The changing feel of place: the temporal modalities of atmospheres in Smithfield Market, London

Within the context of recent debates around urban atmospheres, this article examines the situatedness and partiality of urban experiences. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Smithfield Market area, a neighbourhood undergoing a period of rapid urban regeneration as part of the ‘Culture Mile’ in the City of London, we explore how different individuals experience the changing feel of place. By focusing on the felt body, the article analyses the ways in which individuals with different attachments to the neighbourhood respond to the impending urban change and draw on selective temporal modalities of atmospheres in order to make specific claims to place. In particular, we identify three temporal modalities of atmospheres: the selective feel of the past, the contentious present feel and the ambivalent future feel. The article thus argues that studies of urban atmospheres need to pay more attention to the manifold bodily capacities, personal and social histories which mediate and position in diverse ways how places are experienced. More generally, this article makes an intervention into debates on urban atmospheres by analysing empirically how the variable interactions between sensory and temporal qualities produce diverse atmospheric constellations for different individuals.

Meat Markets

Meat Markets articulates the emergent ‘nonhuman thought’ developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality. It presents important connections between meat and popular serial press industries, the intersections of criminals and public readership, and the long history of bloody spectacle at London’s Smithfield Market including public executions, criminal escapades, death and horror tales, and the fungible ‘penny press’ forms of mass consumption. Through analysis of subjection, address, and narration in canonical and penny literatures, this book reveals the mutual forces of concern and consumption that afflict objects of a weird cultural history of bloody London across the long nineteenth century. Players include butchers, Smithfield, Parliament, Dickens, Romantics, Sweeney Todd, cattle, and a strange, impossible London.

Popular Politics and Public Policy: The Excise Riot at Smithfield in February 1647 and its Aftermath

On 15 February 1647 hostility to the excise flared up at Smithfield market in London. A riot occurred when a purchaser of livestock refused to pay his excise and attempted to remove his livestock without doing so. When he was stopped by ‘the guard’ a crowd gathered in his defence. It was dispersed but another crowd gathered later burning down the excise office and ‘80. or 100.li [was] scattered and purloined’. The rioters were said to have drawn encouragement from excise disturbances in Norwich shortly before. The crowd that gathered later was led by butchers one of whom, William Taylor, was reported to have said that he would ‘bear down the Excise by Force’. The Kingdom's Weekly Intelligencer could not ‘heare of any man killed’, but remarked that the tumult ‘did arise to such a hight that many of the Officers of the excise were beaten, [and] their books torn’. The Weekly Account, emphasizing the seriousness of the riot, reported that the ‘Lord Mayor and Sherriffes of the City were forced to come in person to pacifie the tumult’.

The Productivity Of Mashona Cattle in Rhodesia

SummaryThe productivity of a herd of Mashona cattle is described, where hand-feeding was practised in winter to prevent loss of body weight. Calves weighed about 50 lb at birth, and gained weight at the rate of 1.27 lb a day to six months of age, compared widi 1.56 and 0.87 lb a day for calves at two other sites. Young animals gained an average of ½ lb a day from weaning to maturity. Mashona steers responded to pen-feeding and produced carcasses which were satisfactory for the Smithfield market. The mature weight of breeding cows was just under 700 lb and the calving rate varied from 72 to 92 per cent. Cows which failed to calve and those whose calves were early-weaned gained almost 100 lb liveweight by the end of die grazing season. Early-weaned calves fed a complete diet were 40 lb heavier than their contemporaries at 28 weeks of age. The need to develop die breed is discussed.