I am Reader in Cultural History based in the English department at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). Along with my academic research I also write for the Guardian, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. Phone: 0151 231 5120 Address: Dept of English
Liverpool John Moores University
St James Rd
Liverpool
L1 7BR
We need a better road politics, to help us explore more imaginative possibilities for getting peo... more We need a better road politics, to help us explore more imaginative possibilities for getting people out of their cars. Y ou can learn much about recent British history and politics just from driving along a single stretch of road. Our collective hopes and fears about the kind of society we want to live in lie buried in the asphalt. The history of roads is the history of ourselves: our desire for community and our fears about its fragility; our natural instinct to expand the possibilities of life set against our premonitions of death, destruction and loss; and our fierce arguments about what is valuable and beautiful about the world. But this history, like the road itself, is full of loose ends and detours, unfinished stories and stalled narratives.
This article discusses the 'new nature writing' and the work of some of its key practitioners: Ma... more This article discusses the 'new nature writing' and the work of some of its key practitioners: Mark Cocker, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. The new nature writing focuses on finding meaning not in the rare and exotic but in our common, unremarkable encounters with the natural world, and in combining both scientific, scholarly observation of nature with carefully crafted, discursive writing. In this sense it speaks to a contemporary eco-political moment while critically engaging with the rich history of nature writing and thinking about the environment in Britain from the Romantic era onwards, and particularly since the late 1960s.
abstract: This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagi... more abstract: This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagined in postwar Britain. From the ethnographers and street photographers who emerged in Bethnal Green in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the planning concept of 'streets in the air', to modern geodemographics, the street has been a way of thinking through shifting ideas about civil society and collective social life. Imagined as a space of spontaneous community when set against the rational, contractual operations of both the market and the state, the street has been a means of articulating hopes for and anxieties about social change.
The vernacularisation of voice-recording technology over the course of the last century means tha... more The vernacularisation of voice-recording technology over the course of the last century means that we have largely forgotten what a strange and quasi-magical thing it is to preserve someone's voice. This article, first delivered as the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, traces the development of voice-recording technologies in the twentieth century from gramophone records to miniaturised mobile devices. It argues that the recording of the voice led to a renewed awareness of the voice as a trained instrument, as a marker of individual identity and as a way of immortalising speech and preserving an auditory remnant of people after their deaths. Recording technologies extended the range of voices that could be heard by taking the BBC and other voice capturers beyond the London-based live studios and what Lord Reith referred to as the anonymous 'collective personality' of the radio announcers; and it made people listen intently to voices as both expressions of the self and as vehicles for communicating with others. The voice recording technologies of the last century were essentially democratising, allowing the 'voice of the people' to be heard in authentic everyday settings, albeit in fragmentary and imperfect ways.
2009 the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, while being interviewed on BBC radio, suddenly beca... more 2009 the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, while being interviewed on BBC radio, suddenly became angry when the interviewee mentioned a particular word. Bragg's response is worth quoting in full:
We need a better road politics, to help us explore more imaginative possibilities for getting peo... more We need a better road politics, to help us explore more imaginative possibilities for getting people out of their cars. Y ou can learn much about recent British history and politics just from driving along a single stretch of road. Our collective hopes and fears about the kind of society we want to live in lie buried in the asphalt. The history of roads is the history of ourselves: our desire for community and our fears about its fragility; our natural instinct to expand the possibilities of life set against our premonitions of death, destruction and loss; and our fierce arguments about what is valuable and beautiful about the world. But this history, like the road itself, is full of loose ends and detours, unfinished stories and stalled narratives.
This article discusses the 'new nature writing' and the work of some of its key practitioners: Ma... more This article discusses the 'new nature writing' and the work of some of its key practitioners: Mark Cocker, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. The new nature writing focuses on finding meaning not in the rare and exotic but in our common, unremarkable encounters with the natural world, and in combining both scientific, scholarly observation of nature with carefully crafted, discursive writing. In this sense it speaks to a contemporary eco-political moment while critically engaging with the rich history of nature writing and thinking about the environment in Britain from the Romantic era onwards, and particularly since the late 1960s.
abstract: This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagi... more abstract: This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagined in postwar Britain. From the ethnographers and street photographers who emerged in Bethnal Green in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the planning concept of 'streets in the air', to modern geodemographics, the street has been a way of thinking through shifting ideas about civil society and collective social life. Imagined as a space of spontaneous community when set against the rational, contractual operations of both the market and the state, the street has been a means of articulating hopes for and anxieties about social change.
The vernacularisation of voice-recording technology over the course of the last century means tha... more The vernacularisation of voice-recording technology over the course of the last century means that we have largely forgotten what a strange and quasi-magical thing it is to preserve someone's voice. This article, first delivered as the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, traces the development of voice-recording technologies in the twentieth century from gramophone records to miniaturised mobile devices. It argues that the recording of the voice led to a renewed awareness of the voice as a trained instrument, as a marker of individual identity and as a way of immortalising speech and preserving an auditory remnant of people after their deaths. Recording technologies extended the range of voices that could be heard by taking the BBC and other voice capturers beyond the London-based live studios and what Lord Reith referred to as the anonymous 'collective personality' of the radio announcers; and it made people listen intently to voices as both expressions of the self and as vehicles for communicating with others. The voice recording technologies of the last century were essentially democratising, allowing the 'voice of the people' to be heard in authentic everyday settings, albeit in fragmentary and imperfect ways.
2009 the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, while being interviewed on BBC radio, suddenly beca... more 2009 the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, while being interviewed on BBC radio, suddenly became angry when the interviewee mentioned a particular word. Bragg's response is worth quoting in full:
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