Previous Metropolitan History seminars

Metropolitan History seminar 2009-10

Convenors: Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Vivian Bickford-Smith  

Autumn Term 2009

7 October Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis (LSE)
The decline of apprenticeship in early modern London
21 October Henriette Steiner (ETH Zürich)
“The more I see of the world…” London as metropolitan paradigm in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,Norway and Denmark (1796)
4 November Eric Sandweiss (Indiana University, Bloomington/CMH)
The City Museum and the Museum City: remembering forgotten landscapes
18 November Caroline Sandes (UCL)
Recreating a metropolis with selective memory: the use of the past in post-civil-war Beirut
2 December Valentina Pugliano (IHR/Oxford)
Naturalists in the metropolis: the quiet pursuits of London apothecaries

Spring Term 2010

13 January Berta Joncus (Oxford)
Music for diversion and seduction at Ranelagh Gardens
27 January Matthew Stevens (CMH/IHR)
London women in the city and Westminster courts in the later middle ages
10 February Tim Wales (KCL)
Public health, political culture and the decline of infant mortality in West Ham, 1886-1939
24 February Jim Clifford (York, Ontario)
Remaking the Bow Back Rivers: environmental and social intervention to decrease flooding and unemployment in West Ham, 1905-1935
10 March Jordan Landes (CMH/IHR)
London Quakers in the Atlantic world before 1725

 

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2008-09

Convenors: Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Dr James Moore

Autumn Term 2008

8 October Mark Latham (Leicester)
Finance and urban improvement: estate revenue and the London Bridge Improvement Act of 1756
22 October Julie Atkinson (Warwick/IHR)
Office politics: representing the city in revolutionary New York
5 November Deborah Colville and Rosemary Ashton (Bloomsbury Project, UCL)
A tale of two squares: Russell Square and Gordon Square in the 19th century
19 November Kathrin Pieren (CMH)
From 'Ost und West' to East and West End: London's role in the discourse on Jewish art at the beginning of the 20th century
3 December Vivian Bickford-Smith (CMH/University of Cape Town)
Metropolitan pretensions in the South: comparing the claims of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg in apartheid era city histories

Spring Term 2009

14 January Ben Heller (Oxford)
A user-friendly metropolis? Transportation, individual mobility, and the distribution of recreational spaces in Georgian London
28 January Jim Galloway (CMH)
London and the tidal Thames: flooding, economy and environment in the later middle ages
11 February Henry Meier (Oxford)
Nursing the sick poor in seventeenth-century London
25 February Katrina Gulliver (CMH)
Outposts of Empire? Urban identity in colonial port cities
11 March Christoph Heyl (Frankfurt)
German immigrants and refugees in London, 1848-1945
Please note: this seminar will be held in Room NG16 (Ground Floor, North Block, Senate House)

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2007-08

Convenors: Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Derek Keene, Dr Patrick Wallis

Autumn Term 2007

17 October Paul Dobraszczyk (Reading)
Out of sight, out of mind? Representing London's Victorian sewers
31 October David Marsh (Birkbeck)
Changing perceptions of public and private open spaces in early modern London
14 November Daniel Antoine (Institute of Archaeology, UCL)
Growing up in London from the 11th to 19th century: the bioarchaeological evidence
28 November Erik Spindler (Oriel College, Oxford)
Suburban prostitution and marginality in late medieval London and Bruges
Please note: this session will take place in room ST274, Stewart House 2nd Floor
12 December Quentin Russell (Royal Holloway)
Greeks in Victorian London: 'A Cowardly and Dishonest Race', from marginalisation to acceptance

Spring Term 2008

9 January Catherine Wright (Centre for Metropolitan History)
Dutch and Anglo-Dutch social networks in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London
23 January Philip Baker and Mark Merry (Centre for Metropolitan History and Birkbeck)
Parishioners, pews and perimeters: residence and status in early modern London
6 February Laurence Scott (King’s College London, Comparative Literature Programme)
The aesthetics of terror in the novels of London and Paris
20 February Göran Rydén (Uppsala University)
Impressions of London – Visions of Progress: Swedish eighteenth-century visits to London
5 March Carlos López Galviz (Centre for Metropolitan History)
On maps, timetables, cities and railways. London and Paris, c.1860-1900

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2006-07

Convenors: Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Derek Keene, Dr Patrick Wallis

