London JournalPub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2106679
Edward Legon
{"title":"The Lord Mayor's Show and the Politics of London's Clothworkers’ Company in the Mid-Seventeenth Century","authors":"Edward Legon","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2106679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2106679","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses detail from the records of the Clothworkers’ Company to explore the tensions that lay beneath the surface of the elaborate Lord Mayors’ Shows of Sir John Ireton in 1658 and Sir John Robinson in 1662. Nearly one hundred members of the Company failed to pay their contributions (or ‘fines’) towards the Shows, leading to a shortfall in funding that the Company's Court of Assistants sought to remedy through protracted and expensive institutional and legal proceedings. The article seeks explanations for such behaviour. While the invidiousness of financial burdens and the inability of members to pay their fines are instructive, explicit evidence of enduring divisions between elements of the Company's hierarchy demonstrate how institutional non-participation is inextricable from wider political and religious issues. In the final analysis, suggestive evidence of radical tendencies among the Clothworkers’ membership conveys that the Shows of 1658 and 1662 could be vectors of opposition to the regimes of which Ireton and Robinson were representative, as well as the extravagant Shows themselves.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49539433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
London JournalPub Date : 2022-08-17DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2058788
Ole Jensen
{"title":"‘No One Likes Us’: Football, Identity, and Belonging in Post-Industrial London","authors":"Ole Jensen","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2058788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2058788","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the role of Millwall FC as a reference point for a working-class population feeling increasingly marginalised in the post-industrial city. The analysis is framed by, respectively, Sandra Wallman’s continuum between open and closed urban systems, developed in the 1980s, and Edward Soja’s concept of a multi-scalar view that offers an understanding of smaller geographical areas within a wider urban context. Overall, it can be argued that post-industrial dynamics, in particular the loss of industrial, inner-city employment and changes to housing stock and tenure patterns, have triggered a general move towards more open urban systems, thereby challenging the continued relevance of the open–closed continuum. With the closed system still existing in small ‘pockets’ of memories and nostalgia, Millwall fan culture represents one of few remaining closed systems, keeping alive memories of the docklands, and with Millwall support as a ‘blood tradition’, practiced across generations. But it is very much a pocket of the past. Where Millwall emerged as a club of its immediate neighbourhoods, this geographical area is now characterised by widespread gentrification and a rapidly increasing BAME population. With an increasing proportion of Millwall fans now located in Kent, Millwall FC has come to represent a last working-class bastion in South London.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48568045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
London JournalPub Date : 2022-08-17DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2106401
Pippa Catterall
{"title":"Why London is Labour: A History of Metropolitan Politics, 1900–2020","authors":"Pippa Catterall","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2106401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2106401","url":null,"abstract":"space for solidarity with other black immigrants. Abrahams’s relationship and subsequent rift with George Padmore, for instance, is traced through the response to his book Return to Goli, which emphasises the liberal humanism he formed in progressive and ‘tolerant’ 1950s London. In Matshikiza’s accounts of early 1960s London, Thorpe locates ‘a meaningful engagement with the interplay between London, South Africa and a wider global black imaginary’ (97). Thorpe draws on work by scholars including Leslie James; this book might also usefully be read in conversation with Marc Matera, Kennetta Hammond Perry, and Rob Waters to expand the historical frame of Black diasporic politics, geographies, and reading cultures in London. The chapters deal with the writing and experiences of male writers in the metropolis as their case studies, distinguished by intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Thorpe details the reasons of structure and genre as to why this is the case, including the masculinity of South African urban writing. The book also includes two ‘detours’, where Thorpe explores the work of Noni Jabavu, including her time as the first black woman editor of the New Strand magazine, and Lauretta Ngcobo, a ‘forger of alliances between Black British writers’ (184), including the edited collection Let It Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain (1987). The detours are named as such because they represent ‘intriguing diversions into the cartography of the South African writer in London’ (12). This is perhaps most evident in Thorpe’s location of Ncgobo within wider London networks of black British activism and feminism, where she challenged the limits placed on black South African women writers and shaped the direction of intersectional, anti-racist politics. But Jabavu’s earlier experiences of gendered expectations and sexism and the negotiation of racism through her proximity to the upper middle class in Britain and the longevity of her time in London are also drawn out with finesse to offer a different story than the ‘well-worn tropes of masculine apartheid-era exile’ (91). These detours are fascinating but frustratingly brief, offering a tantalising glimpse into the alternative maps of South African London that might be further pursued. Nevertheless, there is much in Thorpe’s work for scholars of South African history and writing, London and urban histories, exile, modernity, and transnational movements.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43414767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
