Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T12:50:12.576Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cities, spaces and movement: everyday experiences of urban travel in England c. 1840–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2016

COLIN G. POOLEY*
Affiliation:
Lancaster Environment Centre and Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YQ, UK

Abstract

Travelling through a city was (and remains) a routine experience for many people, but direct information on such movements is hard to uncover for the more distant past. This article uses selected diaries to explore the ways in which urban residents interacted with and responded to the spaces through which they travelled in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It is argued that while some types of travel and associated environments did generate strong responses that diarists felt worth recording, for the most part urban travel was unproblematic and unremarkable and was therefore rarely remarked upon in life writing.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For example, Lynch, K., The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1960)Google Scholar; Gottdiener, M., The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin, 2010)Google Scholar; Pile, S., Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London, 2005)Google Scholar; Gieseking, J., Mangold, W., Katz, C., Low, S. and Saegert, S. (eds.), The People, Place, and Space Reader (London, 2014)Google Scholar.

2 See Pooley, C., Turnbull, J. and Adams, M., A Mobile Century? Changes in Everyday Mobility in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2005)Google Scholar, for one approach to reconstructing twentieth-century mobilities using mainly oral evidence, but this does not explicitly explore environmental engagement.

3 See, for example, material in Gilloch, G., Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Hoboken, 2013)Google Scholar; de Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solnit, R., Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Kern, S., The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 But see, for example, Pooley, C. and Turnbull, J., ‘Changing home and workplace in Victorian London: the life of Henry Jaques shirtmaker’, Urban History, 24 (1997), 148–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawton, R. and Pooley, C., ‘David Brindley's Liverpool: an aspect of urban society in the 1880s’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 126 (1975), 149–68Google Scholar.

5 For a more extended discussion in the context of nineteenth-century British cities, see Pooley, C., ‘Patterns on the ground: urban form, residential structure and the social construction of space’, in Daunton, M. (ed.), Cambridge Urban History, vol. III: 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 429–65Google Scholar.

6 Park, R. and Burgess, E., The City (Chicago, 1925), 1 Google Scholar.

7 Lynch, Image of the City.

8 Harvey, D., Social Justice and the City (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Harvey, D., The Urbanization of Capital (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Harvey, D., Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.

9 Tuan, Y., Topophilia (Englewood Cliffs, 1974)Google Scholar; Tuan, Y., Landscapes of Fear (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar.

10 Self, W., Psychogeography (London, 2007)Google Scholar; Bonnett, A., ‘The dilemmas of radical nostalgia in British psychogeography’, Theory, Culture and Society, 26 (2009), 4570 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coverley, M., Psychogeography (Harpenden, 2010)Google Scholar.

11 Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

12 Ricketts, J., Evans, J. and Jones, P., ‘Mobile methodologies: theory, technology and practice’, Geography Compass, 2 (2008), 1266–85Google Scholar; Fincham, B., McGuiness, M. and Murray, L., Mobile Methodologies (Basingstoke, 2009)Google Scholar; Carpiano, R., ‘Come take a walk with me: the “Go-Along” interview as a novel method for studying the implications of place for health and well-being’, Health and Place, 15 (2009), 263–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Ponsonby, A., English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, with an Introduction on Diary Writing (Ann Arbor, 1923)Google Scholar; Fothergill, R., Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Vickery, A., The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar; Lejeune, P., On Diary (Honolulu, 2009)Google Scholar.

14 Autobiographies and life histories have been much more extensively used in historical research than have diaries; however, they do not provide the immediacy of a daily diary and rarely provide detailed information on everyday movements. Examples of historical research using autobiographies and memoirs include Humphries, J., Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Delap, L., Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, E., Liberty's Dawn. A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Young, K. and Garside, P., Metropolitan London, Politics and Urban Change, 1837–1981 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Law, M., The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London (Manchester, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Gordon, G. (ed.), Regional Cities of the UK 1890–1980 (London, 1986)Google Scholar; A vision of Britain through time: www.visionofbritain.org.uk/; Patmore, J., ‘The railway network of the Manchester conurbation’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), 34 (1964), 159–73Google Scholar; Patmore, J., ‘The railway network of Merseyside’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), 29 (1961), 231–44Google Scholar.

