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This paper addresses the potential for using childhood memories shared on social media as a means of interrogating experiences of twentieth-century social historical geographies of home and family life. In so doing, the paper discusses briefly the value of children's perceptions as guests in others' homes as an insightful source of data, before exploring the value of social media as a place for sharing these recollections and accessing them as a researcher. The paper draws data from a thread on the popular UK-based parenting website and internet discussion space, 'Mumsnet', asking contributors to share the 'weirdest' thing they saw at someone else's house when they were a child. This paper positions social media research as an ethically, epistemologically and ontologically sound approach to creating data for geographical research, which has become well-established in other sub-disciplines. The paper seeks to explore what it is to remember intimate childhood experience alongside those whose memories might reflect or conflict with your own. Further, the paper addresses the way in which a social media thread created new narratives and uncovered long-buried memories which provide an insightful lens for exploring a particular domestic historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watermills have been an essential source of mechanical power for over two millennia. Their careful siting often took into account local hydrology, topography, and economic demand, attesting to the important place they held in premodern and early modern societies. This paper highlights the significance of Paul Bishop's work on mills over the last 20 years, which revealed that numerous historical watermills along Scottish rivers were closely located near overly steep stretches of river to maximize waterpower and minimize cost. Termed 'knickpoints', many of these steep erosional features formed thousands of years ago during and after melting of the British–Irish Ice Sheet. Post-glacial isostatic rebound caused rivers to erode into bedrock at rates set by river catchment size and sediment availability. Although bedrock knickpoints along the Scottish coast are relatively stable over human timescales (<103 years), knickpoints generated by milling in England have been invoked as potential hazards due to their potential to migrate over similar timescales. Bishop's observations on the colocation of knickpoints and watermills encouraged a more comprehensive investigation of the relationship between natural and human systems over the last 250 years and invited re-evaluation of prevailing narratives for the history of water technology and patterns of water-powered industrialization in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue make an important contribution to a growing body of work, exploring not only the ways gender and property were co‐constituted in Britain and the British colonies in the long eighteenth century but also the sources scholars must work with in uncovering women's lives and experiences. In this afterword, I explore some of the possibilities and prospects for developing research in this area, highlighting new directions and themes, as well as teasing out some of the wider implications of this persuasive and fascinating collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Financial geography is one of the fastest growing subdisciplines in geography. • Financial geography emerged in the UK in the late 1980s after London's Big Bang. • The subfield remains exceedingly British with the growing engagement from Continental Europe. • Financialization emerged as the subfield's central focus after the 2008 global financial crisis. • Financial geography has a pluralist theory-culture represented by four distinct intellectual traditions. The past decade has yielded an unprecedented surge in geographical research on money and finance. Amidst this apparent financial turn, the paper aims to provide an institutional sociology of the rapidly growing subdiscipline of Anglophone financial geography, using Web of Science bibliometric data and oral histories of key figures in the field. Employing a two-track methodology involving an analysis of 440 financial geography articles published since 1986 and 23 interviews conducted with self-identified financial geographers and scholars allied with the financial geography project, the paper aims to deconstruct how financial geography emerged as a field by examining the people present at the birth, the intellectual histories that shaped it, and the conditions that have influenced its wider reception. The paper presents three main findings. First, it shows how the political economic conditions of financialization in the UK coupled with the patterns of institutionalization and the subfield's origins resulted in an enduring British dominance. Second, citation patterns reveal that during the three decades of its existence, financial geography evolved into a poly-centric and pluralist subfield with four main intellectual traditions represented. Finally, the paper exposes the extent to which the 2008 global financial crisis was the major force behind the consolidation of financial geography as a subfield, giving momentum to studies of financialization and amplifying the visibility of financial geography's scholarship within the broader social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swimming is a popular form of recreation and exercise in the UK and US. Swimming can take place outdoors but, particularly in the UK, largely takes place in designated indoor pools. Existing research tends to focus on ‘public’ or ‘municipal’ pools leaving broader spatial geographies of swimming pool provision under explored. In response to concern about swimming pool closures, this paper draws from extensive archival research into all swimming pools in the City of Glasgow, Scotland, since the first opened in 1804. Formal and informal programmes of pool building and closure were revealed. Rather than decreasing, public provision has remained constant for the last 100 years but become progressively more spread out in relation to the city’s changing size. Broadening exploration beyond the ‘public’ category exposed a vast drop in school pool numbers around the year 2000 due to a Private Finance Initiative project that consolidated the secondary school estate and outsourced school building management. The lessons: researching all types of swimming pool through time greatly enriches understandings of the changing meaning and extent of public service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the current state of the field of environmental history in Britain, focusing on current trends. The field is consolidating, with a more visible presence at British universities, and a notable switch to the study of environmental histories of Great Britain itself. There is still considerable crossover with related fields, in particular historical geography, economic history, and regional histories. Current themes in environmental history revolve around questions of climate, water, and energy. In addition, the field is addressing previous criticism related to the absence of social theories, and integrates the human world while remaining a sense of agency of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on the 16th International Conference of Historical Geographers (ICHG), London that was held in July 2015 at the Royal Geographical Society, London, Great Britain. Topics discussed include the history of the ICHG and a related institution, the "Journal of Historical Geography," cultural memories of extreme weather events, and climate vulnerability in Latin America.

