History Of London Research Articles

“We Can Make Something Out of Anything”: Sally Potter's Thriller and London's History of Queer Feminist Film Spaces

The National Trust, a British charity founded in 1895 that manages heritage buildings and open spaces for the UK, is now running daytime tours of London's queer club culture from 1918 to 1967 (when the Sexual Offences Act decriminalized private homosexual acts between men over the age of 21), ending at a version of the Caravan, a queer-friendly members' club from 1934 recreated from police records and court reports. Further, the queer activists Sexual Avengers marked 2017's LGBT History month by placing unofficial “Queer Heritage” blue plaques on London landmarks, including one that commemorated the 1988 action against Section 28 in which four lesbians rappelled into the second chamber of the UK Parliament, the House of Lords. The fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act is being marked this summer by programming at the British Film Institute and other UK cultural institutions. With the National Trust also showcasing the portrait of the Lord Orlando, it is a time when queer histories are clearly entering the mainstream curatorial and cultural spaces and interpretations, making 2017 a productive time to offer a thick description of the complexities of labor, politics, and creative practice that may be smoothed over by this move. At the same time, current queer and feminist spaces in London (as elsewhere in the overdeveloped world) are encountering a recapitulation and intensification of the 1970s version of austerity and precarity that formed both the pretext and subtext of Potter's first film, Thriller (1979), making it an ideal text through which to examine these issues.

Pandora's Box: Forty Years of Housing History

Housing history has been part of the mix of articles in The London Journal from its inception in 1975. The housing articles cover a wide period of London's history from early modern times to the contemporary city, and they track the major changes in historical method and sources that have become available over the last forty years. As has been noted by others, the contemporary has fallen out of the coverage, which is a pity since the housing debate in the capital has become more insistent, and it would seem that housing history has much to offer, not in the way of answers, but with strategies from the past for dealing with a perennial and intransigent problem.

Review: Italy: Modern Architectures in History, by Diane Ghirardo

Diane Ghirardo Italy: Modern Architectures in History London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 336 pp., 207 b/w illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781861898647 When we think of the history of modern architecture the story might revolve around the Germans and the Bauhaus, but Diane Ghirardo’s Italy: Modern Architectures in History might give us pause, since it reminds us of a more fundamental driver of “the modern,” namely, the rise of the nation-state. This was a significant aspect for the Prussians during the Enlightenment, and indeed some have argued that Friedrich Schinkel was, in a sense, the first modern for the Germans. But the German unification as such took place only in 1871, and though there are many parallels, the Italian situation was considerably more stressed, for they not only had to build a nation-state after 1861 out of the chaos of unification but also had to do so in the vortex of modern industrialization. Timing was everything; the Greeks won their independence in 1830, but the Greeks never accepted—or perhaps one can say embraced— “the crisis of modernity” in quite the same way as the Italians. The task of creating Italy’s image fell, of course, to the architects, city designers, and artists whose accomplishments gave visible definition to the question of what a national architecture should look like, especially in comparison with the architecture of countries far ahead in the modernization enterprise. The Italians were not alone in that general ambition. The Americas were equally concerned with developing a national style, as were many of the other European nations in the era of Romantic nationalism. But the Italian story remains unique, given the tension between that nation’s deep history and its now-nationalized civilizational ambitions. Unique to the Italian perspective was the situation that the country was not a colonial power with access to far-flung resources. In 1861, it was largely a rural nation. The scale of the transformation should, therefore, not be underestimated. …

