Josephine Butler and spaces of reform in Winchester

5 Jun 20175 Jun 2017

There ought to be a word for the mixture of thrill and dread that comes with hearing someone talk about your home town on the radio or TV. Coming from Winchester,…

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…

That particular articulation of social relations which we are at the moment naming as… Doulton Brook

5 Dec 20167 Apr 2017

A break from the Irish this week. I've been mostly reading Doreen Massey this week - if you're not familiar with her she's an urban geographer of major importance, who…

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…

Birmingham’s furthest outpost: Michel de Certeau and the tactics of Elan Village’s navvies

4 Jul 201626 Jun 2016

The Welsh countryside It's often presumed that times moves slowly in the countryside. Seasons come and go, and the work changes little. The 1901 census for the rural Welsh parish…

Birmingham’s furthest outpost: Michel de Certeau and the strategies of Elan Village’s builders

20 Jun 20167 Apr 2017

 I was very fortunate recently to get to camp in one of the most beautiful spots in the country, in the Elan Valley, Powys. It's among the most sparsely-populated parts of…

Foucault in Northfield: Birmingham’s reformed pubs

13 Jun 201628 May 2018

As I mentioned recently, apparently historians love pubs more than anything. I was particularly intrigued by a discussion with Nathan Booth at the Urban History conference in Cambridge about the…

Doreen Massey (1944-2016)

12 Mar 201612 Mar 2016

I came into academia via a fairly circuitous route. After a degree in sound engineering (which I left pretty sure I never wanted to enter a recording studio again; although it…

The Other immigrants of Carribee Island: Wolverhampton’s Jewish community 2

8 Feb 2016

This post follows my first on the early Jewish community in mid-19th century Wolverhampton, last week. We explored the Bernsteins who lived at 64 Canal Street, and the opening of…

The Other immigrants of Carribee Island: Wolverhampton’s Jewish community 1

1 Feb 20161 Feb 2016

My PhD research focuses on a small section of Wolverhampton town centre in the nineteenth century that was well-known - perhaps notorious, even - for it's substantial Irish immigrant population.…