Ruth Craggs

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.

‘The long and dusty road’: Comex travel cultures and Commonwealth citizenship on the Asian Highway

This article explores the Comex expeditions founded in 1965 to allow young people to understand Commonwealth ideals through travelling by road to India. Comex drew on optimistic narratives about the possibilities of the Commonwealth as an antidote to the perceived problems of race and declining values in the modern world, attempting to produce enlightened Commonwealth citizens through the travel culture prescribed on route. The article argues that contact, hospitality, adventure and discipline were all central to the expeditions, feeding into and reproducing visions for the Commonwealth in the 1960s and drawing on other narratives of the road and post-colonial travel. By recalling episodes and events on these journeys, the paper highlights the creation and practice of a Comex Commonwealth citizenship through travel. It also provides insights into the reconstruction of expeditionary memories and identities through a variety of archival materials.

Losing an Empire and Building a Role: The Queen, Geopolitics, and the Construction of the Commonwealth Headship at the Lusaka Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, 1979

The queens role as the head of the commonwealth has evolved over the last 60 years. In this article, we explore the ways in which this position was constructed and negotiated through the queens presence (and absence) at commonwealth conferences. Utilising the example of the Lusaka Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 1979—a highly fraught meeting, the queens attendance at which was hotly contested—we examine narratives present in newspaper and oral history accounts surrounding the queens role. Placing this event in the context of the broader constitutional and political issues that have surrounded the headship since the creation of this ambiguous office in 1949, we explore the competing interpretations of the meaning of head of the commonwealth and the vexed question of who was responsible for advising the queen in this role. We argue that the example of the Lusaka summit shows that, far from being a crowned non-entity, the queen was an active agent, both shaping a constitutional role for herself that was separate from that as British monarch and becoming enrolled in broader geopolitical scripts.