This paper explores the emergence of child protection work in Victorian Britain, using the annual reports of societies in Liverpool, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and newspaper accounts of their activities. Employing the concept of scalar governmentality I argue that the growth and extension of protection work was informed by and helped to rework existing moral assumptions about people, place and environment. This happened along two entwined trajectories. The first trajectory was an imaginative one, as intervention in individual cases was justified with reference to the broader social body. The second was territorial, seen in the expansion of child protection from town to town, and later to new colonial settings. I refer to these trajectories as a scaling up and a scaling out of child protection and I argue that the extension of protection work thus played an important role in challenging received moral assumptions about who needed protecting, where, by whom, and for whose benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report, commissioned by the UK's Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of an international review of research in human geography in the UK, considers the quality and impact of research within two related fields of particular interest to readers of this journal: historical geography and history of geography. The report, submitted in March 2012 and published here for the first time (with a new introduction) provides an account of the core themes addressed in these sub-disciplines over the last decade; gives examples of key outputs in these fields; and evaluates evidence of the impact of such research beyond the academy, notably in terms of policy and public engagement. The review is particularly concerned with the influence of geographical research beyond the boundaries of the discipline. What we as historical geographers think of ourselves is one thing; our influence within and beyond the academy is another, and it is the latter which provides the focus for the report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the topics of natural history and botanical research done in Jamaica during the eighteenth century, the article explores how such knowledge was translated in speech. It considers oral culture in the communication in science, historical geography, and the British Atlantic world. Topics considered include printed texts, science and imperialism, the cross-cultural communication of traditional ecological knowledge, and slavery. The relationship between Scottish doctor and Jamaican botanist William Wright and English naturalist and botanist Sir Joseph Banks is explored.

The 1947 epidemic of poliomyelitis was the largest and geographically most widespread outbreak of the disease ever recorded in England and Wales. As a transitional event in the history of poliomyelitis in the British Isles, the 1947 epidemic signalled the sudden onset of a sustained period of heightened epidemicity that continued until the introduction and mass administration of safe and effective poliovirus vaccines in the late 1950s. This paper explores the apparent shift in the spatial dynamics of poliovirus that underpinned the geographical spread of the 1947 epidemic in England and Wales. Drawing on a robust method of spatial epidemiological analysis (swash-backwash model), we demonstrate that the epidemic wave was associated with a pronounced acceleration in the rate of spatial propagation as compared to the preceding years. The velocity of spatial expansion and retreat and the duration of infectivity are shown to have varied by category of geographical area and by county of England and Wales. The weight of available evidence suggests that the so-called 'hygiene model' of the epidemic emergence of poliomyelitis, developed in the context of Western countries and generally assumed for England and Wales, does not adequately account for the events of 1947. Rather, we suggest that the features of the epidemic are consistent with the introduction and spread of one or more new strains of poliovirus in England and Wales in the summer of 1947. Possible connections to the epidemic occurrence of poliomyelitis in other European countries at about this time are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses the history curriculum of the U.S. which has a political and traditional influence of English colonial period. He claims that initial writers of the U.S. history were themselves Easterners who created a mental geography related with the place, space and region for the country's history. He further examines the scope of the U.S. history, mental geographies, and geography in the U.S. history courses.

