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9781572303652

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A fascinating interdisciplinary study of eighteenth-century London which takes the reader around sites such as the Magdalen Hospital, a pleasure garden and the city streets in an examination of the nature of urban space. An original and exciting study of eighteenth-century London. A fascinating and scholarly tour through eighteenth-century London--its excise houses and magdalen homes; its streets and pleasure gardens. A rich study of the spaces of eighteenth-century London drawing on sociology, cultural geography, history, and history of art. --Lynda Nead, PhD, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London This finely constructed study revisions the history and theory of modernity from a geographical perspective. Miles Ogborn maps formations of power and pleasure, discipline and license, state formation and commercial exchange in sites and networks of eighteenth-century London, its paved streets, pleasure gardens, penitentiaries and bureaucracies. Spaces of Modernity is about the geographies of modern life. It focuses on the citizens and subjects of London, their ways of seeing, their codes of conduct. In the process of mapping modernity, Miles Ogborn revisions historical geography as a discipline, reworking traditions of spatial analysis, urban morphology and landscape iconography. Through a vivid study of a particular city, Spaces of Modernity sets out a geographical framework for analyzing large scale, multi-layered social developments. --Stephen Daniels, Department of Geography, University of Nottingham This book unites cutting-edge theory and scholarship with an energy and engagement that are constantly exhilarating. Through a series of close-focused studies of urban institutions, Ogborn reopens the question of the birth of the modern and shows the crucial role of eighteenth century London in that transformation. Alert to current debates, Ogborn argues his case with verve and clarity. S

The image of modernity created in Spaces of Modernity is a coherent one....In all of the spaces he examines...Ogborn successfully navigates between the Scylla of grand theoretical claims and the Charybdis of the almost inevitably idiographic concerns of tradional historical geography. Any readers interested in adding to their deeper understanding of modernity will undoubtedly find Ogborn's exceeding well-written Odyssey riveting and rewarding....I could only marvel at the ease with which Ogborn weaves together the particular and the general into anew and exciting narrative. -- Journal of Urban History <br> By moving smoothly from philosophical understandings of modernity, the individual, and the public sphere to geographies, stories, incidents, and objects in which these ideas can be seen at play, Ogborn tells a complex and fascinating tale. Ogborn has a wide range of analytical methods at his disposal and wields them all well, employing paintings, prints, maps, newspaper accounts, plays, and a wide variety of other texts to paint complex and lively vignettes of modernity in process. -- Research in Philosophy and Technology <br> This book is important for the depth of its critical analysis of London's place (and the places of London) in the formulation of modernity....Those who wish to theoretically explore the fundamental changes that were taking place in eighteenth-century society, and how they were variously formulated in the London context, need to read this book attentively. -- The London Journal <br>.,. offers consistently illuminating ways to examine transformations of institutions, experiences and identities. This book offers a clearly configured historical geography ofeighteenth-century London that will be of considerable interest to historians, geographers and anyone else interested in the culture of the period. -- Journal for Maritime Research <br>.,. takes a penetrating and fascinating look at...the idea of modernity...and by so doing breathes new life into the discipline of historical geography.... Spaces of modernity offers us the best of what historical geography promises: to provide contextual and dynamic understandings of our past though interrogations of the specificity of space and place. - -Progress in Human Geography <br> Ogborn offers his readers a richly varied view of modernity....The variety of contexts and institutions included in the compass of his book nicely illustrates an alternative to the totalizing and rationalizing view of modernity which he rejects. -- Cahiers de Geographie du Quebec <br> [An] excellent study of the geographies of late 17th and 18th century London....Each...essay...is a beautifully constructed meditation on a dimension of the experience of modernity, carefully interpolating between theory and detailed contextual research.... Spaces of Modernity is an enthralling and provocative tour through key sites in the making of the modern world. -- Space & Polity <br> Ogborn's rich and imaginative study considers several particular spaces, places, and landscapes...to elucidate the social transformations that are diagnostic of modernity....Sensitively illustrated, profusely footnoted, and well indexed, this study is at once an interesting piece of historical research and a provocative theoretical statement. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- Choice <br>

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Miles Ogborn, PhD, is Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, UK

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