Katrina Navickas on Chartism, spaces and places

In seeking to understand the Chartist movement, historians have largely focused on what was said rather than where it was said. Yet the spaces and places chosen for Chartist rallies and meetings often held great significance for Chartists themselves.

Dr Katrina Navickas has put an enormous amount of work into opening up a “spatial” approach to the study of Chartism and other radical movements in the first half of the nineteenth century, and her book Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 is a fascinating read.

This weekend I dragged her away from real work to answer a series of questions for Chartist Ancestors about her book, its associated website and other related projects.

She explained how Chartists themselves saw the venues used for political meetings as loaded with significance, and how they responded to efforts by local elites to exclude them from public spaces, sometimes contesting their exclusion and other times creating alternatives.

The full interview can be found here.

This is, incidentally, not the first time that Dr Navickas has helped out Chartist Ancestors. As part of her research she compiled a database of 644 men and women in Manchester who subscribed to the Chartist land company.

The full list of names and other information is here.

Needless to say, I am immensely grateful to her for her help and support.