Black Country Irish: lies, damned lies and statistics

2 Jan 2017

We've had a quick look at some of the stories and statistics behind the Irish in the Black Country, particularly focusing on the census data for 1851. Data is an…

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…

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…

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…

“History breaks down into images not into stories”

8 Sep 20158 Sep 2015

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…

Searching for Hulland

19 Jun 2015

Yesterday I attended a digital tools workshop at the University of Warwick, and very worthwhile it was too. Sticking 'digital' in front of anything is a recipe for sexy-sounding academia…

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…

All the pieces matter

2 Jun 20152 Jun 2015

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…