Role Of London Research Articles

World Politics by Other Means? London, City Diplomacy and the Olympics

Summary Drawing on the case of the Olympics, and in particular on the role of London in securing, planning and administering the 2012 Summer Games, this article investigates how cities participate in world politics beyond the traditional avenues of the international system. Tracing how the planning of a sporting mega-event has been woven into London’s international role as a global ‘green’ leader, the article seeks to shed some light on the diplomatic role of cities, as well as on how sport has been used in relation to city diplomacy and urban governance. The Olympics offer a unique window on the multi-scalar reach of these subnational authorities, allowing for substantial public diplomacy initiatives. Major cities such as London, as the article argues, can exert a pervasive diplomatic influence, and planning for sporting events can extend their capacity to link ‘city diplomacy’ with tangible impacts on everyday lives.

Diplomacy and Loans: the Foreign Office, Economic Reconstruction, and Security in South-Eastern Europe in the 1920s

This article embarks on the discussion of tensions between political and finanical strands of British policy towards two smaller states in South-Eastern Europe – Hungary and Bulgaria – during the first decade after the First World War. The two case studies examine the way in which conflicting agendas of the Foreign Office and the Treasury affected each other in connexion with reconstruction loans given to Hungary and Bulgaria. They touch on that part of foreign policy where both the Foreign Office and the Treasury were concerned, and where economic reconstruction, promoted by the latter, clashed with what were primarily security considerations, pursued by the former. The role of London as a financial centre of the world and the key position of the Bank of England in carrying out collaborative enterprises of great international banks provided the Foreign Office with a valuable lever to bring pressure to bear on the smaller South-Eastern European Countries and force them conform to Whitehall's expectations. However, the opportunities this offered invariably went begging due to the Treasury's unfaltering resolve to proceed with its own schemes and its refusal to cooperate with the Foreign Office and allow it to achieve its political goals.

‘I lov’de thee best’: London as Male Beloved in Isabella Whitney’s ‘The Manner of her Wyll’

This paper reflects on the role of London as male Beloved in Whitney’s ‘Last Wyll and Testament’. Such a characterization of the city, the paper argues, has two consequences. First, it complicates and provides an important challenge to the ubiquitous personification of London as female in early modern England. Second, this dynamic between female speaker and male Beloved encourages a reconsideration of Whitney’s agency in the poem — often celebrated as forceful — as more consciously ironic (although, ultimately, all the more compelling and effective because of it).

High Street Adaptations: Ethnicity, Independent Retail Practices, and Localism in London's Urban Margins

Two key forces are likely to impact on the retail profile of London's high streets. First is the increasing expansion of London's retail sector across both affiliated and independent sectors, paralleled with economic volatility associated in part with the global crisis in 2008. The second is the political shift, at both national and city scales, towards the recognition of small independent shops and local high streets, as signalled in The Mayor's Draft Replacement London Plan, 2010. This brings us to a third consideration: the growth of ethnic retail, evidenced particularly in London where national levels of immigration and ethnic diversity are at their highest. The 2010 High Street London report commissioned by the Mayor's Office emphasises ‘the local’ role of London's high streets for a local’ populous, reflecting a larger national policy emphasis on Localism as outlined in The Localism Bill in 2010. This paper explores what forms of planning are best suited to recognise a rapidly evolving retail landscape together with the crucial differentiations inherent in the local landscape. The focus is explicitly contextual: it is London centric in its scope, and relies on detailed survey and ethnographic data of a south London high street located within an area with high Indices of Deprivation. The context sits in contrast to the notions of the village high street and the upmarket high street, which encapsulate cultural notations of vitality and viability which frame much of the literature and policy around the value of high streets. By analysing the adaptive practices of the ethnically diverse, independent retailers on the Walworth Road, socioeconomic measures of high street values are explored. Further, the paper conceptualises adaptation as the strategic adjustments made by independent proprietors in recognition of large-scale economic forces, national regulatory frameworks, and local cultural nuances. The paper reframes ‘the local’ as ‘the particular’ and emphasises the need for disaggregated, fine-grained research on retail practices in high streets which reflect crucial contextual differentiations. Finally it explores what a planning framework and stewardship mechanism for high streets in London's urban margins might comprise.

