The London Docklands are a particularly unique area of London; the area possesses a rich history as a major seaport, but is also now home to one of London’s largest financial centers. In essence, the London Docklands are a junction where history collides with the present. Within this essay, I will discuss how efforts to conserve the past of the London Docklands conflict with its current development. One the one hand, the Museum of London Docklands (MLD) acts as a prime example of efforts to conserve the area’s rich yet dark history. On the other hand, the development of Canary Wharf, a financial power center, symbolizes the future of the area, with little to no attempts to preserve the Docklands’ history. I will use supplementary sources from …show more content…
Despite the tragedy of the history, the Museum of London Docklands asserts that the period is a crucial part of British history and encourages the preservation of the past in its London, Sugar, and Slavery Gallery. However, this preservation of London’s dark past drastically conflicts with the massive business enterprises now domineering the area called Canary Wharf. On the one hand, an extremely inclusive museum aims to conserve the sensitive past of the Docklands, whereas on the other hand, the private enterprises of Canary Wharf aim solely for economic success with no acknowledgement of the past. With the conflict created by the MLD’s effort to conserve the past and Canary Wharf’s seemingly disregard to conserve the past, it has become increasingly difficult to define what kind of ‘place’ the London Docklands is and what kind of ‘place’ the Docklands should …show more content…
The various ports, spanning miles wide, were each designed to store a specific good. For example, the West India Docks, now the location of the Museum of London Docklands, were used to store sugar from the West Indian plantations where enslaved Africans worked. Although Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 with the Slave Trade Act, slavery continued in the West Indies and other areas. The Docks continued to act as a junction: connecting the slave workers in the Caribbean Islands to British merchants and the wider British population. It was not until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 that slavery was abolished throughout the entire British Empire. Nevertheless, the Docklands continued to play a vital role in the trade between Britain and the globe, until the facilities were bombed in World War II. The ports were never able to fully recover and with the shipping industry’s adoption of cargo transportation, the Docklands were all closed by 1980. Almost as soon as the Docklands were closed, efforts to redevelop the area began. Eventually, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) developed various commercial and residential areas, the most famous being Canary Wharf
Objective- To build on and realize the strengths of the downtown as the heart of the London community: an international centre for the arts, culture, tourism, education, and knowledge based industries, and a leading national business, finance, and government centre.
Proud (2014) describes Shoreditch, an area in east London as a metonym for unlucky pieces of real estate that have had the hipster formula applied to them. situates the term in space, going one further to describe hipsterfication as “Shoreditchification” However the term “hipster” has been mentioned in other geographical works such as that of David Ley and Tom Butler (1980; 1997), in the theories of “the new middle class” of gentrifiers. Hipsters have turned themselves into “self-gentrifying urban Bedouins”, “popping-off then popping-up” where ever is cheapest (Eror 2014). The perceived advantages and disadvantages that this new “creative class of the skilled, educated and hip”, bring are mixed in literature (Companella; Kotkin
The City of Dreadful Delight starts with some cultural analysis of the historical background that helped to produce the social landscape of Victorian London. In discussing the transformation of London, Walkowitz argues for seeing more than merely a shift from one type of city to another but rather a conflicted layering of elite male spectatorship, the “scientific” social reform, and W. T. Stead's New Journalism. Here Walkowitz investigates the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The “Maiden Tribute” consisted of a series of articles, authored by Stead and presented in the penny press, which exposed the sale of girls into prostitution. According to Walkowitz, these stories relied on the new scientific methods of social investigation, but the...
The setting is London in 1854, which is very different to anything we know today. Johnson’s description of this time and place makes it seem like a whole other world from the here and now....
The English public park from 1840-1860 provides a physical reflection of this Victorian frame of mind in that it exemplifies one of the grave contradictions that defines the upper-middle class Victorian society which boasts for universality of its ideals for all yet is exclusionary toward the proletariats.
On the Waterfront is a classic, award-winning and controversial film. It received eight academy-awards in 1954, including best-picture and director. The director, Eliza Kazan, in collaboration with Budd Schulberg wrote the film’s screenplay. Based on actual dockside events in Hoboken, New Jersey, On the Waterfront is a story of a dock worker who tried to overthrow a corrupt union.