This paper examines informal citizenship training for youth and the historical geographies of education over time through analysing the Scout Movement in Britain and its activities in the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, it highlights the complexity of youth citizenship and the significance of non-school spaces in civil society to our understandings of young people's positioning as citizen-subjects. Drawing on archival research, I demonstrate how a specific youth citizenship project was constructed and maintained through the Scout Movement. I argue that various processes, strategies and regulations were involved in envisioning 'citizen-scout' and developing both duty-bound, self-regulated individuals as well as a wider collective body of British youth. This analysis speaks to broader debates on citizenship, nationhood and youth, as well as highlighting how the historical geographies of citizenship education are an important area of study for geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of British geographical work in Central Asia (Persia and Afghanistan) in a period when Britain was concerned about a region which lay between Europe and Enlightenment on the one hand, and her Indian colonies, the uncertainties of Asia and the imperial designs of France and Russia on the other. The paper explores the connections between geography, diplomacy and colonial knowledge and demonstrates how the mapping and geographical study of Central Asia was a central feature of British colonial ambitions and of Enlightenment conceptual reasoning, in illuminating the ways in which 'ancient' and 'modern' geography was at work in this politically core yet geographically 'marginal' space, the paper highlights the complexities intrinsic to the making of geography and of empire in a region until now neglected in modern historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical geography of the British motorcycle industry (its distribution over time and the rate at which motorcycle marques entered and exited) shows two major agglomerations or clusters (West Midlands and Greater London) to have been the driving force behind the industry. Motorcycle marque exits from the industry (shakeout) had a net positive effect on the West Midlands and a net negative effect on the Greater London area. Spin-off of new companies was primarily an internal process in the West Midlands and an external process in the Greater London area. The high level of spatial concentration, the rapid rate of technology diffusion, and large number of spin-off firms helped the British motorcycle industry to maintain a wide variety of marques over a long time. However, each successive shakeout period resulted in an industry that was increasingly innovation-averse and stagnant, eventually ending in its near total collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public monuments in colonial Nairobi were visual links to the British empire, and served as a means of asserting imperial power. During this period, colonial memories and identities were inscribed into Nairobi's landscape by the dominant group, the elite of the European population. However, at the moment of Kenya's achievement of independence from colonial rule, such identities and assertions of power were challenged as statues were removed from the city. This paper examines the forces behind the decolonisation of Nairobi's monumental landscape and how this landscape visualised the changing political and cultural contexts of the city. Comparisons are made with the removal of statues from Sudan, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to situate the Kenyan experience. Through a comparative examination of the decolonisation of Nairobi's monumental landscape, this paper illustrates how the removal of public monuments from the city was exploited by both the coloniser and the colonised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the power of a spoken agreement, a printed declaration or a private letter? Early modern empires worked through historical geographies of oral and which spanned large spaces. These forms of communication have to be understood in terms of the ways in which the meanings and uses of speech, script and print were differentiated from each other while these varied ways of communicating were also combined in practice. This paper explores the power relations of imperial communication through the story of the conduct and aftermath of the Jamaican Maroon War of 1795-6. It details the historical geographies of speech that legitimated Britain's empire, the uses of printing that shaped relationships between the imperial state and its subjects, and the forms of manuscript communication through which imperial administration was organised. The paper argues that these deployments of speech, script and print - particularly by Jamaica's governor, the earl of Balcarres - aimed to win a war of words. This was, however, simultaneously undercut by the varied meanings and uses of speech, script and print, by his adversaries' deployment of them and by the transatlantic geography of imperial communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Inebriates Acts of 1879 and 1898 which facilitated the formal provision of institutional care for inebriates. The Acts'' permissive character produced an uneven geography of provision of institutions that meant that inebriate treatment varied markedly across the counties and county boroughs of England and Wales. The vast majority of those committed under the Acts were women. Using two exemplary case studies from Lancashire, a private retreat created under the 1879 Act and a council run reformatory created under the 1898 Act, the paper considers how debates about liberty and control shaped the regulation of problem drunkards. It shows that geography was as important as class, religion, and gender in determining who was subjected to regulation. The paper argues that the failure to reform inebriates helped the recoding of inebriety within a broader discourse of mental deficiency that encouraged the permanent segregation of problem populations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