London JournalPub Date : 2022-08-17DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2059232
M. Meer
{"title":"Heraldry, Corporate Identity, and the Battle for Symbolic Capital in Late Medieval London","authors":"M. Meer","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2059232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2059232","url":null,"abstract":"While scholars of guilds and fraternities take great interest in the texts, objects, and performances that bound late medieval guilds together and created a sense of collective identity, the place of their corporate heraldry remains relatively underexplored. By analysing grants of arms obtained by London guilds between 1439 and 1530, this article argues that corporate heraldry was not just a convenient means of identification but was meant to be seen as a semantically dense visual communication of corporate identity. Grants, confirmations, and augmentations of arms presented the heraldic signs they conferred as official acknowledgments and visual representations of their recipients’ symbolic capital of honour. The connection between heraldry, identity, and corporate honour also found its expression in the prominent display of corporate arms on central stages of corporate self-representation such as halls, churches, and rituals. This proud heraldic display of corporate identity, just like the pursuit of grants of arms, reflected a need for weapons in an intensifying battle for symbolic capital that the guilds of late medieval London faced, perhaps as a result of economic difficulties that marked the later fifteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46641714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
London JournalPub Date : 2022-07-28DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2062924
M. Arts
{"title":"The Experience of Employment in a 1930s East End Cinema","authors":"M. Arts","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2062924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2062924","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the employment experience of workers at the Eastern Palace Cinema in East London, in 1934. In August 1934, a member of staff murdered the cinema’s manager. The witness statements taken in the subsequent criminal investigation give a unique insight into the operations of 1930s cinemas and the working conditions of the people who were employed in them. The statements give voice to a group of service staff that had limited means of relating their lived experience. The article contrasts these statements with contemporary advice on cinema operations from guidebooks and trade papers to explore how trade advice translated into reality. It also draws on archival sources to excavate the backgrounds of cinema staff across roles. This adds to our understanding of the experience of staff employed in the most popular leisure industry of interwar Britain, an area that has not yet been extensively researched.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43550196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
London JournalPub Date : 2022-06-30DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2074706
Rosalind Stokeld
{"title":"Borough Market: How a London Market Responded to the Arrival of Railways in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Rosalind Stokeld","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2074706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2074706","url":null,"abstract":"Food markets were a vital element in the economic life of Britain over many centuries, and the arrival of railways into urban spaces during the nineteenth century provided unprecedented opportunities for them to expand the range and volume of good that they sold. This article examines the impact of railways on these markets during the decades following the arrival of trains into London through a case study of Borough Market. This important London fruit and vegetable market is examined through the prism of its financial records. Detailed analysis of the Market’s income produces a timeline for growth, while the records for the goods ported through the Market help to explain the change. The case study also highlights developments in trading techniques at Borough Market that enabled it to prosper during the second half of the nineteenth century, despite limitations placed on its expansion created by the impact of railways on the urban physical environment.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45582659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
London JournalPub Date : 2022-06-21DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2068281
Oliver Parken
{"title":"Blitz Spirits: Ghosts of London and the Nation in Second World War Britain","authors":"Oliver Parken","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.2068281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.2068281","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the workings of ghosts in Second World War London, particularly what they reveal about the experience, representation, and management of life under fire. It brings together urban-historical, psychological, and cultural/commemorative approaches in tracing how ghosts were used to articulate the turbulence of bombardment. Arguing that ghosts represent a useful tool for bridging the gap between different readings of wartime London, the article pays attention to the universal dimensions of air raids and particular local variations. The article suggests that the workings of ghosts—and the psychology of believing more broadly—represent an important, if neglected, aspect of the civilian experience of war.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41816030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}