The Crystal Palace Concerts: Canon Formation and the English Musical Renaissance

Abstract This article examines the role of London's Crystal Palace in the popularization of “classical music” in Victorian Britain, and in the creation of the orchestral canon in the nineteenth century. The Crystal Palace was originally built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and was reconstructed in the London suburb of Sydenham in 1854. This popular attraction assumed a musical prominence in British culture when the ambitious conductor Augustus Manns established an orchestra there in 1855, and presented a series of Saturday Concerts until 1900. Central to this discussion of the significance of the Crystal Palace concerts are two audience plebiscites that Manns conducted, in 1880 and 1887, which shed much light on Victorian popular taste and musical values. As well, particular attention is given to his involvement in the “English Musical Renaissance” in both of its aspects: as a campaign to raise British composers to canonic stature (to construct a “British Beethoven”); and as an effort to securely embed classical music within British culture.

“My Travail’s History”: Perspectives on the Roads to Othello , Stratford-upon-Avon 1959

This article seeks to unite theatre history with the 'real' histories of economics, ideology and race by looking beyond conventional archive materials, tracing the genesis of one of the 20th century's most lauded yet also undermined performances: that of singer, actor, athlete, and anti-fascist activist Paul Robeson as Othello in 1959. The study incorporates archival materials from the RSC and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as well as those from less likely sources, including records held by the FBI and MI5. These materials reveal the tireless efforts of the American and British authorities to prevent Robeson from using the role of Othello as a vehicle for his activism, drawing parallels between the actor's plight and Sergei Yutkevich's 1956 Russian Othello , in which he was refused the right to star despite having received great acclaim for his performances of the role in London (1930) and on Broadway (1942-45). In contextualising the socio-political backdrops against which these earlier productions were set, the article addresses the racial opposition and misrepresentation faced by Robeson for more than 30 years, shedding light on the ways the actor made Othello a symbol of race relations in the twentieth century and how his opponents, echoing the conflicts in Shakespeare's play.

Britishness in Trafalgar Square: Urban Place and the Construction of National Identity

AbstractThis article argues for the importance of urban public place in exploring how contemporary national identity is constructed. I take Trafalgar Square as my case study, exploring how Britishness was reinvented in two events that took place there in 2005: the celebrations for London's successful Olympic host city bid and the commemorative vigil for the victims of the 7 July London bombings. I contend that during these events, Trafalgar Square contributed to the discourse of national identity in three distinct ways: firstly, as a podium for the promulgation of official messages about the two events; secondly, as a tableau that demonstrated the ‘diversity in unity’ that official messages emphasised; and finally as a physical frame that accessed a version of British history to contextualise the events. More generally, the use of the square helped illuminate some important tensions at the heart of contemporary national identity in Britain, such as the question of multiculturalism and the role of London in the national imagination.

Honor, Brotherhood, and the Corporate Ethos of London's Barber-Surgeons' Company, 1570-1640

As the largest and most civically active body of medical practitioners in the late Tudor and early Stuart period, surgeons played a vital role in London's urban landscape, but remained precariously vulnerable to abasement due to the regular contact with death and disease necessitated by their work. Based on an analysis of guild records, printed surgical manuals, and conduct literature, this study explores the emergent corporate ethos of London's Barber-Surgeons' Company and addresses the identity formation of surgeons in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. By implementing codes of conduct and uniform standards of practice, punishing transgressions of propriety, and developing legislation to limit the activities of unlicensed and foreign practitioners, Company officers ardently sought social and occupational legitimacy within a milieu characterized by a tremendous emphasis on status and hierarchy. Rooted in methodology drawn from the social history of medicine and cultural anthropology, this study argues that in response to the persistent stigma associated with their work and London's increasingly prevalent culture of credit, surgeons, like other artisanal groups, sought to enhance their social legitimacy and occupational respectability by manipulating contemporary social rituals, reinforcing the honorable associations of their work, and preserving the veneer of brotherhood and camaraderie.

Building capacity to care: learning for maternity support workers

Maternity support workers (MSW) are an increasingly important part of the maternity workforce. This article describes the results of an extensive study of the reasons why maternity units in London introduced MSWs, the service areas they work in, the duties they undertake and it explores views on effective training and development for the role. The study found that MSW is a reasonably established role in London; typically one MSW is employed for every qualified midwife and works across all care settings. Maternity services introduced the role for a wide range of reasons. There is a pressing need to develop a single accredited learning programme for MSWs to overcome problems with transferability. The study identified the features heads of midwifery would like to see learning programmes address.

The Developing Carbon Financial Service Industry: Expertise, Adaptation and Complementarity in London and New York

London and New York are the world's pre-eminent financial centers. They are essential in processing the financial transactions of the global economy. The circumstances that have given rise to and maintained the preeminence of these centers are well explored in the literature. Less attention has been paid to the importance of these financial centers in organizing the complementary institutions, services, and products of functional and developing markets. This article looks at the role of London and New York, particularly the complementarity of exiting financial infrastructure, in developing a new carbon market. I argue that developing a market from existing financial infrastructure through complementarities is more efficient because it economizes on sunk costs, relies on the marginal pricing of new initiatives, and generally reduces the costs of infrastructure development. Therefore, new markets are best constructed using existing market infrastructure or by developing complementary processes within existent market systems. I investigate three levels of complementarity between (existent and new) markets and within the new carbon market: the complementarity of expertise and information, the complementarity of institutions and services, and the complementarity of market systems. Case studies constructed from expert interviews conducted with banks, brokerages, intermediaries, legal firms, consultancies, and wire services in London and New York are used to support the argument. This paper concludes by commenting on the significance of the financial service centers (geography) where the market is developed.

Tourism, the global city and the labour market in London

Global cities, such as London, are viewed as distinctive in terms of their role in the increasingly globalized economy. There has been considerable academic debate over the nature of global city labour markets and how these can be explained in relation to global city functions. New empirical evidence is presented for the tourism labour market in London and the UK. The pay, conditions and social characteristics of tourism workers in London are examined, and they appear distinctive in terms of their full-time, gender (male), student, ethnicity and migrant characteristics. An explanation is developed that explores the interactions between the global city role of London and other scaled geographical processes that originate, especially at the national level.

The wholesale and retail markets of London, 1660–1840

Markets and marketing are perennial themes in English economic and social history. Yet they remain largely unexplored in relation to London during a period of remarkable growth and change, the long eighteenth century. This article begins to fill that void, by surveying over 70 London produce markets that existed during the period, and identifying patterns in their collective development. It concludes that the physical market place, though ancient in origin, evolved through the ‘commercial revolution’ as a highly dynamic and diverse institution that played a significant role in London's distribution.

London's Place in the World of Finance: A Supply-side Approach

If its prospects were doubted in the early 1990s, London is now the preeminent international financial centre. It dominates its European rivals, and is joined with New York in a non-stop reciprocal global embrace. Whereas some analysts approach this topic concentrating on the nature and quality of market relationships in London and between London and the rest of the world, others emphasize the role that government regulation has played in promoting the growth of the City of London with respect to its European rivals. Here, I elaborate the logic whereby financial products and services are produced at a particular point in space even if financial trading is an increasingly ubiquitous activity in virtual markets. In doing so, my supply-side model emphasises the competitive dynamics of the financial services industry, the distinctive qualities of financial products, and the peculiar place of London in corporate global transactions systems. I mean to show that the production of financial products has been brought to ground (so to speak) in London for a variety of (perhaps non-replicable) reasons. In this regard, my argument is clearly at odds with those analysts of information and communication technology who proclaim the end of geography; I contend that history and geography are important when accounting for the place of London in the world of finance. However, my argument also sits uncomfortably with those who insist upon the persistence and co-existence of different national financial systems. My argument has significant implications for the role of London in the evolving integrated European market for financial services, and for the future of continental European financial centres.

