Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T15:30:35.495Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Place and voluntary activity in inter-war England: topophilia and professionalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2017

JOHN PENDLEBURY  and
LUCY E. HEWITT
JOHN PENDLEBURY
Affiliation:
Global Urban Research Unit, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK
LUCY E. HEWITT
Affiliation:
Urban Studies, Bute Gardens, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

During the inter-war period, the formation of amenity groups marked a new phase in the way place was conceived and shaped and their establishment and relationship with newly empowered local authorities remains an under-examined aspect of the management of towns and cities at the time. Focusing on the motivations for group formation in Birmingham and Norwich, we explore how complex relationships of attachment to place, or topophilia, entered into dialogue with professionalizing approaches to urban development and shed new light on attitudes to urban conservation and planning in the inter-war period. The article also adds a historical perspective to work on affective relationships with place.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 453 - 470
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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 Baxendale, J., Priestley's England: J. B. Priestly and English Culture (Manchester, 2007), 92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For Birmingham, the documents consulted include annual reports, minutes of the council and technical committee between 1918 and 1940, publications associated with the group and letters exchanged with the city council or other institutions. For Norwich, annual reports and committee minute books have been consulted as have files held by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) on Norwich, which include correspondence with members of the Norwich Society (NS). The minutes of the Ancient Buildings Committee of Norwich Corporation, which existed for a few years in the 1920s, were also a key source.

3 Barker, A. and Keating, M., ‘Public spirits: amenity societies and others’, in Crouch, C. (ed.) Participation in Politics (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Hewitt, L.E., ‘Towards a greater urban geography: regional planning and associational networks in London during the early twentieth century’, Planning Perspectives, 26 (2011), 551–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hewitt, L.E., ‘Associational culture and the shaping of place: civic societies in Britain before 1960’, Urban History, 39 (2012), 590–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hewitt, L.E. and Pendlebury, J., ‘Local associations and participation in place: change and continuity in the relationship between state and civil society during the twentieth century’, Planning Perspectives, 29 (2014), 25–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowe, P.D., ‘Amenity and equity: a review of local environmental pressure groups in Britain’, Environment and Planning A, 9 (1977), 35–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For example Cooper, A.J., Planners and Preservationists: The Cambridge Preservation Society and the City's Green Belt 1929–1985 (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar.

5 For example Cresswell, T., Place: An Introduction (Chichester, 2015)Google Scholar; Tomaney, J., ‘Region and place II: belonging’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (2015), 507–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Glendinning, M., The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation (London, 2013)Google Scholar; Jokilehto, J., A History of Architectural Conservation (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.

7 Brace, C., ‘Envisioning England: the visual in countryside writing in the 1930s and 1940s’, Landscape Research, 28 (2003), 365–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chase, M., ‘This is no claptrap: this is our heritage’, in Shaw, C. and Chase, M. (eds.), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989), 128–46Google Scholar; Matless, D., Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998)Google Scholar; Murdoch, J. and Lowe, P., ‘The preservationist paradox: modernism, environmentalism and the politics of spatial division’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28 (2003), 318–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Morris, R.J., ‘Voluntary societies and British urban elites, 1780–1850: an analysis’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 95–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, R.J., ‘Civil society and the nature of urbanism: Britain, 1750–1850’, Urban History, 25 (1998), 289–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morton, G., de Vries, B. and Morris, R.J. (eds.), Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places: Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Clark, P., British Clubs and Societies, 1680–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 460.Google Scholar

10 Levine, P., The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Miele, C. (ed.), From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939 (New Haven and London, 2005)Google Scholar.

11 Wright, M., Lord Leverhulme's Unknown Adventure: The Lever Chair and the Beginnings of Town and Regional Planning, 1908–1948 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Whyte, W., ‘The 1910 Royal Institute of British Architects’ Conference: a focus for international town planning?’ Urban History, 39 (2012), 149–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Ward, S., Planning and Urban Change (London, 2004), 29Google Scholar.

13 Agnew, J., Politics and Place (Boston, 1987)Google Scholar.

14 Cresswell, Place.

15 Relph, E.C., Place and Placelessness (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Tuan, Y.F., Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Columbia, 1974)Google Scholar; Tuan, Y.F., Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, 1977)Google Scholar.

