The politics of public space in 19th century EnglandDr Katrina Navickas, University of Hertfordshire, k.navickas@herts.ac.uk

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Narrative chronology1790s-1800s – loyalist reaction: formally through legislation and informally through exclusions and intrusions in public spaces1816-19 – ‘mass platform’ radicalism claimed public spaces16 August 1819 – Peterloo massacre, Manchester1818-30 – ‘war of the unstamped’ and trade union mass action1832-42 – imposition of new administrative geographies by a new Whig-liberal regime – reformed electoral districts, factory inspections, new poor law unions, municipal corporations, new police 1837-48 – Chartists and Owenite socialists challenged restrictions on the space to meet and created their own utopias

Legislation and exclusions from public space

▪ 1795, 1817, 1819 - Seditious Meetings Acts ▪ 1794, 1799-1801, 1817-18 - suspension of

Habeas Corpus acts ▪ 1799-1800 – Unlawful Societies act;

Combination acts▪ 1819 – ‘Six Acts’▪ November 1838 – royal proclamation against

nocturnal assemblies▪ May 1839 – royal proclamation against illegal

assemblies

What is public space?

Privatisation of public space – 18th century and early 19th century ‘improvement’

Adelaide Street, Bradford

Bradford map from c.1890

Spaces of ‘making do’

TNA, HO 45/2510, seized posters, 1848

Theories of space‘not local protectionism but a critique of dispossession’,Doreen Massey, ‘Landscape/Space/Politics: An Essay’,http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/

Spaces of utopia

“You will remember what it was that made you think of building this Hall. You were denied the use of that Hall which your labour and money had erected. Thus has persecution, at all times, defeated its objects.”

Northern Star, 13 April 1844. Feargus O’Connor at the laying of the foundation stone of Oldham Working Men’s Hall.

“We make ourselves independent of every other body or class, we cannot do so unless we have our own meeting, reading and lecture rooms.”

Sheffield Chartists, Northern Star, 22 August 1840.

Spaces of utopia

Huddersfield Hall of Science, built 1839Manchester Hall of Science, 1840

‘locales’: New Cross, Manchester