Ian Waites

Middlefield: The Development of a Provincial Post-World War Two Council Estate in Lincolnshire, 1960–1965

Scholarly, local-historical, studies of provincial, low-rise post-World War Two council estates are rare. This article attempts to remedy this by examining one such example, the Middlefield Lane estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, which was completed in 1965. Using two key primary sources, the minute books of the Gainsborough Urban District Council’s Housing Committee and the Gainsborough Evening News, the article will provide a narrative account of the planning and development of Middlefield, and of the experiences of the estate’s new residents as they settled in there. Post-war council estates have long been criticized as being socially and architecturally problematic. This article aims to present a more nuanced historical perspective on this by demonstrating that these estates were carefully and thoughtfully planned, and have rich and meaningful histories that are worth chronicling.

'Extensive fields of our forefathers': Some Prospect Drawings of Common Fields in Northamptonshire by Peter Tillemans, c. 1719–21

Abstract This article presents a number of prospect drawings of various parts of Northamptonshire, made by the Flemish artist, Peter Tillemans, between 1719 and 1721. These views provide the rural historian with what are probably the earliest artistic representations of the unenclosed landscape in England and a unique visual reference to Northamptonshires open fields and commons just before the parliamentary enclosure movement began. The article will examine these views to demonstrate first of all how the prospect compositional style was suited to the artistic treatment of Northamptonshires open fields and commons, and to show that this landscape was more varied and not as bleak as later pro-enclosure commentators would have it. It will also be demonstrated how some views appear to suggest that common land continued to play an accepted part in the countys economic and cultural development at this time, while others clearly give an indication of incipient and inevitable change in the landscape as the century progressed.

'A Spacious Horizon Is an Image of Liberty': Artistic and Literary Representations of Space and Freedom in the English Common Field Landscape in the Face of Parliamentary Enclosure, 1810-1830

This article explores artistic representations and responses to the Parliamentary Enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the literary work of John Clare and the paintings of Peter DeWint in depth. It highlights the competing cultural and political agendas of the time, the cultural meanings that common land and the rights of access to it held for common people, and the way the privatisation of common land dramatically affected their cultural lives. The article then draws some comparisons between the cultural politics of land and space from this period, and contemporary urban, spatial political movements such as Reclaim the Streets, in order to highlight its continued urgency and vitality.

‘One Big Playground for Kids’: A Contextual Appraisal of Some 1970s Photographs of Children Hanging Out on a Post-Second-World-War British Council Estate

ABSTRACT This article gives a broad assessment of a selection of photographs taken in the early 1970s of children on a post-Second-World-War British council estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. As one of the cornerstones of postwar social reconstruction in Britain, the provision and design of new public housing often had the well-being of the future citizen – the child – in mind, and the photography of these estates at the time often included children as a way to promote a sense of well-being and community. This article offers a reading of these photographs as a representation of the child’s day-to-day life in this particular environment, and to present an understanding of how the planning and layout of the estate was intended to function as a crucial influence on the development of the children who lived there.

Breaking ground: art, archaeology & mythology

Department of Archaeology in promoting a specific period of Indian history (i.e. Thanjavur Nayaks) through its programme of heritage preservation (278, 279). In the same vein, why does the national department for archaeology protect just the Land Gate and do these efforts better engage with the town’s fishing population? How do women use these spaces differently than men? Jørgensen successfully draws together several sources of information, however, the volume would benefit from deeper analysis of the wide range of perspectives on preservation of heritage. A more explicit spatial approach to these perspectives can assist the reader in elucidating who wants to preserve what, and where, which in turn can give insights into particular actors that are able to influence people and situations at specific moments. Nonetheless, Jørgensen offers a compelling narrative on the complexities of heritage preservation in the 21st century and a window into Tranquebar, a former Danish trading post and the life of its residents in post-colonial India.

Places Where I Forgot Things: Memory, Identity, and the British Council Estate in the Paintings of George Shaw

George Shaw (1966–) is a British painter known for his meticulous depictions of Tile Hill in Coventry, a post–World War II council housing estate where Shaw lived from 1968 until the late 1980s. This article assesses Shaw’s work as a product of a wider struggle between the idealistic principles of postwar council estate planning and the later negative social and aesthetic stereotyping of these estates. Next, it discusses how Shaw’s paintings appear to cope with this struggle by “spectrally wavering” between a visualization of Tile Hill as remembered from his childhood and as it is in its present condition. Finally, Shaw’s work is examined in relation to theories of autobiographical memory and childhood development to show how the postwar council estate had an indelible effect on the formation of Shaw’s personal and cultural identity.

The common field landscape: cultural commemoration and the impact of enclosure, c.1770-1850

One ‘traditional’ image of the English landscape is that of a ‘patchwork’ of groups of small fields, enclosed and demarcated by verdant hedgerows. As Christopher Taylor pointed out many years ago however, the word ‘traditional’ has to be used advisedly in relation to any type of English landscape, since it has largely evolved in a constant state of flux, change and contradiction.1 In much of midland and southern England at least, that patchwork landscape was largely created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the process historically known as parliamentary enclosure. As such, this ‘traditional’ landscape is 250 years old, at the very most. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain experienced a period of intense cultural, economic and industrial expansion which saw a cultural attachment to nature and the landscape begin to play a crucial role in the development of a strong sense of national identity.2 Parliamentary enclosure was a component part of this expansion, producing a new landscape of small, divided and hedgerow-lined fields that, paradoxically, became emblematic of the ‘English Countryside’ and ‘Englishness’ for later generations. The subsequent cultural dominance of this type of countryside also reveals how the enclosed landscape’s antithesis — the open or common field landscape — has been sidelined in key late twentieth-century historical studies of English agriculture and rural society.