Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Visualising cities (Sponsor: Adam Mathew Digital)
Chair: Rosemary Sweet (Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester)
Abstracts
Spectacular cities: viewing London and Paris in the early nineteenth century
Dana Arnold (University of Southampton)
This paper uses the examples of panoramas, dioramas and arcades in both London and Paris as a means of exploring how these building types related to viewing practices and offered innovative perspectives on the city. Panoramas and dioramas were novel ways of representing urban topographies – London or Paris was seen miniaturised in its entirety from a vantage point not normally or easily gained by many, prompting the city to be imagined in different ways. These modes of viewing operated as a kind of phantasmagoria similar to that experienced in the fleeting mobile encounters of the crowd in the arcades. The aim here is not to produce a comparative history, but rather it is to benefit from the points of contact between London and its near neighbour Paris as regards the presentation of metropolitan space as spectacle and how it was viewed by a range of publics.
'An architectural peepshow': visualising and recreating the city in exhibitions and museums
Alex Werner (Museum of London)
In 1888, William Morris in A Dream of John Ball described a dream of 'an architectural peepshow...a clear-seen mediaeval town standing up with roof and tower and spire with its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old.' This paper will chart the development and reception of city models, dioramas and recreated historical spaces in exhibitions and museums from the eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century from a largely London perspective. Displays to be considered include the large model of the Liverpool docks at the Great Exhibition, the recreated 'London in the Olden Times' street at the International Heath exhibition of 1884 and the models of old London made by John Thorp for the 1908 Franco-British exhibition at the White City, later acquired by the London Museum and subsequently supplemented by the Great Fire model.
Cities, archives and digital projects
Martha Fogg and David Tyler (Adam Mathew Digital)
The wealth of archival evidence on cities, their inhabitants, their buildings, their cultures, their diversity and development across time is immense. How are we seeking to capture some of this material in various digital projects? What kinds of evidence and data are researchers interested in having in a more accessible form? To promote discussion on this we intend to focus on a few examples from current and future digital projects. These range from full text search of Indian newspapers from cities such as Calcutta, Bombay or Madras to a full run of Town Topics, 1887-1923, the society gossip magazine for New York. We also plan to look at visual material from Empire Online, sketches of cities in Meiji Japan, court records on urban slavery, the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, as well as visual representations in new projects such as the Grand Tour and London Lowlife: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld, finishing off with some ideas and questions for a new generation of interactive projects, such as Stuart London, with layered mapping for different facets of life in the metropolis. Our aim is to demonstrate what is currently possible and indicate the nature of future developments with digital innovation.
