I sent an invite to everyone i got an email address from to become an author here. You should have gotten some sort of email from blogger saying that you have been invited to be an author. i can see that bethany has accepted and should now be able to post, but everyone else is still listed as pending.
PART 3
ReplyDeleteNotting Hill signified more than an area or location, they indicated events and attitudes. Notting Hill became a key term in a discourse about race, articulated in a negative and pejorative sense. As McArthur (1997:20) notes on the positional meaning of location cities (and indeed, all urban spaces and natural landscapes) are always already social and ideological, immersed in narrative, constantly moving chess pieces in the game of defining and redefining utopias and dystopias. In the period under discussion Notting Hill was generally articulated as a vision of dystopia, though as we shall see, it was simultaneously embraced and re-valorized by the counter-culture. This over-determination means that we have to address this area as the site of both material processes and of projections, and recognize that these cannot be analytically separated, since they reinforce each other. Although Ed Soja might worry that the urban real is displaced by the urban imaginary, as social space folds into mental space, several researchers have noted that it is the very enfolding of these spaces that characterize the meanings of urban space in fields of representation. The production of urban space is simultaneously real, symbolic and imaginary; what it produces is a material environment, a visual culture and a psychic space (Balshaw and Kennedy 2000: 4-5). As Keith and Pile state:
The metaphoric and the real do not belong in separate worlds; that of the symbolic and the literal are in part constitutive of one another meaning is never immanent, it is instead not just marked but also constituted by the spaces of representation in which it is articulated (1993a: 23)
PART 1 OF A CONVERSATION WITH PETER PLAYDON
ReplyDeleteWe are going to briefly outline some of the themes present in the history of Notting Hill (or rather, the history of representing Notting Hill), in order to establish how the image of Notting Hill has been produced and reproduced in public consciousness. Whether or not the various descriptions and characterizations related accurately to real material conditions and processes in the area, these representations reflect the ways in which Notting Hill has been thought about, and the weight of their accumulation over time comes to determine perceptions of that space.
Notting Hills reputation seems to have been established by the mid 1700s, when one of its streets was described as a dark sink hole/rendezvous for the obscene. Crime, or fear of crime, is at the core of this reputation. Linked to this is a reputation for civil disorder, of an unruly population. It was also one of the most run-down areas of London, with extreme overcrowding, poverty, and a transient population living in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions often with pigs outnumbering people by 3 to 1.
Thomas Lovick, assistant surveyor to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers noted its “foul and pestilential character, the accumulation from various piggeries, offensive ditches loading the atmosphere with their pestilential exhalations and refuse of every conceivable description, most offensive and disgusting condition, emitting effluvia of the most nauseous character, wretched hovels in ruinous condition, filthy in the extreme and contain vast accumulations of garbage and offal”. In the Lovick quotation we see a classic example of how, in the discourse of nineteenth century urban reform, slums are connected to sewage, sewage to disease, and disease to moral degradation, and the conditions are explained by reference to the notion that slum residents lack control over their desires. There is a metonymic chain of equivalences or associations between the poor, animals, slum dwellers and sewage, associations that will be carried over in the racialization of this space.
These chains of associations might almost be said to have originated in relation to Notting Hill, since its reputation as a slum has been traced the arrival of one Samuel Lake, who moved his chimney sweep and night soil (shit collecting) business to the area in the early nineteenth century. Pig-keeping was also introduced, and the area became known as the Piggeries. Like night soil collectors, pig-keepers were an essential service industry in the smooth running of the city, but residential expansion within the West End (and the accompanying expansion of bourgeois notions about public propriety) forced their re-location to this outlying district. The significance of Samuel Lakes occupation lies in the metonymic slippage from sewage to the poor: shit stands for residual people and places. The bourgeoisie sought to distance themselves from the poor and their associated characteristics, but still perceived this excluded residue as threatening the schema dividing the pure from the defiled. A distinction was also made between the honest manufactured dirt of the artisan grease, sweat, oil, dust and grime and the grotesque, faecal dirt of the poor: filth, sewage, swamp, slime and putrefaction.