'Protest and the Politics of Space and Place in northern England, 1789-1848’ Seminar
Event details
Part of the SCNR Spring Seminar series.
Popular protest involved contests over spaces and places of meeting. This paper examines how the first mass movements for parliamentary reform and workers’ rights in England, particularly in the North, claimed the right to use public spaces for meetings and protests. Both local and national governing elites sought to clamp down on these movements by restricting public spaces and buildings to ‘loyal’ groups only. Radicals, trade unions and Chartists responded by creating their own alternative spaces, seeking new utopias and the liberty to meet. This paper will appeal to scholars interested in the history of democratic movements, social protest, the legal history of restrictions on protest, and urban planning and public spaces.
Speaker information
Dr Katrina Navickas, University of Hertfordshire. Dr Navickas is a Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities. Her interests include Cultural Geography and Nineteenth- and Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture. She has published widely on these topics, and her talk will draw on her forthcoming book Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester University Press).