in the thousands. Jackson stops short of any comparatively sustained study of the very institutions that contemporaries and historians branded as such whose "invention" is foregrounded in the book title. Jackson breaks new ground in examining the commercial dance scene, from genteel provincial assembly rooms to London's louche casinos and the notorious Argyll Rooms, to Blackpool's grand ballrooms for the working classes at the end of the century, though a mass dancing public was not realized until after the First World War. Pleasure gardens and their dancing platforms are followed by accounts of exhibition grounds of varying success that added entertainment to the more high-minded formula of London's Great Exhibition. Among the showmen entrepreneurs awarded heroic stature by Jackson, Imre Kiralfy is singled out for his White City, a vast exhibition site in 1890s suburban London, pronounced "the zenith, the ultimate in mass entertainment … amusement on an industrial scale, using industrial methods—from the tollgate to the mechanized rides" (247). Seaside towns became popular holiday sites as cheap and rapid transport by steamship and railway drew a new working-class public that was eager...

Unruly Tramscapes

This article reappraises tramway closures in 1930s London by reading enthusiast memoirs of the events surrounding them. Literary representations in forms such as the novel and poetry of urban public transport experience often overlook experiences in peripheral urban zones and on modes such as the tramway which had a chiefly working-class ridership. Building a perspective around London’s tramscapes, and by practicing Deep Locational Criticism as part of a characteristically “humanities” mode, temporally focused, in mobility studies, the article reveals contestations including acts of disorder surrounding the closure events, deploying those in a rereading of mid-twentieth-century British history more broadly. The 1930s North London suburbs emerge through a reading of George Atkins’s account of 1938 closure events as sites of carnivalesque disorder and other bottom-up transport-focused activity, including the formation of enthusiast groups. This group of practices opposed the extremely top-down transport planning of the post-1933 London Passenger Transport Board’s management.

Impressions of Wembley Park: Photographic Representations in a Landscape of Corporatism


 
 
 Corporatisation eradicates the human places that rely on local infrastructures and direct connections made between people. This visual essay looks at a moment of transition happening in Wembley Park, in the suburbs of northwest London. A series of photographs captured between 2017-2018 records how a new residential neighbourhood for London takes shape. The photographic series, used as the backbone to an architectural thesis, challenges the corporate development built up of identikit zones and influenced by profit margins, risk assessments and quality indicators. Photography is used as an instrument for a critical reading of the territory that observes the area from multiple perspectives. The photographs drive the design proposal: predictive future scenarios were developed through photomontage and digital reconstructions. The proposal explores the possibility of an ‘Urban Carpet’ that transforms the central public space built as a series of ad hoc acts of construction over 90 years. A series of collages juxtapose the strict, corporate landscape with the nature of incidental and spontaneous encounters. The collages are a provocation, arguing for the necessity of disorder and complexity as a way to build up a sense of community in a nondescript zone.
 
 

POPULARNA KULTURA U ROMANU BUDA IZ PREDGRAĐA HANIFA KUREJŠIJA

Тhis paper will explore the portrayal of popular culture in Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The introductory part of the paper presents a review of the terms culture and popular culture and their interrelationship in order to shed light on the space in which popular culture emerges in this novel. Kureishi examines the subcultural scene of England, where the concept of popular culture represents the spirit of the new age that the novel’s characters encounter. The main part of the paper is dedicated to the elements of popular culture, their representation and interpretation through the actions of the characters in The Buddha of Suburbia. The paper aims to describe the concept of popular culture through fashion, music and lifestyle, but also the re-examination of the London suburb and the way it has been described in the English literature.

Rachel Cusk’ın Arlington Park (2006) isimli romanında ev kadınlarının gündelik hayatının ve direnişinin analizi

Sociologists of everyday life have regenerated the notion of everyday with creative potential, especially after the 1970s. The ability to make the familiar unfamiliar has posited everyday life studies with multifaceted realities which can embrace the human situation of emancipation and oppression. The mundane reality of everyday life practices is freighted with power and resistance. Therefore, everyday life practices have to be scrutinized as they have become a site upon which agency is situated. In this sense, the sphere of everyday life can be regarded as a space of exploitation and liberation at the same time. The power relations in everyday life practices conceptualize the notion in a contested manner; thus, resistance. The present paper will analyze the everyday life practices of housewives in the suburb of London to discover the resistance and the possibility of emancipation narrated in the novel Arlington Park (2006) written by Rachel Cusk. The analysis here is based on Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the notion in a dialectical manner, suggesting that it can be both oppressive and liberative. Discovering the potential everyday holds for the housewives accentuates the value of domestic labor in transforming the female actors. In this sense, Michel de Certeau’s celebration of everyday as a sphere of resistance will be taken into account in analyzing the resistant activities of the housewives in the abovementioned novel. This paper proposes the possibility of emancipation for the housewives who carry out their everyday practices by situating the notion of everyday as a mediator space.

