Richard Hornsey

Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use

This paper is in two parts. In the first half I consider the challenge posed by the recent performative turn in critical cartography to the urban historical geographer. If maps come into being only within the diverse moments of their use, then how can we compensate for the absence of such events within the historical archive? Building on Tim Ingolds work, I suggest that one approach is to make an analogy between printed maps and musical scores, as decentred technologies whose instructions for performance are always mediated by environmental contingencies and the historical particularities of their performers. Returning a map to its original setting and ‘listening’ to the rhythms inscribed within it might enable us to uncover the specific spatial practices it once sought to produce. I then consolidate this approach via a study of Harry Becks 1933 map of the London Underground. By locating it within the rhythmic dynamics of interwar London, I uncover the Tube Maps covert cybernetic impulse; in gesturing towards its own redundancy, it proffered a mode of cartographic practice that might impel the user toward an environmental docility that accorded with the dynamics of monopoly capitalism. Becks map thus stands revealed as a watershed technology within attempts to orchestrate 20th-century urban life.

Postmodern critiques: Foucault, Lyotard and modern political ideologies

Abstract ’Postmodernism’, or rather aspects of it, has posed a challenge to modern political ideologies. In particular, the works of Michel Foucault and Jean‐Francois Lyotard, through their attacks on the epistemology of modernity, have articulated persuasive critiques of modern ideologies as mechanisms of domination and injustice. Both writers extend their critiques to formulate new strategies of political action and struggle, creating modes of political prescription in both succession and opposition to these ideologies. However, these new prescriptions are problematic, contradictory and disabling, and can be shown partially to emulate the very political ideologies they attack and supersede. Ultimately Foucault and Lyotards work needs to be placed in a symbiotic relationship with modern political ideologies, to create an astuter, if less‐defined, critical apparatus.

The Independent Group Looks at London’s West End

In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group’s discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profound form of social democracy. Soon, this critical engagement would develop in different directions, represented here by Lawrence Alloway’s commentary on Piccadilly Circus in his essay ‘City Notes’ and the London footage inserted by John McHale into his film for the Smithsons’ Berlin Hauptstadt project (both 1959). By the end of the 1950s, members of the erstwhile Independent Group had produced two contrasting critical accounts of how the metropolitan centre should be looked at, which challenged the strictures of post-war reconstruction in distinct and conflicting ways.

“The modern way to loveliness”: middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain

ABSTRACT In May 1935, the British manufacturer Boots launched ‘Number Seven’, a premium range of skin-care products sold via its nationwide network of chain-store chemists. Using material from the Boots Archive, this paper traces the early history of Number Seven to explore the changing meanings of middle-class cosmetics across the mid-twentieth century. Number Seven offered provincial and suburban women an explicitly modern form of facial beauty that married the logics of mass production to traditional moral aesthetics. Through the discourse of ‘loveliness’ and the careful management of in-store experience, it negotiated the prerogative connotations of colour cosmetics and the problematic influence of cinematic glamour. Yet by the mid-1950s, this construction had been superseded by a more situational understanding of beauty that was dependent on context and the appreciation of others. This fundamental shift in the normative aesthetics of public femininity had important implications for women on both sides of Boots’ toilet counters.

The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation.