Search

This paper explores the twentieth-century rise and fall of the traditional department store Bourne and Hollingsworth in London's Oxford Street as a means of re-examining the historical geographies of metropolitan consumption cultures. The research moves away from a preoccupation with urban retail's novelty and spectacle towards a consideration of the more conventional and conservative kinds of consumption that have been a vital part of the retail ecology of many major cities in the twentieth century. The paper analyses the intersections of different dimensions of the history of metropolitan consumption: with a culturalist focus on consumer identity and urban microgrographies; but also an examination of this as a family-owned, paternalistic business, and as a material space, both as a building designed and refurbished by its owners, management, architects and shopfitters, and as a particular site within the routes and flows of the West End. The final approach to Bourne and Hollingsworth as urban property, as a distinctive form of capital asset in the city, allows a new understanding of the vulnerability of this kind of retailing by the later twentieth century. The study shows that an emphasis on the significance of cultures of consumption provides at best a partial explanation for changes in the landscapes of consumption: it is argued that cities are the sites of complex intersections between cultural practices and other kinds of geography, in this case those of asset values and opportunities for property speculation.

This paper argues for a renewed consideration of counterfactuals within geography. Drawing upon Doreen Massey's emphasis on notions of ‘possibility’, ‘chance’, ‘undecidability’ and ‘happenstance’, we argue for an engagement with approaches in the humanities that have addressed such issues directly. We review previous uses of counterfactual method in historical geography, particularly as related to cliometrics and the ‘new economic history’ of the 1960s, but argue that a recent upsurge of interest in other disciplines indicates alternative ways that ‘what-if’ experiments might work in the sub-discipline. Recent counterfactual work outside of geography has had a notably spatial cast, often thinking through the nature of alternative worlds, or using counterfactual strategies that are explicitly concerned with space as well as temporal causality. We set out possible agendas for counterfactual work in historical geography. These include: consideration of the historical geographies within existing counterfactual writings and analyses; suggestions for distinctive ways that historical geographers might think and write counterfactually, including experiments in geographies of happenstance, and the exploration of more-than-human possibilities; analyses of the geography of and in counterfactual writing; and study of the political, ethical and emotional demands that counterfactuals make. This discussion and framework provides an extended introduction to this special feature on counterfactual geographies.

Most studies of the municipal movement in late nineteenth-century Britain have necessarily concentrated on the great cities. However, ideas about the nature of the city, urban politics and citizenship formed in the large metropolises had influence outside of them. This paper assesses the influence of municipalism on mining towns in South Wales and Nottinghamshire, particularly in the towns of Ynysybwl and Hucknall. Differences in the acceptance and adoption of municipalism between the two coalfields are related to the relationship between employers and miners, to the character and importance of local intermediate social groups, and to the structure of local institutions. David Smith's idea of the “definition of community” is used to argue that the sense of collective identity was a social construction, and the result of a process of social struggle. In South Wales, this process of “definition of community” resulted in local collective identities which largely excluded the ideas of urbanism which were associated with the muncipal movement. In Nottinghamshire, municipal ideas were more successful. Involvement in local government became an alternative strategy to paternalism and close control of company villages for coalowners in the county. Liberal coalowners such as John Ellis of Hucknall supported, promoted and sponsored local municipalism. The evidence of these contrasting cases calls into question common stereotypes of mining villages found in sociological and historical literature, and points to the contingent ideological influence of municipalism beyond the great cities.