Autumn Term 2006

18 October Peter Bailey (University of Manitoba)
Mid-Victorian metropolitan music hall: audiences and ambience
1 November Bruno Blondé (University of Antwerp)
Material culture in a declining metropolis: Antwerp in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
15 November James Moore (CMH)
The problem of corruption in municipal government and politics, c.1850–1914: Manchester, Liverpool and Wolverhampton
29 November Panikos Panayi (de Montfort University)
The rise of the foreign restaurant in London
13 December Alysa Levine ( Oxford Brookes)
Pauper apprentices in eighteenth-century London

Spring Term 2007

10 January Glen Calderwood (Institution of Civil Engineers) and Carl Bridge (King’s College, London)
The Australians in Britain in 1901: an exploration
[joint meeting with the Contemporary British History seminar]
24 January David Peters Corbett (University of York)
‘Food for Starving Souls’: the urban scene in Ashcan School and Camden Town Realism around 1900
7 February Panikos Panayi (De Montfort University)
The rise of the foreign restaurant in London, c.1870-1940
[Meeting rescheduled from 29 November]
21 February David Green (KCL) and Alistair Owens (QMUL)
Following the money: geographies of wealth in nineteenth-century London
7 March Andrew Lees (Rutgers)
Germans on society and social reform in urban Britain in the nineteenth century

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2005-06

Convenors: Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Derek Keene, Dr Patrick Wallis

Autumn Term 2005

12 October

 No meeting
Please note: All are welcome at the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century seminar (Wolfson Room, IHR, 5.15 pm) for Dr David Green's paper on 'Pauper Protests: power and resistance in early nineteenth-century London workhouses'

26 October

 Leonard Schwarz, Jeremy Boulton, John Black and Peter Jones (Birmingham and Newcastle)
The Poor in Westminster, 1725-1825: the feminisation of poverty?
9 November Kate Bradley (CCBH)
Growing up with a City: urban youth in London and Chicago 1880-1950
23 November Luke McKernan (Birkbeck and British Universities Film & Video Council)
Diverting Time: London cinemas and their audiences, 1906-1914
7 December Tim Strangleman and Bridget Henderson (London Metropolitan University)
Guinness was good for us: London, labour and stout, 1935-2005

Spring Term 2006

18 January Barry Venning (Open University)
Turner's London
1 February John Chalcraft (LSE)
The road to Beirut: Syrian migrant labour in Lebanon since 1945 and the politics of disposable labour
15 February

Simon Dixon (Devon Record Office/University of Exeter)
Quakers and the London parish, 1670-1720
1 March Katia Pizzi (Institute of Romance and Germanic Studies)
The pasts and futures of a liminal metropolis: Trieste, 1910-90
15 March

Georg Leidenberger (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, México)
Tramways and the emergence of modern Mexico City, 1880-1950

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2004-05

Convenors: Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Derek Keene, Dr Patrick Wallis

Autumn Term 2004

13 October Graeme Davison (Monash)
The first Australian suburbs
20 October Jerry White (Local Government Ombudsman)
Trouble in Arcadia: the London suburb, 1840 to the present
3 November Brigitte Flickinger (Heidelberg)
Silent spectators: going to the cinema in London, Berlin and St Petersburg before 1918
17 November Laura Ugolini (Wolverhampton)
The passing of the 'nut'? Masculinity, youth and consumption in World War I London
1 December Brenda Assael (Swansea)
Conspicuous Consumption: dining out in the Victorian West End

Spring Term 2005

12 January Mark Merry and Philip Baker (Birkbeck/CMH)
'For the house her self and one servant': households and houses in late seventeenth century London
26 January Michelle Johansen (IHR and East London)
Struggling heroes: the public librarian in late Victorian London
9 February

Mike Finn (Cambridge)
Educating the underclass: Walter Besant ideas of poverty, 1882-1900

Please note the change of title from that previously advertised
23 February Stefan Goebel (University of Kent and CMH)
Coventry and Dresden: the politics of transnational remembrance after 1945
9 March

Jose Luis Oyon (U.P.C. Barcelona)
The structures of the everyday city: space and urban practices in popular Barcelona, 1914–1936

NB: This seminar will be held in the Low Countries Room, 3rd floor, IH

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2003-04

Convenors: Dr Iain Black, Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Derek Keene

Autumn Term 2003

8 October Rachel Unsworth (Leeds)
Locating the early service sector of Leeds: the origins of an office district
22 October Margrit Schulte Beerbühl (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf)
The forgotten majority: German merchant houses in eighteenth-century London
5 November Kathy Chater (Goldsmiths College)
Black people in Old Bailey Trials, 1722-1812
19 November Craig Bailey (Centre for Metropolitan History)
The Irish network in London: the case of merchants, 1760-1840
3 December Krista Cowman (Leeds Metropolitan)
'Going to London': metropolitan opportunities for suffragettes from the region