There have been many attempts to define ‘European History’. The concept did not exist until the emergence of the idea of ‘Europe’ itself, which can be dated to the Early Modern period, when ‘Christendom’ no longer seemed a viable geographical concept in view of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the expansion of Christian missions overseas. By the late eighteenth century, the reforms of Peter the Great had led to the expansion of the idea of ‘Europe’ beyond the area imagined by Ancient geographers to include a large part of Russia. More recently, attempts to equate European history with the history of the member states of the European Union have met with little favour. In the UK, European history conventionally means the history of the European Continent, not including the British Isles. Argument about the cultural parameters of European history continues, and forms an essential part of any study of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ongoing struggle to discern patterns of allegiance in the Civil Wars has emerged as a geographic enterprise, whose constructions of England's 'wild' West in particular need careful re-evaluation. 'Dark Corners' examines the major twentieth-century theories of an East/West divide within England – in relationship to one another, to modern quantitative geography's various models of civil war in general, and to seventeenth-century geographical writing and cartography. It goes on to suggest a new study of regional patterning of active royalism vis-a-vis the education, educational activities, regional origins and migration patterns of the clergy of the Church of England, who are perhaps as unique in their susceptibility to geographical analysis as in their role in the public communication of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the geographic origins of the Norman knights instrumental in the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. The author reflects on geographic allegiances and how they played a role in combat motivation and mobilaztion of resources for conquering England. The military leadership of Duke William of Normandy over an army composed of Bretons, Brench, and Normans and organized into mounted knights, foot soldiers, and archers is considered. Other topics include spatial distribution of Norman nobles, ancestry, and early Viking settlements in Normandy.

In 1908, London hosted the fourth Olympic Games. A centrepiece of the Olympics, still in a nascent form after their creation in 1896, was the marathon, a foot-race of approximately 40 km. The race was run from Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium at Shepherd's Bush in July 1908, and quickly became famous for its controversies, such as the judges' assistance that helped Dorando Pietri over the line, and the questionable amateur status of Canadian runner Tom Longboat. This paper will concentrate on the route of the race: on how it was planned by the Polytechnic Harriers, how it was managed on the day, how it contributed to the development of 'marathon fever' after the Olympics, and what it tells us about the growing suburban landscape of Edwardian London and its hinterlands. The paper will end with a survey of the route today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Water stress is becoming a permanent feature of life in Britain and other developed societies, and attempts to change ‘consumer behaviour’ are at the forefront of strategies for sustainability. This paper combines historical, geographical and sociological perspectives on the evolution of drought and water demand in modern England and Wales. Droughts have natural properties but their course, size and distribution is also the result of an interplay between governance, social norms and everyday practices. Focusing on seven significant droughts between 1893 and 2006, this article traces changing understandings of ‘normal’ water consumption and ‘rational’ demand and relates them to the evolving socio-technical management of water and identities of ‘the consumer’. We challenge the idea of a watershed between private supply (associated with passive ‘customers’) and public ownership (associated with active ‘citizens’). While private systems facilitated self-organised civic action more easily than public supply, the ideal of a citizen-contract blinded systems of public provision to the problem of expanding water use. An interdisciplinary analysis of droughts in the past offers lessons for the debate about sustainable consumption today. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the inter-war Home Counties, the roadhouse, a sizeable country club style location of entertainment and dancing was an iconic destination of consumption and leisure aimed at the wealthier middle classes. These establishments were marketed in newsreels as exclusive and sophisticated but in reality were open to wider groups in a settings that offered anonymity by virtue of their suburban locations. Reflecting this, roadhouses were also used in literature and in cinema as a locus of transgression and danger. Readings of suburbia have concentrated on static analyses of house/home and discussions of suburban mobilities have been confined to commuting, thus reinforcing the centrality of the house. A consideration of mobilities facilitated by the motorcar can produce a more subtle view of the suburban world of the period. In this paper the roadhouse is shown to form part of a new suburban landscape responding to the development of the wider availability of the automobile and to London''s new arterial roads. The leisure products consumed at the roadhouse were heavily influenced by American cultural exports but were hybridized for local audiences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q''eqchi'' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article uses recent work in the central Lake District to explore current approaches to prehistoric landscapes in Britain. It argues that those approaches owe much to ways of seeing, which have their roots in the Romantic tradition, in particular, a tendency to privilege vision over the other senses. The more recent history of the area is drawn upon to argue for approaches which deal more directly with the physical engagement with landscape at varied scales. Such an approach has implications for the ways that the area has been, and remains, caught up in discourses of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our respondents, North American and British alike, have provided a series of perceptive comments on our essay “A Peripheral Vision”. They are as wide-ranging as they are well argued and provide ample food for thought on the direction of Communist historiography, not only in Britain but in America and beyond. We want to thank all of them for their informed, often argumentative and sometimes critical collaboration, as well as Dan Leab, the editor of American Communist History , who has made this exchange possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a classified bibliography of J. B. Harley's publications. Historical geography; Commercial Map-Making in England and Wales; Cartography in Late-Colonial and Revolutionary America; American Cartographies: Indigenous and Contact.

