Historian and geographer, writer and researcher
keeping in contact with old friends It was twenty years ago today, went one of the contenders for greatest album ever. It was twenty years ago today since I and my friend Nathan made the eager after-school trip to MVC in the Brooks Centre in Winchester to buy Radiohead's brand new album, OK Computer. It was …
Continue reading "Pragmatism not idealism"
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 did introduce me to some unexpected concepts like dada which, oddly enough, is resurfacing in some of my recent reading), I ended up temping in a …
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 has a conference season. At least, March appears to be it which means I've ended up with far too much work to do in one …
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. "Carribee Island" and the "Stafford Street district" became by-words when any sort of unrest occurred amongst Wolverhampton's Irish. My cursory go at statistics so far …
Continue reading "The Other immigrants of Carribee Island: Wolverhampton’s Jewish community 1"
I've ummed and aahed a bit about what to write about the Post's report on Darlaston. It's really the same old story: surface drainage, evils, abomination, bubbling and seething, stagnant, over-flowing, the cholera, back courts, and so on; there's not a lot to add compared to previous outrages at Oldbury or Bilston. Despite the fact that the journalist's …
The Post's next community is one I'm loathe to try and explain in detail. Oldbury was infamous as one of the most polluted towns in the country - so much so that Dr Janet Sullivan recently completed a top-notch PhD thesis on the environmental and biological costs of industrialisation in the town. For a quick overview of …
Continue reading "“Slums” of the Black Country: Eel Street, Oldbury"
On the night of 25th September 1940, a middle-aged German-Jewish academic took his own life with an overdose of morphine in the Hotel de Francia, Portbou, on the Spanish side of the Pyrennean border. He'd been hoping to flee to America following the Nazi invasion of Paris where he'd been working in exile on a variety …
Continue reading "“History breaks down into images not into stories”"
I've been reading Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis lately. I'm no expert on continental philosophy or cultural theory really, so I've enjoyed this - it's light and possible to read in an impressionistic sort of way, glossing over all the Bachelards and Nietzsches, the Objects and Subjects. Lefebvre's key ideas throughout his career were around the 'everyday' - the mundane, …
Disclaimer: I'm no expert on American history, not at all. I'm keen that any theory I want to study be portable though, so I'm attempting here to look at a TV series I've been re-visiting through a particular lens. No Black Country history here either, we're in half-baked theory territory. Spoilers ahoy as well, if you …
Warning again: I'm going to be talking Black Country history a little further down, but I've been interested in what maps do and don't show, so the preamble is a bit... vague and theoretical. Maps are complex beasts. They show what they show, for reasons their makers choose, and the inclusions and omissions can define a district. …
