The violent frontline: space, ethnicity and confronting the state in Edwardian Spitalfields and 1980s Brixton

This article discusses in comparative terms the relationship between space, ethnic identity, subaltern status and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It does so by comparing two examples in which the control of the state, as represented by the Metropolitan Police, was challenged by minority groups through physical force. It will examine the Spitalfields riots of 1906, which began as strike action by predominantly Jewish bakers and escalated into a general confrontation between the local population and the police, and the Brixton riots of 1981, a response to endemic police harassment of mainly Caribbean youth and long-term economic discrimination in that area of South London. It will begin by dissecting the association of physical metropolitan space with the diasporic ‘other’ in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this ‘othering’ was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right. It will then interrogate the difficult relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Jewish and Caribbean working class communities, and how this deteriorating relationship exploded into in extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. The article will conclude by assessing how the relationships between space, identity and violence influenced long-term national and communal narratives of Jewish and Caribbean interactions with the British state

Synagogues and Mosques - fried fish and curries:<br /> the experience of Jews and Muslims in Spitalfields, London

The central focus of the paper will be a comparison of the experience of settlement, acclimatisation and integration of Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis in the Spitalfields district of London in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will seek to identify the role played by religion in those processes, particularly within the contexts of communal cohesion, welfare provision and social control. The paper will then proceed to explore the way in which the two immigrant groups have negotiated their cultural identity - by means of fusion and separation, acceptance and rejection. It will also seek to locate points at which the two groups (in some cases the children and grandchildren of the first generation immigrants) have interfaced socially and in commerce. Finally, the paper will evaluate the importance of location in the Muslim/Jewish integration process by evaluating the role played Spitalfields, a first point of immigrant settlement and home to religious dissidence since the seventeenth century

The uses of space syntax historical research for policy development in heritage urbanism

The application of space syntax methods to heritage related questions has a long track record both in the field of space syntax research and beyond, for example in archaeology. These studies deploy the theories and methods of space syntax to explore the socio-cultural dimension embedded in spatial systems of historic and archaeological significance. Space syntax analysis provides a link between the material and immaterial aspects of ‘spatial’ culture. It offers a critique of built environment typologies defined in terms of stylistic periodisation by advancing an understanding of the role of spatial configuration in the production and reproduction of space-time events. In the context of urban heritage studies, this means looking beyond the value of buildings as individual objects to buildings as elements in emergent arrangements of social space. Building on the comprehensive review of the disciplinary interface between urban history and space syntax historical studies provided by Griffiths (2012), this chapter advances ‘heritage urbanism syntax’ with the aim of orientating this body of historical research towards contemporary issues of urban heritage. It identifies three kinds of heritage urbanism syntax: (1) conservation areas; (2) street scales, and (3) spatial cultures in order to assist critical reflection on the application of this perspective to urban heritage contexts. The chapter highlights how a diachronic understanding of spatial cultures enables an integrative approach to heritage urbanism that situates heritage within both historical and contemporary urban landscapes. It describes the potential contribution of space syntax to inclusive bottom-up definitions of heritage and resilient heritage futures