History and Today

Went to see Jimmy Cauty's New Bedford Rising /Aftermath Dislocation Principle installation in a railway arch in Southwark. A dystopia of the ruins of Bedford, with a ziggurat tower being built next to its remains, as 'New Bedford', which he bills as a 'utopian rebuild'. Bedfordshire Police: fighting crime, building pyramids what's left of the rural (un)idyll New Bedford tower under construction Parts of it reminded me of Civilia: the End of Suburban Man (1971) by 'Ivor de Wofle' (Hubert de Cronin Hastings, of the Architectural Review), in which he describes the suburbia around Nuneaton, and then proposes a whole new city on drastically new lines, including vertical living in a university: Nuneaton: dismal areas of unkempt grass between rashes of subtopian building straggling alongside overwide roads. plan for a new university of Civilia

A year or so ago I spent a long time transcribing the Manchester subscribers to the Chartist Co-Operative Land Company. The records are in a big volume now at the National Archives (ref to follow). I've given the database of 644 subscribers from Manchester to Mark Crail to put on his wonderful Chartist Ancestors website , to accompany previous transcriptions of other towns by Jamie Bronstein. They contain the names, occupations and full addresses of the subscribers from 1847. Go to Mark's website to see the names here: http://www.chartists.net/chartist-land-plan/manchester-chartists-land-plan-supporters/ Read his blog here: http://chartist-ancestors.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/was-your-ancestor-manchester-chartist.html I'm going to map them when I have time and put them on http://protesthistory.org.uk when I have time. Here's the 1841 census entry for one Land Plan subscriber that Mark picked out: Robert Bellis, tripe dresser and dealer of 30 Pollard Street, Ancoa...

Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 is out with Manchester University Press on 1 December. I've just received my copy and it looks great! http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719097058 There was so much that went on the cutting room floor in the final edit, so I've put the choice leftovers on my website to accompany the book: http://protesthistory.org.uk I have also put my data on there and lots of interactive maps and geo-referenced historic maps and sources to use. It's 'the book plus' and I hope is an interesting way of exploring the material. http://protesthistory.org.uk Please cite the website and my name if you are using them elsewhere. More to come as I keep updating the database.

Here's my full talk at BL Labs.  I'll blog on the wonderful day soon.

Political meetings mapper, British Library Labs symposium, 2 November 2015 from Katrina Navickas And a cheesy cartoon version:  

I'll report on the fantastic BL Labs symposium of 2 November soon. In the meantime here's the video explaining my Political Meetings Mapper project and clips of the Chartist tour of London that we did in September. The video was filmed and edited by Adam Jones-Lloyd. There are subtitles if you need them.  

I'm going to be doing the big reveal of Political Meetings Mapper at the British Library Labs symposium on Monday 2 November. I'll post the slides and link here after the event, so you'll get to find out how I got from this when I started my postgrad research all those years ago: to this: (the most exciting video on the internet....) And the video of our Chartist tour of London pubs: me doing a 'news reporter in the street in the rain' impression

The 2015 Conference of the University of Hertfordshire's Social Science, Arts and Humanities Research Institute (SSAHRI) Spirella Ballroom Bridge Road, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, SG6 4ET 10.30am-5pm, 12th November 2015 followed by a public lecture and reception This year's SSAHRI conference, organised by colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Lincoln, and very kindly supported by the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, is on the theme of utopias. It is very appropriate that the conference will be taking place in Letchworth, the world's first Garden City – and one of the first practical experiments in Utopianism. The conference is exploring the concept of Utopia – we will be looking at utopias from all sorts of angles: social, economic, educational, environmental, literary, cultural, aesthetic and philosophical to name a few. The conference Keynote speech will be delivered by distinguished architectural histori...

This question was sparked by a twitter conversation around George Gosling's excellent blog post introducing types of academic writing to undergraduates: https://gcgosling.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/reading1/  George explains that there are four types of academic writing, from textbooks, monographs, journal articles and edited collections of essays. This is true and correct, but his explanation of what a journal article (and indeed a journal) got me thinking and debating with Barry Doyle, Darryl Leeworthy and Mark Freeman about how students view journals in the age of online access. I've found that first year undergraduates get really confused about what a journal is, and what the difference is between a journal and a journal article. This is not surprising, as their first weeks at university are 99% the first time they've ever encountered such a specialist type of writing and publication. In order to explain what a journal is, therefore, I (and it seems the rest of us a...

map of the route, overlaid on Richard Horwood's 1799 map of London On Monday 21 September, as part of my British Library Labs project, we held a Chartist day and walking tour around West London. The Political Meetings Mapper has uncovered over 125 venues in London used for Chartist meetings in the 1840s. The BL Labs team took over 30 academics and members of the general public round a tour of some of the sites that I found still standing today.  We were pleased so many people turned up in costume, and everyone got to wear a traditional red, cream and green rosette! Thanks to every one for coming along, and braving the rain. Thanks also to Mahendra Mahey of the BL for doing the running round organising logistics, and to Adam Lloyd Jones for the filming.  We began with some talks in the Foyle Centre for Conservation conference suite. Mahendra Mahey introduced the work of BL Labs. I then discussed the Political Meetings Mapper and gave a background to Chartis...