Spatial culture, processional culture and the materialities of social memory in nineteenth-century Sheffield

ABSTRACT

This article presents research about a wide range of processions and crowd activities in the English industrial city of Sheffield c.1790–1910. It identifies a theoretical weakness in the historical scholarship where an emphasis on the role of procession and protest in symbolically ordering the built environment too often serves to represent it as intrinsically un-ordered and lacking in definition. The effect, it is argued, has been to present symbolic regimes, particularly those of local elites, as something imposed on rather than in any sense arising from quotidian urban performance, and artificially to isolate research into processional and other mass participation activities from the shared material context of a city’s spatial culture. The notion of spatial culture is developed with reference to the work of Bill Hillier, Manuel De Landa, and Henri Lefebvre, among others, to propose an interpretative ‘mapping’ of the relationship between the evolving structure of Sheffield’s built form and the development of its processional culture. The research raises the question of how far civic traditions often regarded as ‘inventions’ in fact arose from the material conditions of urban life itself, in that sense revealing the historicity of social memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Bill Hillier
• processional culture
• processions
• rhythmanalysis
• Sheffield
• social memory
• spatial cultures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Sam Griffiths is Lecturer in Spatial Cultures in the Space Syntax Laboratory at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. His theoretical and empirical research focuses on understanding the built environment as an aspect of the socio-economic and cultural history of cities and suburbs, with a focus on nineteenth-century British industrial cities. He is also interested in how architectural ideas are encoded in literary and historical works. He is co-editor with Alexander von Lünen of Spatial Cultures: New Perspectives on the Social Morphology of Cities Past and Present, due to be published by Routledge in May 2016.

Notes

1 Although it would be misleading to describe Hillier as a straightforward ‘Durkheimian’, a Durkheimian concern with social solidarity is a recurrent and formative theme in the development of the more explicitly ‘social’ theory aspects of space syntax research (Hillier et al. 1976; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Hillier and Netto 2002; Hillier 2008). Hillier and Hanson (1984, 223) argue that the ‘physical arrangement of space by societies is a function of the forms of social solidarities’. See also Liebst (2014, 2016).

2 The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition of ‘allocentric’: ‘Concentrating on or interested in external objects in themselves, rather than in regard to their relation or relevance to oneself’, http://www.oed.com/ (accessed March 9, 2016).

3 The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition of ‘extrasomatic’: ‘Deriving from or referring to events external to a person considered as an individual or as a member of society’, http://www.oed.com/ (accessed March 9, 2016).

4 See Pred (1977) for some interesting reflections on Hägerstrand and time-geography.

5 The sample of civic processions was compiled using keyword searches of the digitized Sheffield Local Register available in the Sheffield Local Studies Library that provides a useful chronicle of the dates of key events in Sheffield’s history. These were cross-referenced with other local sources, principally newspapers.

6 According to Wood (2014, 275) Rogationtide is traditionally celebrated on Monday to Wednesday of Ascension week.

7 A survey of 105 funerals of Sheffield notables 1700–1810, drawing extensively on information from the digitized Sheffield Local Register, revealed no clear case of an officially ‘public’ funeral that took place in Sheffield.