Irish… After Carribee Island: the Great War 12 Apr 2018 This post follows on from these two about the afterlife of Carribee Island, for forty years the assumed - and stigmatised - home of Wolverhampton's Irish population in the nineteenth…
Black Country… Distance and Strangeness: the murder of Anne Spencer 15 May 201715 May 2017 I sometimes feel like I've spent the last three years trying to figure out my place within history. I still feel like there's probably a huge mountain of scholarship that I've…
Black Country… Telling family stories 2 May 20172 May 2017 As part of my research I will inevitably have to tell you some family histories. I say have to - it's a vital, fascinating and relevant part of my research.…
Black Country… Black Country Irish: Wolverhampton, 1851 8 Aug 201627 Apr 2018 I'm starting my series on the Irish in the 19th century Black Country by looking at Wolverhampton. This is familiar ground for me, or at least should be - so I'm…
Maps… Maps and legends 4 Apr 2016 This week's big adventure was a trip to the fabled meadows of Cambridge or, at least, the brutalist Robinson College (see Otto Saumarez-Smith's paper on it here) and an ugly…
half baked theories… Beauty is in the streets 7 Mar 20167 Mar 2016 The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. I never realised that, like party politics, academia…
PhD Update 22 Feb 2016 I haven't done a normal post today, but it did occur to me that a quick outline of my research might be of interest to some. I tend to only blog…
PhD… Dead ends and back alleys 8 Jul 2015 Just a short one today as I'm in the midst of a massive trawl through several decades' worth of census enumerators returns. I'm writing this from my local library, from…
Everyday Life… Camping, privies, and mapping the everyday 11 Jun 2015 At the age of 33, I recently had my first proper experience of camping (my subconscious has all but blocked the ramshackle Cub camps of my youth, although a few excursions…
Black Country… Space to think 6 Feb 2015 GIS is increasingly being seen as much as a place to think as a simple data management and mapping tool Gillings & Goodrick (1996) "Sensuous and reflexive GIS: exploring visualisation and VRML" I'm…