Spring Term 2004

14 January Barbara Penner (The Bartlett, UCL)
The Amazing Hotel World: nineteenth-century New York hotels and consumer desire
28 January Philip Davies (English Heritage)
An imperial framework: the architecture of the British Raj in India
11 February John Marriott (Raphael Samuel Centre, University of East London)
The discovery of London in the early nineteenth century
25 February Stefan Goebel (Centre for Metropolitan History)
Capital Cities at War: exhibitions in London, Paris and Berlin 1914-18
10 March Maiken Umbach (University of Manchester)
A Tale of Second Cities: autonomy, culture and the law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the long nineteenth century

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2002-03

Convenors: Dr Iain Black, Dr Matthew Davies, Dr Richard Dennis, Professor Derek Keene

Autumn Term 2002

9 October Stefan Goebel (Centre for Metropolitan History)
Mobilising and commemorating the urban Home Front: the Ruhr region during the Great War
23 October Ian Doolittle (London)
The City of London 'property market' in the 1660s: the evidence of the Fire Court Decrees
6 November Derek Keene (Centre for Metropolitan History)
London and Japan: metropolises compared
20 November Sandip Hazareesingh (Cardiff)
Destination Bombay: Glasgow commercial interests and the emergence of a new trade route in the late nineteenth century
NB This seminar will be held in Room 248 in the main block of Senate House
4 December Elisabeth Darling (Brighton)
New homes for old: exhibiting visions of a modern London, 1931-9

Spring Term 2003

22 January Alison Parkinson Kay (Nuffield College Oxford)
Reaction not Retreat: women and entrepreneurial activity in mid nineteenth-century London
5 February Iain Black (King's College London)
Monumental commerce: Lutyens and late-imperial London
19 February David Gilbert (Royal Holloway)
London of the Future: Aston Webb and the planning of London
5 March Matthew Davies (Centre for Metropolitan History)
Digitally enhanced? Towards the creation of a new resource for the study of London's past
19 March Francesca Carnevali (Birmingham)
Golden links: jewellers and jewellery between London and Birmingham in the late nineteenth century

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2001-02

Convenors: Dr Iain Black, Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Professor Derek Keene

Autumn Term 2001

10 October Michael Limberger (University of Antwerp)
Antwerp and its rural surroundings: social and economic changes in the hinterland of a commercial metropolis, c.1450-c.1570
24 October Richard Dennis (University College London)
Modern housing? Attitudes to mansion flats and model dwellings in late Victorian London
31 October David Guzke (Southwest Missouri State University
Rejecting the Gin Palace: London's reformed interwar pubs
NB This seminar will be held in the Training Room as usual
21 November Marc St-Hilaire (Université Laval, Quebec)
The French-Canadianization of a British colonial capital: the population dynamics of Quebec City, 1860-1900
5 December Sarah Glynn (University College London)
East End immigrants and the battle for housing: a comparative study of political mobilisation in the Jewish and Bengali communities

Spring Term 2002

16 January Alex Werner (Museum of London)
The making of the Museum of London's new 'World City Gallery - London 1789-1914'
30 January Jane Rendell (The Bartlett, University College London)
The pursuit of pleasure: gender and architectural space in Regency London
13 February Lynn Leeds (University of Pennsylvania)
The making of public space in the small towns of the Empire: British Malaya, 1900-1940
27 February Jacinta Prunty (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Dublin and London, 1800-1925: contemporary comparisons
13 March Louise Jackson (Leeds Metropolitan University)
‘Lady Cops’ and ‘Decoy Doras’: Gender, Surveillance and the Construction of Urban Knowledge 1919–1959

 

Metropolitan History seminar 2000-01

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Dr Derek Keene

Theme: 'The representation of the metropolis'

Autumn Term 2000

11 October John Wareing (University of North London/ Birkbeck)
Revisiting the social origins of emigrants from late seventeenth-century London
25 October Laura Wright (Cambridge) and Derek Keene (CMH)
Strange things in the city: place-names and representation in medieval London
8 November Lucy Peltz (Museum of London)
Aestheticizing the antiquarian city: printmaking as preservation in the long eighteenth century
22 November Lynda Nead (Birkbeck)
Gas and light: Cremorne Pleasure Gardens and mid-Victorian urban entertainment
6 December Elizabeth McKellar (Birkbeck)
Place not space: problems of locality and identity in the eighteenth-century metropolis

