https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7980-177X
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Stephen Bentel, On Stephen Brooke’s ‘Space, Emotions and the Everyday: The Affective Ecology of 1980s London’ (2017), Modern British History, Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 100–101, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae014
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Extract
Under the leadership of the oft-controversial Ken Livingstone, the Greater London Council (GLC) of the 1980s waged a citywide campaign to link culture and politics in spaces where Londoners spent their day-to-day lives. Stephen Brooke’s Twentieth Century British History article ‘Space, Emotions and the Everyday: The Affective Ecology of 1980s London’ argues that ‘Space was fundamental to what the GLC did in the 1980s’.1 These spaces included dancehalls, parks, markets, and even the London underground.
The GLC built spaces that could act as ramparts against the ‘Great Right Moving Show’ delineated by Stuart Hall.2 However, the spaces on which Brooke focuses—East End council estates, South London childcare centres—are not always at the heart of national political discourse. Brooke asked important questions of what we could learn about how it felt to be in two distinct settings in 1980s London and how that shaped local politics and political coalitions. As Daniel Renshaw notes, in pursuing this line of inquiry, Brooke ‘combines the tangible (the demographic make-up of a council estate), with the intangible (how protagonists feel about this demarcation and how responses are emotionally predicated)’.3 Brooke’s work shows readers how emotion played a key in shaping those sites and in remapping politics onto the urban landscape of 1980s London.