British business in Brazil: maturity and demise (1850-1950)

This paper analyses the long-term trends of ''British business'' in Brazil since 1850. It covers investment and other manifestations of the British presence such as those related to trade as well as financial intermediation. Primary interest is in British involvement in Brazilian private sector activities, whether by direct investment or by the flotation of sterling securities for firms operating in Brazil. The article also considers the role of London as a financial market where Brazilian public loans were floated, the relevance of Britain as a market for Brazilian commodities and as a supplier to Brazil, and British intermediation in Brazilian trade with third countries. It is divided in chronological sections: imperial years (1850-1889); stagnation and boom (1889-1914); first signs of decline (1914-1930), and the divestment period (1930 to the mid-1950's). The final section presents the conclusions and mentions post-1950 trends.

Poor Relief in London during the English Revolution Revisited

This article will argue that the poor relief institutions of seventeenth-century London proved incapable of adequately responding to the increased poverty caused by the economic disruption of the English Civil War. In so doing it challenges previous' optimistic' interpretations of poor relief in Civil War London, in particular that of Ronald Herlan. This study uses qualitative rather than quantitative sources to chart the rise of Civil War poverty, but draws on a wide range of materials from the City of London and the suburbs to evaluate the response of poor relief institutions to the wartime social problems. This subject is of vital importance in recapturing Londoners' experience of the war, and this paper will therefore contribute to the understanding of the role of London in the 'English Revolution'.

London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History, 1775-1825 (review)

In the third chapter of this book, David Barnett poses five sets of questions about the role of London in the Industrial Revolution. First, just how important was the city as a contributor to manufacturing, compared to Manchester, Birmingham, and elsewhere? Did it rely disproportionately on particular industries and types of goods, such as luxuries? Were firms small or large, and was London at the forefront of technology--in the use of steam power, for example? Second, how important was the construction boom in the rapidly expanding conurbation, both as an industry itself and in providing spillovers? Third, can a consumer revolution be identified in the composition of output, the expansion of the wholesaling, retailing, and distributive trades, and did London habits show the way for the rest of the country? Fourth, how important was the service economy, and how did it interact with the rest of the economy? And finally, how important was commerce more generally?

R post-vocalique et histoire de l’anglais

In this paper, I explore the way in which a different norm emerged in England and in the United States concerning the pronunciation of post-vocalic r’s: the R. P. norm (or ‘BBC English’ in the terms of Roach and Hartman’s 1997 edition of Daniel Jones’ English Pronouncing Dictionary) is non-rhotic, whereas the US norm (or ‘Network English’ for the same authors) is rhotic. While the loss of post-vocalic r’s does require an explanation in phonetic and phonological terms, I mainly concentrate on broader sociolinguistic and sociohistorical issue: on the one hand, the early emergence in Britain of London and the surrounding counties as a centre from which changes radiate across the whole of Britain; on the other hand, the complex evolution of English in the United States with the emergence of new social and geographical boundaries. The paper will attempt to show that, while the selection of particular traits to separate dialects is usually arbitrary from a strict linguistic point of view, once a trait has been selected and functions as a ‘shibboleth’ in the Biblical sense (Judges, xii, 5-6, “King James Version”, 1611) powerful societal forces can conjoin to maintain and reinforce it. The role of London vs. New York in explaining rhoticity in Britain and the United States will be seen as a fundamental one.