The Spatial Morphology of Community in Chipping Barnet c.1800–2015: An Historical Dialogue of Tangible and Intangible Heritages

This article presents a case study of the London suburb of Chipping Barnet to show how a spatial-morphological approach to tangible heritage challenges its archetypal image as an affluent commuter suburb by highlighting its resilience as a generative patterning of social space that has weathered successive phases of social change. We argue that the enduring spatial-morphological definition of Barnet as a local centre explains how it has been possible to preserve something less tangible—namely its identity as a suburban community. We show how Barnet’s street network constitutes community heritage through a combination of local- and wider-scale affiliations that have sustained diverse localised socio-economic activity over an extended period of time. Noting how local histories often go further than sociological studies in emphasising the importance of the built environment for indexing the effects of social change on everyday life, we draw on a range of archive sources including the analysis of historical maps using space syntax techniques, to reveal Barnet’s street network as a dialogue of both tangible and intangible heritages that are formative of a suburban community.

Track and Trace, and Other Collaborative Art/Archaeology Bubbles in the Phygital Pandemic

AbstractThis paper describes our creative responses to a surface assemblage (a scatter) of lithic artefacts encountered on either side of a worn track across a field early on in the pandemic. Our art/archaeology response takes place within a phygital nexus in which artefacts or assemblages can be instantiated either physically or digitally, or both. In the nexus we create, connect and explore an ontological multiplicity of – more or less – physical and digital skeuomorphs and other more standard forms of records for sharing (i.e. Latour’s immutable mobiles, such as photographs), but rendered with radically different properties and affordances, at different scales, with different apparatus. These include interactive Reflectance Transformation Images, graphical surface models, machine intelligence style transfer, and 3D prints, all of which were produced in a variety of isolated analytical “bubble” settings and transmitted to and from (both digitally and physically) a home office in an isolated Hampshire village and a home studio in a London suburb. Our approach is to describe, diffractively, the ontological shifts and itineraries associated with some of these objects and assess how this assemblage came to matter as an art/archaeology installation. Ultimately, some of these deterritorialised, (re)colourised, affective, biodegradable, and diffractively born metamorphic instars, now inscribed with new meanings, are returned to the original findspot of the lithics to be (re)discovered.

Anglican Rites of Consecration and the Delineation of Sacred Space, ca. 1689–1735

Between 1712 and 1715, the Convocation of the Church of England attempted to replace the existing informal orders used for the consecration of churches, chapels, and churchyards with a single uniform rite. While these efforts have been associated with the erection of the Fifty New Churches to provide for the populous and expanding suburbs of London and Westminster, the discussions actually arose out of the political divisions between the bishops and the Lower House of Convocation. The efforts to establish an official order of consecration was also a response to the changed ecclesiastical climate that followed the Toleration Act of 1689, which allowed for the registration of Dissenter chapels. The Established Church found its religious hegemony threatened and the particular status of its places of worship, achieved through consecration, challenged. The church responded to the criticism of their existing forms of consecration by reforming the liturgy as well as demonstrating the historical and legal basis for the practice. The sermons preached at the consecration or reopening of these churches provided a further opportunity for the clergy to justify the ceremony as well as to draw comparisons between these churches and Dissenting meetinghouses.

At home in the gurdwara? Religious space and the resonance with domesticity in a London suburb

ABSTRACT ‘Home’, as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may ‘scale up’ to the public sphere, particularly among immigrant and religious minorities. Following this insight, we investigate the functional equivalences between domestic space and public, religious one, based on a case study of Sikh gurdwaras in Southall, West London. Besides their everyday function as hubs for spiritual and cultural connections with the Sikh home(land), gurdwaras reveal a parallelism with a private home in two respects: vertical domesticity – the forms of spatial and temporal thresholding that turn a house of worship into the home of the guru – and horizontal domesticity – the home-like routines underpinning community life in gurdwaras. This opens up a novel space to see temples as infrastructures for people’s sense of home, and the reproduction of sacredness inside them as a form of homemaking.