Spring Term 2001

17 January Dirk de Meyer (University of Ghent)
(Dis)enchantments: representing Los Angeles Suburbia in the 1960s
31 January Tony Sutcliffe (Nottingham)
London in the cinema: from Lodger to Launderette
14 February Iain Black (King's College London)
Between tradition and modernity: Hongkong Bank building in Hong Kong and Shanghai, 1880-1940
28 February Deryck Holdsworth (Pennsylvania State)
Local and global components of the proto-office district: exchanges, coffee-houses and counting-houses in their larger context
14 March Davide Deriu (University College London, Bartlett)
Modernity, memory and the metropolis: notes on urban photography in Europe between the wars
21 March Pat Garside (Salford) and Ali Strauss (British Film Institute)
'Neither One Thing nor the Other': Film and London's identity between the wars

 

Metropolitan History seminar 1999-2000

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Dr Derek Keene

Theme: 'Marginality and the city'

Autumn Term 1999

27 October
 
 		 Sally Alexander (Goldsmiths' College), John Bold and Tanis Hinchcliffe (Westminster University), Derek Keene (CMH)
Exploring the suburbs of twentieth-century London
10 November
 
 		 David Green (King's College London)
On the margins of the middle class? Women's wealth in London, 1800-1850
24 November
 
 		 Shompa Lahiri (Queen Mary and Westfield College)
Patterns of marginality: Indian seamen in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London
15 December
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 		 Joint meeting with the 'Earlier Middle Ages' seminar
NB. This meeting will be held in room 329, Third Floor, Senate House NOT at the IHR
Adriaan Verhulst (University of Ghent)
The rise of cities in north-west Europe
This seminar celebrates the publication of Professor Verhulst's book on The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe and will be followed by a reception sponsored by Cambridge University Press

Spring Term 2000

19 January
 		 Craig Bailey (CMH and King's College London)
On the medical margin: John St. John Long of Harley Street, 1830-4
2 February
 
 		 Matt Houlbrook (University of Essex)
Happy Hunting Grounds? The paradoxical spaces of sexual citizenship in metropolitan London: 1918-1957
16 February
 		 David Pike (Amercian University, Washington)
Underground in London and Paris, 1815-1939
1 March
 		 Caroline Bressey (UCL)
Forgotten geographies: spaces of black identity in nineteenth-century London
15 March
 
 		 William Greenslade (West of England University)
The resouces of the marginal: George Gissing, fiction and late nineteenth-century Londo

Metropolitan History seminar 1998-9

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Dr Derek Keene

Theme: 'Commercial and imperial metropolises'

Autumn Term 1998

14 October Bill Day (London School of Economics)
Florence: the growth of a metropolis, 1200-1300 
28 October Michela Rosso (Turin)
John Summerson as an historian of London 
11 November Professor Shizuya Nishimura (Hosei University)
The development of a commercial metropolis: trade and banks in Shanghai, 1870-1914 
25 November David Barnett (University of Nottingham)
Fountainhead of consumerism: wholesale and retail distribution in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries 
9 December Alan Cox (Survey of London)
Harvey Nichols and Harrods: two shopping cultures 

Spring Term 1999

20 January Graham Twigg (Centre for Metropolitan History/Royal Holloway)
Epidemics and the plague: London, 1540-1720  
10 February Peter Whitehouse (Birkbeck College)
Freedom and regulation: situating Middlesex petrol stations   
24 February Catherine Brice(Ecole Francaise de Rome)
The Vittorio Emmanuele Monument, other Roman monuments, and the forging of national identity  
10 March Professor Jonathan Schneer (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Anti-Imperial London: The Pan-African Conference of 1900  
24 March Scott R Fletcher (University of Reading)
Yankees on the make: American immigrant entrepreneurs in Edwardian London  

Metropolitan History seminar 1996-7

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Dr Derek Keene

Theme: 'Metropolitan Attractions'

Autumn Term 1996

9 October David Feldman (Birkbeck College, London)
Migrants in urban Britain, 1840-1950
23 October Janet Polasky (University of New Hampshire/Catholic University, Leuven)
British workers and Belgian peasants on the railways: a comparative perspective on Workmen's Trains in the urban housing crisis at the turn of the nineteenth century 
6 November Jennifer Davis (Wolfson College, Cambridge)
Race and the residuum: the Irish origins of the English underclass 
20 November Donatella Calabi (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia)
From the Jewish district to the ghetto in Venice, Florence and Rome: spatial architectural characteristics 
27 November Mark Jenner (York)
Networks of water in London, c.1569-c.1725
4 December Gerry Kearns (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge)
The political uses of history in the modern urban landscape: Chicago and the quincentenary of Columbus [NB: this will be a joint meeting with the History of the United States of America seminar] 

