Hannah Neate

Architectural Enthusiasm: Visiting Buildings with the Twentieth Century Society

In this paper we put forward the concept of architectural enthusiasm—a collective passion and shared emotional affiliation for buildings and architecture. Through this concept and empirical material based on participation in the architectural tours of The Twentieth Century Society (a UK-based architectural conservation group), we contribute to recent work on the built environment and geographies of architecture in three ways: first, we reinforce the importance of emotion to peoples engagements with buildings, emphasising the shared and practised nature of these engagements; second, we highlight the role of architectural enthusiasts as agents with the potential to shape and transform the built environment; and third, we make connections between (seemingly) disparate engagements with buildings through a continuum of practice incorporating urbex, local history, architectural practice and training, and mass architectural tourism. Unveiling these continuities has important implications for future research into the built environment, highlighting the need to take emotion seriously in all sorts of professional as well as enthusiastic encounters with buildings, and unsettling the categories of amateur and expert within architectural practices.

Provinciality and the art world: the Midland Group 1961–1977

This paper takes as its focus the Midland Group Gallery in order to, first, make a case for the consideration of the geographies of art galleries; second, highlight the importance of galleries in the context of cultural geographies of the 1960s and third, discuss the role of provinciality in the operation of art worlds. In doing so, it explicates one set of geographies surrounding the gallery—those of the local, regional and international networks that are connected to produce art works and art space. It reveals how the interactions between places and practices outside of metropolitan and regional hierarchies provide a more nuanced insight into how art worlds operated during the 1960s, a period of growing internationalism of art, and how contested definitions of the provincial played an integral role in this. The paper charts the operations of the Midland Group Gallery and the spaces that it occupied to demonstrate how it was representative of a post-war discourse of provincialism and a corresponding re-evaluation of regional cultural activity.