Lancashire Britishness : Patriotism in the Manchester Region during the Napoleonic Wars

Peer reviewe

Conflicts of power, landscape and amenity in debates over the British Super Grid in the 1950s

The 'Super Grid' network of high-voltage power lines transformed the landscapes of England and southern Scotland in the 1950s. This article examines debates over the siting of pylons, with a focus on the public inquiries into the proposed lines across the Pennines in Lancashire. It brings together archives on electrification from the newly nationalised British Electricity Authority, preservationist groups and local government to reveal deeper insights into processes of local and national decision-making about and popular attitudes to the rural landscape. It uncovers how the public inquiries exposed tensions and differences about the definition of amenity, not just between the electricity industry and preservationists, but also between interests representing urban industrial districts and the National Parks, northern and southern England, and within the preservationist movement. The conflicts over pylons and amenity shows how narratives of landscape preservation were contested and riven with class, region and economic differences in the postwar period.Peer reviewe

A return to materialism? Putting social history back into place

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Bloomsbury Academic in New Directions in Cultural and Social History on 22 February 2018, available online at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-directions-in-social-and-cultural-history-9781472580818/. The Accepted Manuscript is under embargo until 22 August 2019.Peer reviewe

The multiple geographies of Peterloo and its impact in Britain

The Peterloo Massacre was more than just a Manchester event. The attendees, on whom Manchester industry depended, came from a large spread of the wider textile regions. The large demonstrations that followed in the autumn of 1819, protesting against the actions of the authorities, were pan-regional and national. The reaction to Peterloo established the massacre as firmly part of the radical canon of martyrdom in the story of popular protest for democracy. This article argues for the significance of Peterloo in fostering a sense of regional and northern identities in England. Demonstrators expressed an alternative patriotism to the anti-radical loyalism as defined by the authorities and other opponents of mass collective action.Peer reviewe

Legal and historical geographies of the Greenham Common protest camps in the 1980s

© 2023 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article examines the women's protest camps at RAF Greenham Common cruise missile base, Berkshire, England, between 1981 and 1990. Using new evidence from government correspondence in the Home Office archives, it argues that the legal status of the common and its history were key determinants of how the protest camps were policed and repeatedly evicted. The processes of eviction were determined by the complex layers of landownership, common rights, and legislation relating to commons and roadside verges. Protesters developed spatial and legal tactics during the processes of eviction, while sharing broader imaginings of an ideal of commons as publicly accessible to all. This article places Greenham Common in the context of the Conservative government's reaction to other protest and social movements in the countryside that ultimately shaped the formation of public order legislation in 1986 and 1994.Peer reviewe

Memories of a Massacre

Non peer reviewe

Searching for the Material in Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’

This document is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 6 December 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2016.1261591. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 6 June 2018.This article is a response to Peter K. Andersson’s arguments about the ‘civilizing thesis’ in Victorian Studies. It examines his approach in relation to class, discourse, and structure, particularly in relation to the working classes and future directions in approaches to nineteenth-century sources. It suggests that Victorian scholars can learn from labour geographers, who offer new models that highlight structural inequalities while maintaining a sensitivity to post-structural cultural understandings of gender, race, and class.Peer reviewe

“A reformer’s wife ought to be an heroine”: gender, family and English radicals imprisoned under the Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act of 1817

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Katrina Navickas, ‘ “Reformer's Wife ought to be an Heroine”: Gender, Family and English Radicals Imprisoned under the Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act of 1817’, History, Vol. 101 (345): 246-264, April 2016, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12227. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 21 Mar 2018. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.In 1817, the British government reacted to the rise of popular agitation for parliamentary reform by passing the Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act and arresting the leaders of the new working-class radical societies. The imprisonment of these men was a severe blow to the democratic movement. Despite the recent revival of scholarly interest in early nineteenth-century popular politics, historians have treated the events of 1817 as a brief interlude before the better-known Peterloo Massacre of 1819. This article argues that the development of the post-war democratic movement cannot be understood without examining the impact of the imprisonments on the radical leaders and their families. It analyses a previously un-studied series of letters confiscated from the radical prisoners and kept in the Home Office files. The correspondence demonstrates the essential role of letter-writing within radical culture, and how radical thought and self-expression was mediated through the pressures of both government surveillance and financial difficulty. This article secondly offers new evidence about the gender politics of radicalism in this period. It shows how women’s experience of separation from their husbands, and male attitudes towards their role in 1817-18 crucially shaped the emergence of female radicalism in public for the first time in 1819.Peer reviewe

The Contested Right of Public Meeting in England from the Bill of Rights to the Public Order Acts

© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/The 'right of public meeting' has historically been a key demand of extra-parliamentary political movements in England. This paper examines how public assembly came to be perceived as a legally protected right, and how national and local authorities debated and policed political meetings. Whereas previous histories have suggested that a 'liberal governance' dominated urban government during the nineteenth century, this paper offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between people and the state. It points to rights paradoxes, whereby the right of free passage and to 'air and recreation' often conflicted with the demand for the right of political meeting in challenges to use of public spaces. Local authorities sought to defend the rights of property against political movements by using the common law offences of obstruction and 'nuisance'. By the first half of the twentieth century, new threats of militant tactics and racial harassment by political groups necessitated specific public order legislation. Though twentieth-century legislation sought to protect certain types of assembly and protest marches, the implementation and policing of public order was spatially discriminatory, and the right of public meeting was left unresolved.Peer reviewe

From Chartist Newspaper to Digital Map of Grassroots Meetings, 1841-1844: Documenting Workflows

This is a free access article published by Routledge in Journal of Victorian Culture, doi: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1301179.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio