London From Punk to Blair

London From Punk to Blair PDF Author: Joe Kerr
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780230753
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
London from Punk to Blair is a rich portrait of Europe’s foremost capital. An array of contributors, including poets, journalists, teachers, historians, wanderers, drinkers, photographers, and foodies, offer a selection of personal and subjective readings of the city since the late ’70s. These essays chart a variety of literal and metaphorical explorations through modern and postmodern London, showing how it works, and how it fails to work; what makes it vibrant, and what makes it seedy. From West End galleries to strip pubs in Shoreditch; from millionaires’ loft apartments to buses and suburban Tube stops; from film, fashion, and gay clubs to punk bands, ruinous factories, pigeon filth, and the vagaries of weather, London from Punk to Blair embraces the city like no other book has before. This revised edition includes a new introduction by editor Joe Kerr that brings the book up to date and gives the essays context for the post-recession world. “Full of insight into the diverse experiences that constitute the recent history of London.”—Architects’ Journal “This rewarding collection brings into clear focus those dramatic shifts in the fortunes of the metropolis. . . . Beautiful, revealing insights into particular ways of understanding and using the city.”—London Society Journal

London From Punk to Blair

London From Punk to Blair PDF Author: Joe Kerr
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780230753
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
London from Punk to Blair is a rich portrait of Europe’s foremost capital. An array of contributors, including poets, journalists, teachers, historians, wanderers, drinkers, photographers, and foodies, offer a selection of personal and subjective readings of the city since the late ’70s. These essays chart a variety of literal and metaphorical explorations through modern and postmodern London, showing how it works, and how it fails to work; what makes it vibrant, and what makes it seedy. From West End galleries to strip pubs in Shoreditch; from millionaires’ loft apartments to buses and suburban Tube stops; from film, fashion, and gay clubs to punk bands, ruinous factories, pigeon filth, and the vagaries of weather, London from Punk to Blair embraces the city like no other book has before. This revised edition includes a new introduction by editor Joe Kerr that brings the book up to date and gives the essays context for the post-recession world. “Full of insight into the diverse experiences that constitute the recent history of London.”—Architects’ Journal “This rewarding collection brings into clear focus those dramatic shifts in the fortunes of the metropolis. . . . Beautiful, revealing insights into particular ways of understanding and using the city.”—London Society Journal

Remaking London

Remaking London PDF Author: Ben Campkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857734164
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Between the slum clearances of the early twentieth century and debates about the post-Olympic city, the drive to 'regenerate' London has intensified. Yet today, with a focus on increasing land values, regeneration schemes purporting to foster diverse and creative new neighbourhoods typically displace precisely the qualities, activities and communities they claim to support. In Remaking London Ben Campkin provides a lucid and stimulating historical account of urban regeneration, exploring how decline and renewal have been imagined and realised at different scales. Focussing on present-day regeneration areas that have been key to the capital's modern identity, Campkin explores how these places have been stigmatised through identification with material degradation, and spatial and social disorder. Drawing on diverse sources - including journalism, photography, cinema, theatre, architectural design, advertising and television - he illuminates how ideas of decline drive urban change. Richly illustrated and engagingly written, Remaking London is both a compelling account of contested sites from the capital's recent history and a powerful critique of the contradictions of contemporary regeneration.

London, 1984

London, 1984 PDF Author: Stephen Brooke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192607782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In London in 1984 two very different cities came into conflict, one rooted in radical politics and the other shaped by Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative government. This was a city poised between two eras and identities, remoulded in conflicting ways by social democracy and neoliberalism. Using a wide array of sources, many of which have never been used before, London, 1984 explores the radical history of the capital in this tumultuous era, from a major anti-Apartheid march in central London to an alternative childcare centre in Dalston, a protest staged on the Thames against Docklands development to tensions on housing estates in the East End and Tottenham around racial violence and policing, a raid on a gay bookshop in Bloomsbury to the Greater London Council's attempt to build a challenge to Thatcherism from County Hall, Lambeth, and controversial and well-known historical actors, such as Ken Livingstone and Margaret Thatcher, to the compelling stories of numerous less famous Londoners who also sought to influence the shape and nature of their city. This is a story of struggles within the corridors of power, but it is also one of those on the ground, waged through popular culture, activism, and in daily life. In so doing, London, 1984 offers a panoramic, timely, and revealing portrait of the city in a pivotal decade in its modern history. These years saw deep problems of racial violence, policing, and poverty, as well as other controversies and struggles—over feminism, gay and lesbian rights, anti-racism, jobs and economic strategy, neoliberalism and the nature of the state, and global issues, such as Apartheid, nuclear weapons, and Northern Ireland. Across these, and the stories of those who lived, shaped, and fought them, we see the roots of London and Britian today.

NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London

NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London PDF Author: Claire Jamieson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317200047
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group’s work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATؒs identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATؒs place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group’s ethos and development.

The Cultural Construction of London’s East End

The Cultural Construction of London’s East End PDF Author: Paul Newland
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401206244
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Paul Newland’s illuminating study explores the ways in which London’s East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts – films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television’s EastEnders, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can’t Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair.

London (Re)generation

London (Re)generation PDF Author: David Littlefield
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119993784
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
A lively, thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary regeneration of London Plans to regenerate East London and transform the capital are integral to the vision of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This title brings into focus notions of regeneration within the specific context of London: what does the term actually mean, how has it been applied and is it being applied? Historical overviews of large-scale interventions from the past are combined with case studies of new and planned schemes, and explorations of how change and rejuvenation can retain or enhance the city’s unique sense of place and identity. Looking beyond the Games, the title will look at the direction in which regeneration is going in a post-recession economy. How can a long-established, highly protected and even cherished city, like London, continue to renew and expand? Unlike Chinese or Middle Eastern cities, London is constrained by a wide range of factors from heritage protection and geography to finance and democratic accountability; yet the city continues to grow, change and develop, either incrementally or through big, dramatic leaps, like the Olympic Park and King’s Cross. In this way, London provides a fascinating case study of how a developed, Western city can negotiate and greet the pressures for change. Contributors: Michael Batty, Peter Bishop, Matthew Carmona, Murray Fraser, Matthew Gandy, Robert Harbison, Peter Murray and Austin Williams Architects: Sir Terry Farrell, Richard McCormac Projects: King’s Cross, the London 2012 Games and the Shard

Fairy Tales of London

Fairy Tales of London PDF Author: Hadas Elber-Aviram
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135011068X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London PDF Author: Lawrence Manley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521897521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book offers a variety of approaches to the topic of London in English literature from the Middle Ages to the present.

Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London

Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London PDF Author: Niall Martin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472574850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural 'noise' of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and 'psychogeographer' Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair's investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era.

Urbanization and the Migrant in British Cinema

Urbanization and the Migrant in British Cinema PDF Author: Gareth Millington
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137473991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
This book examines a cycle of films about migration made in the late 1990s and 2000s. It argues that these films present a novel (and radical) aesthetic of planetary urbanization based upon the mobility of the migrant and the dissolution of the city. A stimulating cinematic analysis of our expanding urban fabric, it offers an alternative to the ‘cultural cityism’ of many other films about migration. The author demonstrates that this particular film cycle offers a rare, sustained consideration of the travails and struggles for urban life by migrants beyond and without the city. Yet the city haunts these films like a spectre: the city that has been lost, the ‘present’ city that excludes and the possible ‘cities of refuge’ of the future. Offering new insights into the cinematic portrayal of the figure of the migrant and how this is constructed in relation to urbanization processes, this book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, film and media studies, human geography, and urban studies.