PhDThe Lansbury estate was the LCC's first post-war reconstruction area, it
formed the Exhibition of Architecture during the Festival of Britain, and
received considerable media, political, architecutral and planning attention. This
coverage articulated hegemonic post-war ideas about the future, the East End
and communities. I have examined this material and the representation and
understandings about the estate from non-hegemonic groups. My intention has
been to explore these representations and emphasise the complexity associated
with the creation and negotiation of understandings about places. While the
research is concerned with understandings of the Lansbury estate,I have
examined the ways those meanings and understandings are created,and based
my work around a conceptual critique of cultural geography. I argue that
cultural geography has overly relied on hegemonic discourses produced by the
powerful and neglected less powerful groups' understandings. As a result of
this, some cultural geographers have over-simplified the complex ways
meanings about places are created,reproduced and contested,and failed to
address the range of meanings about places. This work, therefore is offered as
a response to these limitations, and aims to show that to appreciate the meanings
of places it is necessary to examine the understandings of hegemonic and nonhegemonic
groups, and emphasise the relationships between those groups
