Galle Face Green is one of the most important public spaces in Colombo. Lara Wijesuriya traces how the public and the state have shaped Galle Face Green since independence.
In postcolonial Malaysia, what does it mean to reconstruct histories through streetscapes? Marie Ngiam considers the complex racial politics at play in the decolonisation of Malaysia's urban landscape.
What can the radical tradition of costume & performance at Notting Hill Carnival tell us about a decolonised approach to the teaching of history? Ife Thompson on the People's War Carnival Band
Did medieval states engage in any sort of surveillance of populations based on the collection of their personal data? Trevor Dean and Patricia Skinner ask what we can learn from lists and facial descriptions of police in Italian cities.
What can a dot in the Dorset landscape, marked by a simple chapel, tell us about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their religious and political convictions? And how might this rare vernacular chapel be restored as a site of living history today?
How does the Mau Mau Memorial Monument depict women's involvement in the anti-colonial Mau Mau uprising? How can women's own words and memories add to this important history? Evalyne Wanjiru explores in this piece.
How did young couples negotiate sexual activity and its reproductive consequences in Old Regime France? Julie Hardwick discusses the real and perceived risks and uncertainties of courtship, arguing that communities ultimately sought to…
What can the arrival of an anonymous letter to a local police station tell us about the administration of justice in nineteenth-century Scotland? Hannah Telling discusses the case surrounding the discovery of a woman's body in 1853, and…
Have you ever wondered what happens to collective trauma as eyewitness memory fades? For descendants of eyewitnesses, do results of violence dissipate, vanish, or evaporate? Gwyn McClelland explores the evidence from Nagasaki.
"By excavating the archives of urban hydrology in Chennai, we can see how the unequal production, impact, and representation of floods is embedded in property making and belonging." Aditya Ramesh argues that responses to flood must go…
Why are displays of electric light an effective way to challenge inequality? Samson Lim explores the history of electrification in Thailand, and the way in which infrastructure itself became a site for both elite expressions of power and…
Smallpox was the first contagious disease for which a vaccine was invented. As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, Sanne Muurling, Tim Riswick and Katalin Buzasi ask how social inequalities shaped the last smallpox epidemic in…
What politically contested narratives lie beyond the East End proper? Jason Finch returns to his ancestral roots in Newham, making the case that spatial literary analysis can shed light on outer London's conflictual past.
What was it like to live in the Roman Ghetto under the shadow of papal authority? Using historical maps and personal testimony, Ariana Ellis recounts the story of Anna del Monte, a young Jewish woman who was subject to forcible removal and…
How did Black activist organisations fight racism in the London suburbs? Daniel Frost finds that they did so – in districts like Croydon and Thornton Heath – through association and alliance with the struggles of inner-city locales.
How did the civic spaces of Sheffield animate new forms of working-class protest and procession? Katrina Navickas argues that public space became an instrument of democratic struggle and a means for building unity amongst Chartist groups.
How did 1970s New York become a laboratory for a grand experiment in 'returning streets to the people'? Mariana Mogilevich argues that street life and politics in Midtown Manhattan became central to the inception of a new form pedestrian…
How do we build healing history in the wake of a massacre? Hannibal B. Johnson writes about black achievement in Tulsa, Oklahoma and celebrates the architects of the “Greenwood District” who resisted white supremacy and racial…
How do we see walking women? Using archival photography from 1950s and 1960s Turku (Finland), Tiina Männistö-Funk argues that women's care and bodily presence shapes cities as much as concrete and asphalt do.
This opening article in the 'Whose Streets?' feature considers what it means to live through the jarring collapse of public life in the midst of a pandemic and how this moment might stimulate new radical histories of the urban commons.
"You don’t know what you had until you lost it": at a time when few of us can travel far, Catherine Fletcher asks what role travel plays in the historical process.