Review: Concrete and Culture: A Material History, by Adrian Forty

Adrian Forty Concrete and Culture: A Material History London: Reaktion Books, 2012, 336 pp., 127 b/w illus. $36 (cloth), ISBN 9781861898975 The ubiquitous use of concrete in modern infrastructure and architecture often symbolizes urbanity; it also connotes modernity, civilization, culture, and human pride in technology, alongside efficiency, industry, and progress. Concrete can also be quite ugly (many people find it aesthetically repellant) if not ecologically unsustainable. As Adrian Forty notes, concrete manufacturing accounts for up to 10 percent of all the world’s CO2 emissions, contributing to drastic changes in our planet’s climate conditions.1 With somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 billion tons of cement manufactured each year, the unsustainability of our global concrete production is inarguably shocking; and since concrete often weathers badly in comparison to stone or other building materials, the ecological problem of its manufacture is compounded. With the demand for cement estimated to double by 2042, as Forty observes, we should be concerned that despite continued technological advancements, our apparently insatiable desire to build with concrete is becoming a serious problem. Forty’s concern about the sustainability of concrete as a building material is compelling, particularly coming from an author who has written a 300-page book celebrating the rhetorical meaning of concrete in our recent history. This ambiguity about the value of concrete, if seemingly contradictory, reveals the challenges facing architecture and architectural historians today. Many building construction techniques developed in the modern era have initiated unsustainable practices that are consuming world resources at an alarming rate, permanently altering the physical makeup of our planet and not necessarily for the better. How are we to wrestle with such substantive human problems while maintaining our fetishistic love for industrial technologies and materials? This is a question that Forty’s book challenges us to consider. Structured into ten readable chapters that explore concrete from its roots in building structure to more recent uses as predominantly nonstructural interior surface treatments, Forty’s book …

Mobilities at a standstill: regulating circulation in London c. 1863–1870

The article explores the relationship between regulating traffic and structuring congestion in mid-nineteenth-century London. It examines plans for the opening of new streets and for the erection of dedicated structures such as subways and pedestrian bridges, as well as the debates around legislation regulating everyday practices, which included the introduction of time intervals and designating pedestrian street crossings. The need for people and vehicles to circulate was central to all of these as were the reactions against congestion. The article interrogates the extent to which the study of what might be termed circulation's inextricable other, namely congestion, sheds a new light on our understanding of the experience of modernity at a particular time in London's history.

Archaeology and the London Thames: past, present and future

Throughout London's history the Thames has functioned as the city's main artery, but the archaeology of the river and its floodplain has, until recently, attracted relatively little attention. Now a wealth of new evidence of changes in prehistoric land use, vegetation and sea level is being recovered, some of which is relevant to present-day policies of river management.

About this title ‐ Military Aspects of Hydrogeology

This book, generated under the auspices of the Geological Society of London's History of Geology and Hydrogeological Groups, contains 20 papers from authors in the UK, USA, Germany and Austria. Historically, it gives examples of the influence of groundwater on battlefield tactics and fortress construction; describes how groundwater was developed for water supply and overcome as an obstacle to military engineering and cross-country vehicular movement by both sides in World Wars I and II; and culminates with examples of the application of hydrogeology to site boreholes in recent conflicts, notably in Afghanistan. Examples of current research described include hydrological model development; the impact of variations in soil moisture on explosive threat detection and cross-country vehicle mobility; contamination arising from defence sites and its remediation; privatization of water supplies; and the equitable allocation of resources derived from an international transboundary aquifer.

London: a life in maps

Like all the great historic cities of Europe, London appears to us solid and unchanging. We feel that we can still explore the London of Dickens, Dr. Johnson, Defoe, Wren and even Shakespeare. The very names St Paul's, Smithfield, Charing Cross, St James's, seem to link us with those past eras. But this solidity is an illusion, for throughout its long history London has been changing and evolving. It has been renewing or replacing the streets and buildings at its heart and has been spreading inexorably outwards. This process is vividly illustrated by maps of London that have been drawn and published over the past 500 years; and this book offers a magnificent panorama of London's history by focusing on its maps. The link between London and Westminster; the devastation of the Great Fire; the emergence of the West End as a place of fashion; the opening of the Royal Parks; the building of the docks; the coming of the railway age; the impact of World Wars - all these processes and many more are evident in these historic maps. Approximately 200 important maps from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day are illustrated and discussed. For all those who know but who wish to look behind the modern facade, London, A Life in Maps should prove irresistible, highlighting the challenge of predicting London's future development and character.

Literary London: Post-, Ex-, Trans-, Neo-?