Nowhere to Play: Available Open and Green Space in Greater London Schools

Experiencing outdoor space, especially natural space, during childhood and adolescence has beneficial physical and mental health effects, including improved cognitive and motor skills and a lower risk of obesity. Since school-age children typically spend 35–40 hours per week at schools, we quantified their access to open (non-built-up) space and green space at schools in Greater London. We linked land use information from the UK Ordnance Survey with school characteristics from the Department for Education (DfE) for schools in Greater London. We estimated open space by isolating land and water features within school boundaries and, as a subset of open space, green space defined as open space covered by vegetation. We examined the relationship of both school open and green space with distance to Central London, whether the school was fee-paying, and the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals (as a school-level indicator of socioeconomic status). Almost 400,000 pupils (30% of all pupils in London) attended schools with less than ten square metre per pupil of open space—the minimum recommended area by DfE—and 800,000 pupils attended schools with less than ten square metre per pupil of green space. Of the latter, 70% did not have any public parks in the immediate vicinity of their schools. School green space increased with distance from Central London. There was a weak association between the school-level socioeconomic indicator and the amount of open and green space. Fee-paying schools provided less open space compared to non-fee-paying schools in central parts of London, but the provision became comparable in suburban London. Many London schools do not provide enough open and green space. There is a need to ensure regular contact with green space through safeguarding school grounds from sales, financially supporting disadvantaged schools to increase their outdoor space and providing access to off-site facilities such as sharing outdoor space with other schools.

Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua

Reviewed by: Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua Adrienne Mannov Jatin Dua. Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 264 pp. In Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, anthropologist Jatin Dua has woven an insightful and refreshing monograph about contemporary maritime piracy emanating from Somalia, with specific focus on what he refers to as "an anthropology of protection" (23). For Dua, this means empirically tracking practices of protection that are violent and/or coercive, whether they are meant to protect lifestyles, land, trade routes, financial assets or free trade (19). This move destabilizes the "empirical and analytical divides between piracy and counter-piracy," (4) and Dua shows us how they are, in many ways, quite similar. The introduction to Captured at Sea is a fabulous piece of scholarship that offers important interventions to how we understand sovereignty, and specifically challenges the taken-for-given conceptual divide between the land and the sea. The first three chapters seek to anchor piracy practices to reciprocal kinship groups (diya) and counter-piracy to marine insurance companies (121). He begins with a thorough historical framing of protection practices in the region, and then shows how these practices continue to be relevant in everyday relations with those who practice Somali piracy. His chapter on the connections between counter-piracy and marine insurance is based on the framework of maritime regulations and law. Thereafter, Dua focuses on ransom-making practices (Chapter 4) and on being captive (Chapter 5). The book is based on research that stretched over approximately four years during which he developed a methodology that is "transregional" (24). In practice, this means that Dua not only links sites perceived as separate—such as places at sea and on land or diya groups and insurance [End Page 737] companies—but he shows how these sites are and constituted through their connections across space, time and reciprocal relations. By taking juxtaposed local practices of space, time, and relations seriously, he charts a field of global connections. In fact, describing his own work as "transregional" does not do the scope of this research justice. Dua brings the reader to courtrooms in Kenya and to coastal villages and khat markets in Puntland, northern Somalia, where readers bump along mountain roads with him and worry that he is "no longer a protected guest" (177). We accompany him to the underwriting rooms at Lloyd's of London's marine insurance offices (110) and are introduced to seafarers in Delhi offices, sometime-pirates on Somali shores, and even a pirate boss in "a town in Puntland" (80). We join him at the Multi-National Headquarters—the EU's counter-piracy taskforce—nestled in a suburb of north London (100), at a bar in Djibouti frequented by private armed guards (141), and for lunch in Washington, DC with high-ranking officers from the US military. We meet a wealth of interlocutors: fishermen and pirates, khat merchants, village elders, private armed guards, international seafarers, dhow captains, military figures, marine insurance underwriters and ransom negotiators. Research of this kind requires serious travel and on-going and nimble access negotiation. Dua's methodology is much more than just transregional. Importantly, he also carried out field research at sea, on board small fishing vessels, dhows, naval patrols, and a container ship. Constructing a field of connections across land and sea are key to his arguments. The monograph is also built up around relevant historical accounts. Dua carefully frames Somali piracy within a wider colonial and postcolonial history of Somalia (50), including its civil war from 1969–1991, and within a rich history of trade routes, practices, and relationships in the region (8). Walking the reader through the historical and political underpinnings of hostis humanis generis, or "the enemy of all mankind" (86), we learn that the pirate was not always seen as a criminal, or even as an enemy. Instead, Dua unpacks two kinds of historical thalassocracies: one that is diasporic, and one that is imperial. A diasporic vision allows the lines to be "blurred between seizure and exchange" (12). In the other, piracy is seen...