Spring Term 1997

15 January Iain Black (Cheltenham and Gloucester College)
Money, architecture and identity: bank office building in the City of London, 1830-1870 
29 January Andrew Crowhurst (Department of Geography, De Montfort University)
Empire theatres and the Empire: images of race and class in London's music halls 
12 February Claire Hancock (Universite de Paris-Sorbonne)
Travellers' descriptions of Paris and London during the nineteenth century 
26 February Bill Luckin, Graham Mooney and Andrea Tanner (Centre for Metropolitan History)
Mortality in the metropolis, 1860-1920 
12 March Patricia Garside (University of Salford)
Fragments of London: selling the capital as a place to visit, 1919-1939 

 

Metropolitan History seminar 1995-6

The speakers are all contributing chapters on London to the forthcoming Cambridge Urban History of Britain. In these papers they will try out their ideas and reflect more generally on the underlying themes of London history.

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Dr Derek Keene

Theme for 1995-6: 'Writing Metropolitan History'

Autumn Term 1995

11 October Derek Keene (Centre for Metropolitan History)
From Lost City to Capital, 600-1300
25 October Caroline Barron (Royal Holloway, London)
A Social and Political Capital, 1300-1540
8 November Jeremy Boulton (University of Newcastle upon Tyne)
An Emergent Metropolis, 1540-1700
22 November Leonard Schwarz (University of Birmingham)
London and the Industrial World, 1700-1840
6 December Richard Dennis (University College London)
World City and After, 1840-1950

 

Metropolitan History seminar 1994-5

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr David Green, Dr Derek Keene

Theme for 1994-5: 'Metropolitan Infrastructures'

Autumn Term 1994

12 October Anthony Sutcliffe (Leicester)
Metropolitan infrastructures in the cinema
25 October Bill Luckin (Bolton)
'That imperial stream': the water question and environmental ideology in nineteenth-century London
9 November Caroline Arscott (Courtald Institute of Art)
'See no evil': London prisons in nineteenth-century art
23 November Mark Jenner (York)
Networks of water in London, c.1569-c.1725
7 December Ralph Turvey (London School of Economics)
The LCC steamboat service, 1905-8: a flop

Spring Term 1995

18 January Peter Hounsell (Thames Valley)
Rubbish, waste and by-products: the nature and location of noxious trades in Victorian London
1 February David Green (King's College London)
Small masters, small fortunes: middle-class wealth in London, 1800-1858
15 February Sophie Forgan (Teesside)
The topography of scientific life in nineteenth-century London
1 March Frank Prochaska (Institute of Historical Research)
The monarchy, civil society and the metropolis
15 March Dana Arnold (The Georgian Group)
Rationality, safety and power: the street planning of late Georgian London

 

Metropolitan History seminar 1993-4

Convenors: Dr Richard Dennis, Dr Derek Keene, Professor Michael Port

Theme for 1993-4: 'Interpreting Metropolitan Space'

Autumn Term 1993

13 October Michael Berlin (Centre for Metropolitan History)
'Places of skill in early modern London'  
27 October Miles Ogborn (Lampeter)
'The street as a space of modernity: eighteenth-century London and the public sphere'  
10 November Julienne Hanson (Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, UCL)
'Interpreting the metropolitan network'  
24 November Mona Domosh (Florida Atlantic)
'Interpreting New York's nineteenth-century retail district'  
8 December David Watkin (Peterhouse, Cambridge)
'Sir John Soane's view of London  

Spring Term 1994

19 January Andrew Saint (English Heritage)
'Ecclesiastical space: Anglican church building and the parish system in nineteenth-century London'   
2 February Pascal Brioist (Istituto Universitario Europeano, Florence)
'Two geographies of seventeenth-century London: Samuel Pepys and Robert Hooke'   
16 February Roland Quinault (University of North London)
'Charles Dickens and London'   
2 March Janet Barnes and Craig Spence (Centre for Metropolitan History)
'An atlas of late seventeenth-century London'   
16 March John House (Courtauld Institute of Art)
'Pissarro in Paris: anarchist or aesthete?'