16 Cresswell, Place.

17 Grenville, J., ‘Conservation as psychology: ontological security and the built environment’, International Journal for Heritage Studies, 13 (2007), 447–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Harvey, D., ‘From space to place and back again’, in Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T., Robertson, G. and Tickner, L. (eds.), Mapping the Futures (London, 1993), 3–29Google Scholar.

19 MacLeod, G. and Jones, M., ‘Territorial, scalar, networked, connected: in what sense a “regional world”?’, Regional Studies, 41 (2007), 1180CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Massey, D., ‘Places and the pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), 186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Scannell, L. and Gifford, R., ‘Defining place attachment: a tripartite organizing framework’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30 (2010), 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Bonnett, A., The geography of nostalgia: global and local perspectives on modernity and loss (London, 2015)Google Scholar; Wheeler, R., ‘Local history as productive nostalgia? Change, continuity and sense of place in rural England’, Social & Cultural Geography (2016) DOI 10.1080/14649365.2016.1189591Google Scholar.

23 Tomaney, J., ‘Parochialism – a defence’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (2012), 658–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomaney, ‘Region and place II: belonging’.

24 Sutcliffe, A., ‘A century of flats in Birmingham 1875–1973’, in Sutcliffe, A. (ed.), Multi-Storey Living. The British Working-Class Experience (London, 1974)Google Scholar.

25 G.E. Cherry, ‘Factors in the origins of town planning in Britain: the example of Birmingham, 1905–14’, Working paper no. 36, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham, Oct. 1975, 5.

26 Briggs, A., History of Birmingham, vol. II: Borough and City 1865–1938 (Oxford, 1952)Google Scholar.

27 Cadbury, G., Town Planning with Special Reference to the Birmingham Schemes (London, 1915)Google Scholar, ix.

28 Annual Report of the Birmingham Civic Society, June 1924 – June 1925, 21. Archives of the Birmingham Civic Society privately maintained by the Society.

29 Haywood, W., The Development of Birmingham: An Essay (Birmingham, 1918), 15–17Google Scholar.

30 Briggs, History of Birmingham, 236.

31 Haywood, W., The Work of the Birmingham Civic Society (Birmingham, 1946), 17Google Scholar.

32 Ibid.

33 Minutes of the sub-committee, 24 Jun. 1918.

34 Given in full in Haywood, The Work of the Birmingham Civic Society, 4.

35 Ibid., 95.

36 Ibid., 97.

37 Mottram was a writer and novelist who came to prominence in the 1920s. He was a leading figure in the NS in the 1930s.

38 Mottram, R.H., The Window Seat or Life Observed (London, 1954)Google Scholar.

39 Mottram, R.H., Another Window Seat or Life Observed 1919–1953 (London, 1957), 10Google Scholar.

40 J.J. McLean, ‘“A fine city, fit for heroes?” The rise of municipal housing in Norwich, 1900–1939: an historical perspective’, manuscript (undated), available www.heritagecity.org/user_files/downloads/housing-a-fine-city.pdf, downloaded 4 Dec. 2015.

41 May 1924.

42 Council minutes, 27 Jan. 1919.

43 Letter Glendinning to Powys 1 Apr. 1930, SPAB slum clearance file.

44 Minutes of NS sub-committee, 26/9/27, NS file SO1.

45 Haywood, William, ‘The Birmingham Civic Society’, Town Planning Review, 10 (1923), 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 P. Abercrombie, ‘Introduction’, in Haywood, The Work of the Birmingham Civic Society, 8.

47 Quoted by Cullingworth, B., Nadin, V., Hart, T., Davoudi, S., Pendlebury, J., Vigar, G., Webb, D. and Townshend, T., Town and Country Planning in the UK (London, 2014), 16Google Scholar.

48 Pendlebury, J., Conservation in the Age of Consensus (London, 2009)Google Scholar.

49 Abercrombie, P., Town and Country Planning (London, 1943)Google Scholar; Williams-Ellis, C., England and the Octopus (Portmeirion, 1928).Google Scholar

50 Matless, Landscape and Englishness.

51 Hilton, M., McKay, J., Crowson, N. and Mouhot, J.-F., The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Dovey, K., ‘The silent complicity of architecture’, in Hillier, J. and Rooksby, E. (eds.), Habitus: A Sense of Place (Aldershot, 2005), 283–98Google Scholar.

53 Foote, K.E. and Azaryahu, M., ‘Sense of place’, in Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Amsterdam, 2009), 96–100Google Scholar.

54 Tomaney, ‘Region and place II: belonging’.