From its origin as the Roman city of Londinium through to its latest incarnation as a super-diverse World City in the twenty-first century, London’s history and culture has been shaped by migration. This book expresses and celebrates the plurality of the capital’s cultures and affirms the importance of migration in the making of the modern city through thirty-three short essays written by academics, artists, broadcasters and curators. Subjects range from the mediaeval to the contemporary: buildings and institutions, individuals and communities, objects, visual art, street performances and literary texts. Some contributors focus on famous people and places, like Shakespeare and St Paul’s, while others explore less well-known subjects, like the Free German League of Culture (1939-46) or Ignatius Sancho, the eighteenth-century musician, grocer and man-of-letters.
It is not only London’s cultures which are diverse, migration is also plural. This book engages with the very many human migrations from across the globe and within the British Isles that have taken place over the last two-thousand years, as well as with the movements of plants, animals, and ideologies from other countries and continents, and the movement of natural resources and manmade toxins into and through the city.
Composed of a vivid collection of snapshots, the volume offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the city and provides new insights into the successive migrant communities that have come to London and made it their own.
Edited by:
Charlotte Grant,
Alistair Robinson
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350242012
ISBN 10: 1350242012
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 07 March 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Frontmatter Author Biographies Introduction, Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson CENTRAL 1. St. Erkenwald and the Hidden Histories of St Paul’s Cathedral, Alastair Bennett 2. Ignatius Sancho: Musician, Man of Letters, Grocer, Markman Ellis 3. The ‘Black-birds’ of St. Giles: Community and Place in Eighteenth-century London, Nicole N. Aljoe and Savita Maharaj 4. Styling the Other: Hazlitt’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’, Uttara Natarajan 5. Begging Places: Poverty, Race, and Visibility on Ludgate Hill, c. 1815, David Hitchcock 6. 13 Red-Lion Square: The Mendicity Society, 1818–76, Oskar Cox Jensen 7. The Chinese Aesthetics of the Admonitions Scroll at the British Museum, Kent Su 8. ‘A terrain on its own’: Elizabeth Bowen and Regent’s Park, Heather Ingman INFRASTRUCTURE: WATER 9. London’s Water: City Comedy, Migration and Middletons, Susan J. Wiseman EAST 10. Shakespeare in Shoreditch, Daniel Swift 11. Hostile Environments: Disinterring a Lascar Barracks in Nineteenth-Century Shadwell, Eliza Cubitt 12. 19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields: A Case Study in the Architecture of Migration and Diversity, Dan Cruikshank 13. The Slot-Meter and the East End Avant-Garde, Alex Grafen INFRASTRUCTURE: WASTE 14. Blockage and Recuperation: Sewer-Hunters in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Naomi Hinds SOUTH 15. Culture and Horticulture in Lambeth from ‘Tradescant’s Ark’ to Vauxhall Gardens, Charlotte Grant 16. The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Sydenham, and St Petersburg, Catherine Brown 17. 87 Hackford Road: The London of Vincent Van Gogh, Livia Wang 18. Writing London: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Ruvani Ranasinha INFRASTRUCTURE: TRANSPORT I 19. Existing Triply: Race, Space and the London Transport Network, 1950s–70s, Rob Waters WEST 20. Scotch Hornpipes and African Elephants: The May Fair in 1700, Alistair Robinson 21. Feathered People in Enlightenment London: Queen of the Bluestockings meets Cherokee King, Elizabeth Eger 22. Prince Eugen in Kensington: Anglo-Scandinavian Artistic, Networks and the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, Eva-Charlotta Mebius 23. ‘What a relief to be back in London’: The Silences of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Edmund de Waal 24. Tricksters of the Water: Sam Selvon's West London and the Migrant Experience, Peter Maber and Karishma Patel 25. Arabian Nights on the Edgware Road: Hanan al-Shaykh’s Only in London, Susie Thomas 26. The Grand Prince of Kyiv in Holland Park: The Statue of Saint Volodymyr, Sasha Dovzhyk 27. ‘Is real mas outside’: Community, Resistance and Notting Hill Carnival, Leighan Renaud 28. ‘Where the City Dissolves’: Suburban Diasporas, Psychosis and Reparative Writing, Martin Dines INFRASTRUCTURE: TRANSPORT II 29. A Bus for Everyone: The Role of the London Omnibus in Enabling Access to the City, Joe Kerr NORTH 30. John Keats and London: Nature, the City and the Suburbs, Flora Lisica 31. The Battle for an African Space in London: WASU Hostel and Aggrey House, William Whitworth 32. Northview: A Snapshot of Multiracial London during the Second World War, Oliver Ayers 33. Exiles of NW3: The ‘Free German League of Culture’ in Upper Park Road, David Anderson Select Bibliography Index
Charlotte Grant is Senior Lecturer in English at NCH London, UK. She has a background in literature and visual culture, having taught previously at QMUL, King’s London, and Cambridge, where she held a lectureship in literature and visual culture. She has published on Eighteenth-Century literature and culture, edited a collection of botanical writing and co-edited Imagined Interiors and Women, Writing and the Public Sphere. Alistair Robinson completed his PhD at UCL in 2018 and became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, before joining NCH London in the summer of 2019, where he is now Lecturer in English. He has published on nineteenth-century literature and culture in the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Review of English Studies, and is currently preparing his first monograph for publication.
Reviews for Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration
This pathbreaking and extensive volume brings together a wide range of authors from academia and beyond to investigate the role and lives of migrants throughout the history and geographical extent of London. * Panikos Panayi, Professor of European History, De Montfort University, UK *