Focuses on the different historiographic practices through which historical geography in North America and Great Britain has been defined. Incorporation of critical theory into historical geography inspiring suspicion from those who ascribe to more traditional approaches; Problems concerning the term cultural historical geography when used to signal the simplistic incorporation of a cultural studies approach rather than to connect the changes in historical geography; Normative statements about progress within historical geography.

Studies the perception of English colonizers of Virginia's geography. Influence of Spanish colonization literature on English perceptions; Beliefs about the specifics of American environments and populations; Sequences of English settlements in Virginia; Interactions between English colonizers and Powhatans.

Presents an interview with geographer David Harvey concerning his works on historical geography of Great Britain. Career background of Harvey; Publication of the book `Explanation in Geography'; Impact of geography on the general intellectual culture; Views on capital-labor and capital-capital relations; Perceptions towards Marxism.

The article discusses on the growth and distribution of English societies on the early nineteenth century in Great Britain. A study on friendly society data in poor law returns from 1819 to 1815 was concluded that historical geography of was determined by the need of industrial workers. The Friendly Societies Act grants privileges in return for registrations and mutual aid as part of the poor law reform. The growth of friendly societies was encourage by the change in historiography of industrialization before 1815.

The article presents a discussion surrounding historical references to the Severn Sea Islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel found within the 10th-century Old English "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" manuscripts. Scholastic questions regarding apparent historical contradictions within the references to the islands are raised and dismissed.

The article presents an examination into the historical geography surrounding the 5th-century English battle of Aurelius Ambrosius fought at Maisbeli, as depicted in the "Historia Regum Brittanniae," by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Details are given outlining the difficulty in identifying the place-name of Maisbeli. Suggestions are made proposing that the locations of Ballifield or Belfield could signify the location.

The article presents information on a roundtable session in honor of historical geographer Graeme Wynn at the International Conference of Historical Geographers held in the Ondaatje Theatre at the Royal Geographical Society, London, England on July 7, 2015. It reflects on Wynn's scholarship and his contributions to the success and growth of geography and historical research.

Information about several papers discussed at the 2011 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference entitled "New imperial geographies?" is presented. Topics include the response of the British Empire to Catholic missionaries in Africa, the importance of imperial maps to the administration of British colonies, and cross-cultural communication in the history of science. The conference featured several historical geographers including Mike Heffernan, Tomas Frederikson, and Gerry Reams.

The article reflects on the views of the author related to Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which is an Arab country in the Middle East. According to Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which is also known as Transjordan was proclaimed an independent state in 1923, however has a problem on their boundaries. Here, the British Army contracted a surveyor to observe a major triangulation connecting the Syrian Cadastral Primary Triangulation to the Existing work in Transjordan however it was not fully completed and that the computations were not handled in a rigorous manner.

The historical geography of sea uses is outlined as a sequence of stages of development. The resulting geographical patterns are discussed in terms of the major sea use groups involved, including reference to urban and rural sea use categories. Source materials for the historical geography of the sea are considered, followed by evaluation of major factors involved, including in particular the roles of technological, economic and environmental considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]