17 For example, Ingold, T., ‘Culture on the ground: the world perceived through feet’, Journal of Material Culture, 9 (2004), 315–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merriman, P., ‘Driving places Marc Augé, non-places, and the geographies of England's M1 motorway’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21 (2004), 145–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheller, M., ‘Automotive emotions feeling the car’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21 (2004), 221–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spinney, J., ‘A place of sense: a kinaesthetic ethnography of cyclists on Mont Ventoux’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (2006), 709–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ingold, T. and Vergunst, J. (eds.), Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Aldershot, 2008)Google Scholar; Spinney, J., ‘Cycling the city: movement, meaning and method’, Geography Compass, 3 (2009), 817–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Middleton, J., ‘Sense and the city: exploring the embodied geographies of urban walking’, Social and Cultural Geography, 11 (2010), 575–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lorimer, H., ‘Walking: new forms and spaces for studies of pedestrianism’, in Cresswell, T. and Merriman, P. (eds.), Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Farnham, 2011), 1934 Google Scholar.

18 John Leeson diary, London, 6 Aug. 1859.

19 Elizabeth Lee diary, Merseyside, 28 Jan. 1890.

20 Ida Berry diary, Manchester, 18 Dec. 1904.

21 Ida Berry diary, Manchester, 8 Aug. 1906.

22 Pooley, C., ‘Uncertain mobilities: a view from the past’, Transfers, 3 (2013), 2644 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 John Leeson diary, London, 26 Apr. 1861.

24 Ida Berry diary, Manchester, 24 Jul. 1906.

25 Elizabeth Lee diary, Merseyside, 4 Nov. 1886.

26 Elizabeth Lee diary, Merseyside, 5 Jul. 1887.

27 For instance, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Rappaport, E., Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar; Rendall, J., Women in an Industrializing Society: England, 1750–1880 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

28 Studies that develop this theme include Gordon, E. and Nair, G., Public Lives: Women, Family, and Society in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 2003)Google Scholar; Pooley, C. and Pooley, S., ‘Constructing a suburban identity: the everyday life of a young late Victorian female’, Journal of Historical Geography, 36 (2010), 402–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmucki, B., ‘“If I walked on my own at night I stuck to well-lit areas”. Gendered spaces and urban transport in twentieth-century Britain’, Research in Transportation Economics, 34 (2012), 7485 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Jakle, J., The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln, NE, 1985)Google Scholar; Adler, J., ‘Origins of sightseeing’, Annals of Tourism Research, 16 (1989), 729 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 John Lee diary, Leeds/Bradford, 26 Aug. 1859.

31 John Leeson diary, London, 17 May 1862.

32 Elizabeth Lee diary, 18 Jun. 1886.

33 Elizabeth Lee diary, 13 Aug. 1892.

34 Catherine Gayler diary, Lincolnshire, 30 Jun. 1934.

35 Pooley, C., ‘Getting to know the city: the construction of spatial knowledge in London in the 1930s’, Urban History, 31 (2004), 210–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Rhona Little diary, 29 Jan. 1938.

37 Rhona Little diary, 8 May 1938.

38 John Lee diary, 29 Aug. 1859.

39 John Lee diary, 1 Sep. 1859.

40 Elizabeth Lee diary, 2 Aug. 1885.

41 Elizabeth Lee diary, 1 Feb. 1886.

42 Rhona Little diary, 8 Jul. 1938.

43 Catherine Gayler diary, 25 Aug. 1934.

44 Catherine Gayler diary, 5 Oct. 1934.

45 Sibley, D., Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, P., ‘No teens allowed: the exclusion of adolescents from public spaces’, Landscape Journal, 21 (2002), 156–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gough, J., Eisenschitz, A. and McCulloch, A., Spaces of Social Exclusion (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

46 Elizabeth Lee diary, 26 Aug. 1887.

47 Elizabeth Lee diary, 1 Sep. 1884.

48 Elizabeth Lee diary, 30 Mar. 1886.

49 Ida Berry diary, 1 Jul. 1905.

50 Ida Berry diary, 3 Jul. 1905.

51 Rhona Little diary, 14 Sep. 1938.

52 Rhona Little diary, 15 Sep. 1938.

53 Rhona Little diary, 24 Aug. 1939.

54 John Leeson diary, London, 13 Nov. 1846.

55 Elizabeth Lee diary, 12 Jan. 1884.

56 Diary of Catherine Gayler, Lincolnshire, 13 Jan. 1934.

57 Examples of research using such sources include Liepmann, K., The Journey to Work: Its Significance for Industrial and Community Life (London, 1944)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Westergaard, J., ‘Journeys to work in the London region’, Town Planning Review, 28 (1957), 3762 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawton, R., ‘The journey to work in England and Wales: forty years of change’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geographie, 44 (1963), 61–9Google Scholar; Warnes, A., ‘Estimates of journey to work distances from census statistics’, Regional Studies, 6 (1972), 315–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pooley, C. and Turnbull, J., ‘The journey to work: a century of change’, Area, 31 (1999), 282–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abernethy, S., ‘Opening up the suburbs: workmen's trains in London 1860–1914’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 7088 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Solnit, Wanderlust.

59 Coverley, Psychogeography.