In the capital of financial services, two insurance buildings dominate Boston’s skyline. The Hancock Tower and the Prudential Center are structures that display the uneven change and the urban development that has occurred in this city over the course 19th century. Located in back bay these edifices work with the directionalities of their adjacent streets and the cultural history of the structures that surround them. Boston’s foundation was composed in a manner that designated and organized space. This creates the tension and contrast present in that between the two structures. The iconography that these structures have over the city is important. It represents a sense of the past as well as the purpose that the built environment has with a changing society. Even though these structures dominate so much of the skyline, they interact differently with the public. There is a physical boundary that separates the functionalities and interaction in which society can actively have with them. This essay will focus on the structural purpose in regard to the form following function of these skyscrapers and how they each demonstrate a design aspect that characterizes Boston through a visual perspective.
“Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship” by Carol Duncan: A Response to Western Cultural Imperialism and the “Ritual” of Modernity in European/American Museums
This district was an immense center of bizarre entertainment for miners, entrepreneurs and sailors. After the 1906 earthquake, the city saw an opportunity to clean up the Barbary Coast, transforming it into an acceptable area for the everyday San Franciscans. The Barbary Coast evolves immensely throughout the decades to what we know nowadays as Chinatown, North Beach, and Jackson Square. We will mainly focus on North Beach, a district which preserves his roots and rebuild a new social and environmental determinism throughout the passage of time.
Slaves and slave trade has been an important part of history for a very long time. In the years of the British thirteen colonies in North America, slaves and slave trade was a very important part of its development. It even carried on to almost 200 years of the United States history. The slave trade of the thirteen colonies was an important part of the colonies as well as Europe and Africa. In order to supply the thirteen colonies efficiently through trade, Europe developed the method of triangular trade. It is referred to as triangular trade because it consists of trade with Africa, the thirteen colonies, and England. These three areas are commonly called the trades “three legs.”
Close your eyes and sit back in your recliner. Let the cool breeze refresh you as you relax in your hardwood floored den and sip your English tea. Now picture London. What kind of an image comes to mind? Perhaps the sophisticated languages of its inhabitants or just the aura of properness that encompasses typical visions of the great city of London. I am not writing to deny the eloquence of London, I am instead writing to challenge the notion of sophistication that many of us hold true to London. Could a city of such brilliance and royalty ever fester with the day to day problems that we witness daily in our own country? I argue, yes.
MacKenzie, John M. and Richards, Jeffrey. The Railway Station, A Social History. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1986.
Aesthetic control in the city serves a number of purposes. For one, the zero-sum logic of interurban competition incentivizes the purification of urban space and the presentation of ‘cleanliness’ for the purposes of city marketing. As transfer payments decline as a source of revenue for municipal governments, cities are desperately attempting to enhance their international reputation for the purpose of attracting tourism and capital investment. The cleansing of visible poverty from urban space is accomplished through police harassment and displacement of visible poverty and other ‘undesirable’ uses of space(Kennelly 9). The city’s adaptation to market logics also influences the way urban space is produced and presented internally, to its own population. For example, concentrations of homeless people are said to deter visitors and consumers from traveling to and shopping in those parts of the city [BY WHO]. Visible homelessness is also targeted by city authorities because it disrupts attempts to render the city as a landscape (Mitchell 186). Rendering the city as a landscape is a means of presenting the individual with an illusory sense of control and freedom in the complex urban environment where control in fact belongs to the totalizing economy and freedom for some comes at the expense of freedom for others. The illusion of control is in a sense the way citizens are alienated from the constitutive parts and production of the city. Instead of seeing the realities of capital relations, or the activities of labour reproduction required daily to renew the urban workforce, citizens are presented with a stage on which the daily dramas of the “pacified public” can take place (Mitchell 186). On this stage, a certain kind of “legitimate” citizen expects a broad freedom to move through space without resistance or disturbance, such as may come from encountering or being confronted by
In 1807, the slave trade was abolished by the British Parliament. It became illegal to buy and sell slaves, but people could still own them. In 1833 Parliament finally abolished slavery itself, both in Britain and throughout the British Empire. Why, when the slave trade and the plantations in the West Indies seemed to be making so much money, were they abolished? It was due to a mixture of white campaigners, slaves and economics of the slave trade which finally brought slavery to an end.
The theories in Jameson’s text “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” can be used to analyze Barthelme’s short story, “I Bought a Little City.” In Barthelme’s story, the city owner made modifications to a good city with the intention of bettering it. Instead, he stripped away the city’s individuality and originality. Jameson’s text allows us to interpret Barthelme’s short story and gives us a revelation of the main character’s behavior and his reasoning behind it. The framework that Jameson utilizes helps us understand why the city owner in “I Bought a Little City” alters a perfectly industrialized city with antique ideals.