Research Interests

My research focuses on the 'modernity' of cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am interested in the modernization of the built environment, in ‘new spaces’ in cities, and also in new ways of seeing the city. I am also keen to promote a degree of methodological eclecticism, combining a variety of quantitative and qualitative, archival and literary approaches. Thematically, my archival research has been principally concerned with the development, ownership, management, occupancy and experience of new residential forms, including middle-class apartment buildings and working-class model dwellings in London and Toronto in the period 1880-1939.

Research on Canada is directed towards the production of a book on American Apartments in Canadian Cities, which will combine analysis of quantifiable records – building permits, directories, assessment records, property deeds, probate returns – which reveal who owned and who lived in apartments, and how the market in apartment property operated, with case studies of planning controversies reported in newspaper articles, council minutes and correspondence, and also with study of the representation of apartment life in contemporary novels, guide books and advertising.

Research on London uses similar methods, but focuses as much on the construction and representation of ‘model dwellings’ as on luxury apartments. My chapters in Black and Butlin (eds) Place, Culture and Identity (2001) and Spiers (ed) Gissing and the City (2006) illustrate my methodological approach in the context of blocks of mansion flats and model dwellings which featured prominently both in architectural discourse about living in flats and in George Gissing’s novels of London life such as The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891) and The Whirlpool (1897).

Most recently, my historical housing interests have concentrated on each extreme in the social hierarchy of nineteenth-century London – in London’s first high-rise luxury flats that foreshadow more recent enthusiasm for pethouses and loft-living, and in the common lodging-houses associated with Jack the Ripper’s victims in 1880s Whitechapel.

Gissing's use of London locations in other of his books, e.g. The Unclassed (1884, 1895), The Odd Women (1893) and In The Year of Jubilee (1894) underlies further ongoing work on diverse sites of modernity in late Victorian London while, in my work on Toronto, I have explored the moral geography of the city in the writing of ‘Canada's first urban novelist’, Morley Callaghan. The Canadian dimension to my work is also reflected in a forthcoming collection of essays on The Contemporary Canadian Metropolis (Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2008) which I am co-editing with Ceri Morgan and Stephen Shaw.

I have also become fascinated by the depiction of the elevated railway in the literature and art of late 19th-century and early 20th-century New York; and, in using the metaphor of bridge-building to represent my own methodological eclecticism, I have researched the historical geographies of real bridges – Brooklyn Bridge, Tower Bridge and the Bloor Street Viaduct – in New York, London and Toronto. The wider project to which all these studies contribute is a review of the different, regulatory and experiential, strands of urban modernity in a book on Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930 (Cambridge University Press, June 2008). The book examines new ways of seeing Anglo-American cities – in literature, art, mapping and social survey – and new forms of public and private, residential, financial, commercial and leisure spaces.