Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities

Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009

Urban Communications

Chair: Lynda Nead (Birkbeck)

New systems of communication have been an essential component of urban modernity. Cities were places where new forms of communication such as the tram and the telegraph were first introduced, forms that later became emblematic of urbanism itself. Cities have also been seen as disrupting traditional means of communication, requiring new ways of regulating the interaction of people and things from public conduct to traffic flow. This panel takes up recent interest in the modern city as a site of material and symbolic networks and examines three instances of urban communications in England across the modern period. Joanna Guldi analyses the emergence of a new language for identifying and engaging with strangers on London’s streets which drew on changing uses of the body as well as the transformed urban landscape of the early nineteenth century. Patrick Joyce discusses the creation of the postal system in the nineteenth-century city and the new kinds of collective agency and subjectivity it promoted, which he relates to modern liberal governance. Simon Gunn considers the building of urban motorway systems in industrial cities between the 1940s and the 1970s, the rationales that lay behind them and their material and political effects. Drawing on different periods and urban places the three papers share a common concern with the inter-relationship of technology, subjectivity and the urban environment in the making of modern systems of communication.  The session is chaired by Lynda Nead whose book Victorian Babylon (2000) is a pioneering study of the material fabric and infrastructure of nineteenth-century London.

Abstracts

Learning not to talk to strangers: interactions on the public street, 1800–40
Joanna Guldi (Chicago)

The Young Lady’s Friend, John Farrar, warned his readers of the temptation to elbow their way through the “crowding, pushing, squeezing, and elbowing” crowds that plagued every scene of entertainment, shopping, or travel in the metropolis.  Despite temptation, 'a gentlewoman should never forget herself, should never do anything that is ungentle, should never run, jump, scream, scramble, and push, in order to get a good seat anywhere.'

Farrar’s advice fell into a new genre of advice about observing and controlling the gait, a literature that emerged between 1800 and 1840, during the first decades of rampant urbanization in London. The national road network plunged city-dwellers into a fundamentally new experience of scale: there were simply more strangers per human in any given street, and crowds of hitherto unknown proportions filled every arena associated with travel, commerce, or entertainment.  How to make sense of them, how to counter their potential demands, and how to present one’s self became matters of daily struggle.

Literary scholars have traditionally ascribed the nineteenth-century birth of urban interpretation to a literary avant garde, purportedly more sensitive to the problems of humanity than their contemporaries, capable not only of witnessing the terrifying scale of the new crowds, but also envisioning a web of connection in this new urban sphere.  Yet this narrative underestimates the popular tide of publishing that commented on the highways and their travelers in the 1810s and 20s. 

A new language and visual taxonomy for analyzing and understanding bodies transformed written and visual representation between 1810 and 1840.  New words for analyzing strangers’ posture, gait, and carriage emerged at the level of popular literature, language use, and the popular print.  The period of urbanization witnessed the grassroots development of new tools for identifying strangers from a distance.

That rubric for identification, manifest at the level of popular language, was accompanied by a variety of new tools from middle-class authors on policing and controlling the space around the body so as to walk without interference from strangers.  Dancing manuals and etiquette books instructed middle-class youths how to better change their own gait, while landscape architecture provided suggestions about creating city spaces devoid of uncomfortable jostling. By 1840, an increase in psychological distance, a rise of taxonomy, a transformation in building patterns, and a decline in public sociability characterized the experience of interaction in the London streets.

The postal city
Patrick Joyce (University of Manchester/LSE)

This paper will consider the ways in which technological changes in the nature of the 19th-century postal system created a new communications system in the city.  This involved the disembedding of the social relations of earlier forms of technology, evident in the pre-reform, unofficial postal system, and the embedding of new sorts of social relations driven by the agency of the new system. Local knowledge and personal relationships gave way to a new degree of objectivity in social relations, and with it the generation of new sorts of collective agency and collective subjectivity associated with the advent of permanent connectedness to the new postal system.  New sorts of urban database also emerged.  What eventuated was a new configuration of the city in which new possibilities emerged for the implementation and negotiation of liberal forms of governance through freedom.

Speeding the city: urban motorways in industrial England, c.1940–75
Simon Gunn (University of Leicester)

Studies of post-war urban planning have focused principally on housing and consumption. The priorities of public housing and shopping did indeed loom large in the city plans of the wartime and post-war periods, conjoining the needs of welfare with the idea of the citizen-consumer. A third priority, however, of growing importance in the eyes of city planners and engineers between the 1940s and the 1970s, was the construction of motorway systems that encircled the town, linking different functional zones within it and speeding the transfer of goods and people around them. ‘Ring roads’ demarcated the city centre from the suburbs, industrial estates from housing estates and business districts at the same time as they connected them. Moreover, they linked towns to the wider nationwide network of roads that constituted the ‘urban system’. Like smoke at an earlier period, traffic symbolized urban vitality: the volume of traffic, as one planner put it, represented ‘the measure of success of a town’.

This paper looks at the design and impact of urban motorways in English industrial cities such as Birmingham, Bradford and Leicester between the Second World War and the mid-1970s. Roads as communications networks were considered to have special importance for industrial cities, enabling the more rapid circulation and distribution of goods as well as signifying a panoramic modernity. The paper considers firstly the governmental rationality behind the planning of motorway systems, particularly the ideas of speed, efficiency and circulation. It then moves on to examine their political implications, the relationship of the urban motorway to notions of democracy and citizenship in post-war Britain. By the 1960s road construction had become one of the principal topics of local (and national) political debate, regularly aired in the letter pages of the newspaper press. Ultimately of course debate was to transmute into organised opposition with the rise of the conservation and anti-roads lobbies, able to exert considerable pressure on planners and politicians. This was demonstrated most famously in the case of the London Ringways scheme, which was halted under pressure from campaigners in 1973. But in industrial cities the construction of urban motorways also met with mounting opposition from the late 1960s as it became clear that they offered little or no panacea for manufacturing decline.

In examining these developments the paper explores the ways in which motorway systems became sites on which modern ideas of communications, expertise and governance were elaborated. It does so in a comparative framework, drawing on literatures on the car and the freeway in Germany and the USA in order to throw into relief some of the specificities of urbanism in post-war England.

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