CENTRE FOR METROPOLITAN HISTORY, INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH,
SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

LONDON POLITICS, 1789-1914

A one-day conference

Saturday 28 June 2003

The General Election 1852. Reproduced by kind permission of Collage (http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk) © Corporation of London

Organisers: Matthew Cragoe (University of Hertfordshire) and Tony Taylor (Sheffield Hallam University)

Wolfson Room, First Floor
INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
Senate House, Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

In recent years the history of London has flourished. Yet, whilst cultural, spatial and geographical readings of the capital abound, the politics of nineteenth-century London remain largely uncharted territory. This conference seeks to redress the deficiency.

The Conference embraces a period during which formal changes to the political system were matched by the growth of party organisations and the emergence of an increasingly literate and disciplined electorate. In what ways did London act as a site for concerns about the moral health and political stability of the nation, as a place of social ferment where physical and ideological threats to the established order endlessly recurred, and as a space where the co-existence of extremes of poverty and opulence provided the opportunity for new forms of politics and electioneering? What, in short, were the dynamics of grass-roots politics in the capital city of the world's largest empire?

Programme

9.30    Registration and Introduction by Matthew Davies (Director, CMH)

9.45-11.15    Panel 1
Tony Taylor (Sheffield Hallam)
Introduction: Overview of nineteenth-century London Radicalism

Matthew McCormack (Manchester)
Metropolitan Radicalism and electoral independence

11.15-11.30    Coffee

11.30-12.45    Panel 2
David A. Campion (Lewis and Clark College, Oregon)
“Policing the Peelers”: The 1833 Parliamentary investigations into misconduct by the Metropolitan police

Ben Weinstein (Cambridge)
Whigs, “Titled Radicals”, and the Political Culture of London, 1832-1855

12.45-1.30    Lunch

1.30-3.15    Panel 3
Detlev Mares (Darmstadt, Germany)
Fighting “tyranny and oppression”. The democratic parks agitation in London, 1872-73

David Nash (Oxford Brookes)
Secular Geographies: nineteenth-century metropolitan secularist movements

Alex Windscheffel (Royal Holloway, University of London)
“In Darkest Lambeth”: Henry Morton Stanley and the Imperial Politics of LondonUnionism

3.15-3.30    Tea

3.30-4.15    Discussion and concluding remarks