Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
R.Williams 1976 for a discussion of popular culture). As Clark and Crichter (1985:55)
argue, 'the early nineteenth century was to bring a dramatic transformation to the
form…and context of popular culture, imposing very different parameters of time and
space, rhythms and routines, behaviour and attitude, control and commerce'. However,
the resulting changes cannot simply be conceptualised as a straightforward linear
progression since different influences and cross-currents meant that this transformation
affected different people and areas at different rates and in varying degrees.
Clark and Crichter (1985) provide a useful historical analysis of leisure and
recreational forms in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the
emphasis on the urban forms and political factors, forms of social control (Donajgrodski
1978) and the underlying development and functioning of an urban capitalist society;
leisure and recreational forms emerged as a civilising and diversionary process to
maintain the productive capacity of the working classes as central to the continued
development of capitalism. Therefore, the geographical patterns and manifestation of
urban recreation and leisure for all social classes in the British city in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries has to be viewed against the background of social, economic and
political processes which conditioned the demand and supply of leisure and recreation for
each social class, and in Montreal, Dagenais (2002) highlighted the role of local
government in park provision. However, Huggins (2000) questioned conventional
stereotypes of the respectable urban middle class in different leisure contexts during the
Victorian period. Huggins (2000) highlights the spatial differentiation between highly
respectable behaviour in cities where work, home and respectability were interconnected.
Yet in more liminal locations away from the home (e.g. the seaside and the racecourse),
less respectable and 'sinful' pleasures were consumed by the same middle class, where
less respectable behaviour occurred.
According to Billinge (1996:450), 'Perhaps the single newest element in the
townscape after the general regulation of the street, was the park, and more specifically
the recreation ground…[since] the urban park, as distinct from the garden square, was
essentially a nineteenth century phenomenon' and a symbol of civic pride. As Maver
(1998:346) argued, 'the development of Glasgow's public parks …sparked municipal
interest during the 1850s, given the recognised impact of parks in improving the amenity
value of middle-class residential areas'. The acknowledged role of parks as the 'lungs of
the city', as a haven from industrialisation, was an attempt to recreate notions of
community well-being. In T.Young's (1996) analysis of the development of San
Francisco's city parks between 1850 and 1920, the main proponents of park development
were a middle- to upper-class elite who embodied notions of parks contributing to well-
being, reflecting elements of nature which were balanced and inherently good.
Billinge (1996:444) recognised the way in which the Victorians engineered the term
'recreation' 'to perfection, they gave it a role and a geography. Confined by time, defined
by place and regulated by content, recreation and the time it occupied ceased to be
possessions freely enjoyed and became instead, obligations dutifully discharged'. The
Victorians established a system of approved urban leisure and recreation activities and, as
Billinge (1996) recognised, these were allocated to appropriate times and places. In
spatial terms, this led to a reconfiguration of the Victorian and Edwardian town and its
hinterland to accommodate new, organised and, later, informal recreational and leisure
pursuits in specific spaces and at nominated places. In fact, the natural corollary of this in