THE OTHER DAY, ON THE COMMERCIAL ROAD, just past Aldgate where street suddenly changes from wealthy private corporate zone City London into one main drags poorest local borough in England, Tower Hamlets, I witnessed a time-honoured London tradition. (1) One man, insensibly drunk on pavement, was approached by two Russians, who expertly rolled him first one way then another, fishing wallet from one pocket and cell phone from another. As they stood up, they were stopped by a Bangladeshi man, remonstrating with them over supine body. boys had already spirited their loot away: in dumb-show, they held out empty hands and patted their empty front pockets with affronted innocence before walking away. My bus inched on from this tableau towards Stepney and Limehouse, those historic centres migrations to London. twentieth century began in East End with dense populations Russian and Eastern European Jews. They began to disperse slowly from ghettos Whitechapel after peak 1930s, to be replaced from early 1970s by refugees from Sylheti region Bangladesh. Now twenty-first century has seen a burgeoning new population Russian and Eastern Europeans again, partly escaping poverty, partly religious persecution and ethnic wars 1990s. And East Enders continue to roll drunks, a sport born economic desperation. In large industry contemporary writings about London, such an incident might be written up in two ways. first could be called Gothic mode, best represented by Peter Ackroyd's monumental tome, London: A Biography. The nature time in London is mysterious, he asserts (661), pointing out spooky repetitions and strange inheritances across centuries, and hinting at a magical theory of that territorial imperative, or genius loci, which keeps inhabitants in same area (141). London is a haunted city, subject to spectral invasions from an unquiet past. Its present occupants are driven by compulsions they barely understand, conjured by spirit itself. For theory this London, see any number critical works by Julian Wolfreys; for avant-garde practice it, read novels and urban investigations by lain Sinclair. Ackroyd has made a popular career out Gothicizing London. Yet for all this apparent steeping in history, result is curiously ahistorical--Ackroyd emphasizes a cyclical, mythical London, an irrational place which can be organized and controlled only by means private ritual or public superstition (216). To read event on Commercial Road in a more materialist way would be to turn to second contemporary mode: London as global city, revived from its long-term decline in last twenty years to become a central economic and cultural node new transnational flows capital, information, and people. Global London means high finance and lowly poverty cheek by jowl. is, claims newly created Greater London Authority (established in 2000) in its recently published London Plan, the world's most economically internationalised city and the most culturally diverse in world (par. 1). In terms statistics migrant populations, latter claim is untrue (Miami and Toronto top those lists), but aggressive self-promotion is integral to every global now. So this is also London claimed to have come into being in post-1945 era by two books under review. That these books have appeared virtually simultaneously, and just a year behind Sukhdev Sandhu's history London's Black and Asian writers, suggests that a certain critical mass has gathered behind idea a London. term postcolonial is course extremely contentious, often with its theorists arguing quite entrenched positions, but Ball and MacLeod eschew obscurity and navigate reader through their respective understandings field with lucidity. …

Metropolitan comparisons: London as a city-state*

Abstract This article explores ideas associated with the term ‘metropolis’, especially when used concerning London, and then takes the notion of the city-state as a heuristic device to identify recurrent and fundamental characteristics of this particular metropolis. The comparisons are between successive phases in London's history, including the present; between London and other metropolises; and between London and that elusive ideal type, the ‘city-state’.

World Systems and London's History

World Systems and London's History

World Systems and London's History

World Systems and London's History

The Immigrant Experience in London's History

(1989). The Immigrant Experience in London's History. The London Journal: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 71-75.

The Immigrant Experience in London's History

The Immigrant Experience in London's History

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:Pollock's Principles of Contract. Twelfth edition. By Professor Winfield, K.C.Constitutional Law. By E. C. S. Wade and G. Godfrey Phillips.The Education Act, 1944. By Alfred E. Ekin, b.sc., ll.d.Wurtzburg's Law Relating to Building Societies. Ninth edition by G. W. Knowles, m.a., Barrister‐at‐Law.The Mystery of ‘Peter the Painter’. By J. P. Eddy, k.c. With a Prefatory Note by Eveleigh Nash and a Foreword by Sir Philip Gibbs.This is a very short description of an interesting chapter in London's history—the Sidney Street siege. It adds little—except some photographs—to our previous knowledge or to Mr. Winston Churchill's well‐known account.Comparative Law. An Introduction to the Comparative Method of Legal Study and Research. By H. C. Gutteridge, k.c., Bencher of the Hon. Society of Lincoln's Inn, etc.Judicial Decision and Practical Judgment. By Morris Gall.