Phil's Blog

  As Londoners we are used to buildings crowding out the sky, the constant friction of human traffic, the barrage of  audio-visual noise which cuts into our  thoughts and counterpoints our   conversations on the street.   And so we cocoon  ourselves  inside little immersive techno-bubbles which are just as invasive, but at least of our own choosing, and we seek out … [Read more...] about JULY BLOG A Walk in Olympic Park

Introduction Trespass is a very complicated, tricky, and sometimes dangerous concept. It occupies an ambiguous  semantic space somewhere  between a model and a metaphor, that is, it operates within both a normative and poetic  discourse of transgression.  For example a work  of graffiti sprayed on the side of a house can be treated as both an act of  cr5iminal damage or … [Read more...] about June Blog Crossing the Borderline : the dialectics of trespass in ethnographic fieldwork

Glass Ceilings and other scenes from the life of a pioneering urbanist (Note:this text was written for an event organised by the Urban Lab at UCL  celebrating the life and work of Ruth Glass) Introduction I should begin by saying  that I never was a student or colleague of Ruth Glass, although I did come to meet her under circumstances  I will describe later. So all I can … [Read more...] about May Blog: Glass Ceilings

Threnodies for  S.H. 1. Yesternow Stuart Hall is dead. The world,  especially that part of it he directly  inhabited with his ideas and his presence, is a much less interesting and hopeful place  for his passing. He had become a cultural icon of  the Left and a man for  all seasons.  Something  a contemporary  wrote about   Thomas More, the original bearer  of that  … [Read more...] about MARCH/APRIL BLOG LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN

FEBRUARY BLOG :THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD - AN URBAN TRIPTYCH 'The neighbourhood is that part of town you have no need to go to because you are already there' -George Perec 1)  Chic by Growl I recently moved into a new neighbourhood in Islington. My flat is  in  a large Peabody Estate, off the Essex Road, quite close to the area which Ruth Glass  made the object of … [Read more...] about February Blog :There goes the neighbourhood