Essay reviews: Cataloguing for Empire

Richard Owen, The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy. May and June 1837 . Edited with an Introduction by Phillip Reid Sloan. Natural History Museum Publications, 1992. Pp. xii + 340, £37.50 hardback, £15.95 paper. ISBN 0-565-011065, 0-565-011448 Jacob W. Gruber and John C. Thackray, Richard Owen Commemoration: Three Studies . Historical Studies in the Life and Earth Sciences No. 1. Natural History Museum Publications, 1992. Pp. x + 181, £29.95. ISBN 0-565-01109 Over the last 10 to 15 years it has become increasingly clear that an astonishing proportion of Victorian natural history and comparative anatomy revolved around the enigmatic figure of Richard Owen - so much so that when the centenary of his death came around in 1992, the commemorations willingly spread themselves over several days and a great diversity of scientific themes. Owen’s life and work thoroughly embraced the industrious spirit of the nineteenth century. In his time he was renowned as Britain’s most gifted anatomist, as a public lecturer, a palaeontologist, taxonomist and philosopher on natural history topics, and, in another more concrete sense, as the man who brought the Natural History Museum in South Kensington into existence. He catalogued John Hunter’s collection while curator at the Royal College of Surgeons, dissected rare animals from the zoo, invented dinosaurs, classified a succession of gigantic fossil species from the outposts of empire, wrote memoirs on the pearly Nautilus, Australian marsupials, the Archaeopteryx , the aborigines of the Andaman Islands, the gorilla and the dodo, took an active role in London’s scientific society, received a shower of medals, including the Royal Medal in 1846 and the Copley in 1851, went to the opera, played chess with Edwin Landseer, visited the Queen at Osborne, and ended up with a knighthood and an attractive grace-and-favour residence in Richmond, known as Sheen Lodge. Yet in spite of being such a man of parts, Owen was not liked. Thomas Henry Huxley hated him and never ignored an opportunity to fight. Charles Darwin lost his temper over a review of the Origin of Species and never talked to him again. Antonio Panizzi did his best to prevent him splitting up the British Museum’s collections. It is one of the many achievements of these two books, published to coincide with the centenary, that Owen’s pugnacious, self-aggrandizing character and famous slipperiness under pressure emerge, not quite sanitized, but as the kind of ambitious qualities that were needed to get things done.

Reading Performance Criticism

Fred Astaire once remarked of performing in London that he knew when the end of a play's run was approaching when he saw the first black tie in the audience. Perhaps this is an American's ironic representation of the snobbishness of pre-War London (though he was the American who sang the top-hat, white tie and tails into a part of his personal image). Perhaps it is merely an accurate (or nostalgic) picture of the dress code of the audiences of the period. The very appeal to such a dress code, however – in whatever way we choose to read the anecdote – inevitably relies on a whole network of cultural ideas and norms to make its point. It implies tacitly what is easily recoverable from other sources about the theatre of the period: the expected class of the audience; the sense of ‘an evening's entertainment’ – attending the fashionable play of the season, with all the implications of the theatre as a place not merely for seeing but also for being seen; the range of subjects and characters portrayed on the London stage of the period; the role of London as a European capital of a world empire (with a particular self-awareness of itself as a capital); the expected types of narrative, events, and language, that for many modern readers could be evoked with the phrase ‘a Fred Astaire story’. If we want to understand the impact of the plays of Ibsen or Brecht or Osborne or Beckett, it cannot be merely through ‘dramatic techniques’, but must also take into account the social performance that is theatre. Ibsen's commitment to a realist aesthetic is no doubt instrumental to the impact of his plays, but it is because his (socially committed) dramas challenged the proprieties of the social event of theatre that his first reviewers were so hostile.

Wealden nature and the role of London in nineteenth-century artistic imagination

The new outlook on nature as a restorative for jaded urban-dwellers that is associated with Victorians' sense of an increasing separation from their natural environment, had a powerful influence upon the imagination of mid nineteenth-century landscape artists choosing to work in south-east England. Although they established close business relations with the metropolis and provincial cities, they experienced a loss of confidence in London as a subject for landscape painting and with new opportunities for travel provided by railways they preferred to satisfy a quasi-scientific curiosity in the visible appearance of natural and semi-natural beauty in the green world beyond London, especially in the expressively-shaped Weald, long connected with aesthetic appreciation and scientific observation. Their specific contribution of plain-air realism was to conceive the Wealden landscape both as a natural marvel and a human epic, an idea then new and exciting to the mind. Their feelings of awe and wonder have Ruskinian undertones and are inextricably linked with the drama of earth history that natural scientists were simultaneously unfolding in a newly constituted laboratory of field studies. This spiriting of a new, imagined, wilderness out of what wooded nature still survived in a shrunken form after the clearings of pioneer farmers became an inexhaustible source of enrichment to nineteenth-century urban life and conforms at least partially with mid-Victorians' perception of a natural habitat juxtaposed with one of the world's largest and most artificial environments that Victorians themselves were creating. It became a nearly symbolic image of an ideal English landscape which existed largely as a protected paradise of the urban imagination.