Gooseman by M. G. Sanchez

Reviewed by: Gooseman by M. G. Sanchez Robert Patrick Newcomb Sanchez, M. G. Gooseman. The Dabuti Collective, 2020. Pp. 449. ISBN 978-1-999-88764-3. Gooseman is the fourth novel by the prolific Gibraltarian author M. G. Sanchez, a fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and columnist, who has affirmed his place as Gibraltar's most important living English-language writer. Gibraltar, a self-governing British territory bordered by Spain and the Mediterranean, is a multilingual community whose writers have published in English and Spanish. A West Yorkshire resident with a PhD in English literature, Sanchez often utilizes his fiction to address the Gibraltarian experience in Great Britain. Gibraltarians have a long history in the United Kingdom, whether as World War II-era evacuees, students, or economic migrants. In Gooseman and elsewhere, Sanchez depicts the ignorance and xenophobia Gibraltarians face, despite their British citizenship, as "foreigners" from a little-known imperial relic. He cleverly represents this dynamic in the title of his new novel: Gooseman is a corruption of the surname of narrator-protagonist Johann Guzman, who is habitually referred to as "Gooseman," "Geeseman," and so on by his British interlocutors. Readers accompany Johann's sputtering progress from childhood to middle age. Born in Gibraltar in the 1970s to working-class parents, Johann is a sensitive, socially awkward boy, who eventually discovers that he suffers from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and agoraphobia. He also periodically self-harms. The young Johann fails to distinguish himself academically, despite his intelligence, and is repulsed by his peers' alcohol-fueled, sex-obsessed social life. He drops out at 15, "with nothing to show for ten years of schooling except a mild to moderate persecution complex and a stolen library copy of Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North" (24). After a period spent self-isolating and failing to live up to his father's expectation that he pay his way ("If you think I'm going to be keeping you without you bringing a wage home, you're out of your head, pishón …" [boy]) (25), Johann heads "to the UK to seek better prospects," as he writes to his parents (85). Johann hopes that by moving "from periphery to centre" (362), he might "start afresh in some place where nobody [would know] about my mentally unstable past, somewhere where character judgments [would be] dependent on what I said" (84). These hopes are quickly dashed. Setting up in the bleak London suburb of Neasden, Johann first works cleaning toilets at McDonald's, then in a mail room. English nativism marks him as a "foreign bahstard [sic]" (377) from the moment he opens his mouth. His mental struggles, which strained by poverty and alienation flower into misanthropy, prevent him from realizing his ties—hinted at by his pilfering of Salih's novel—with his fellow "colonials," that is, the working-class South Asian and African immigrants he encounters in London and later in Yorkshire. Johann also fails at love. His first relationship, with white, middle-class Jules, collapses under the weight of deception (ashamed of his poverty, he pretends to be a graduate student), his emotional instability, and her parents' snobbery. His second, with Ashrita, a civil servant, implodes in spectacular fashion after a night at a swingers' meetup so disastrous that she—improbably—abandons her job, returns to her Indian immigrant parents in Bradford, and agrees to an arranged marriage. Johann's life moves from malaise to crisis when, after failing to convince Ashrita to return to London, he is accosted by a group of Bradford teenagers. Misidentified based on his accent ("'Geeb-ral-tar … 'that's still Kosorvo, mate, innit?") (301), Johann becomes the victim of a hate crime, and is stabbed and beaten so viciously that he is left disabled. After a prolonged hospital stay leaves him homeless and unemployed, Johann is moved to public housing in nearby [End Page 750] Wakefield, where his accent and disability earn him harassment from a second gang of bigoted teens. Verbal threats escalate to property destruction, and most disturbingly, the shoving of a crucified rat through his letterbox. Johann eventually lures the group's sadistic leader into his apartment, where in a scene both...

Alcohol and Personal Security in the Built Environment: Student Engagement in the Night-time Economy of Kingston upon Thames, London, UK

London has a diverse and dynamic night-time economy (NTE) valued in 2018 at £5 billion. The London Assembly’s vision for future growth includes creative partnerships with outer-London boroughs to share opportunity and minimise economic decline in suburban high streets. Studies from cities across the UK recognise the contribution of University students to the NTE, but the situation in suburban London is under-researched. This exploratory study based on evidence from 604 University students in Kingston upon Thames (London) addresses that issue. It identifies relationships between time-based activity spaces of student life style and the built environment; defines time-phases and levels of alcohol consumption reconstructing journey-to-drink movements; identifies patterns of night-time expenditure; positions activity spaces in student life style within a framework of management control and local crime environments; and examines town centre issues of victimisation and personal security. The study advocates further policy-informed studies of under-researched groups in the mosaic of recreational spaces throughout London’s NTE.