School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemMirroring England?: Milton Keynes, decline and the English landscape( 2017)This thesis traces representations of the new town Milton Keynes in British media, politics and popular culture from 1967-1992. From the time of its designation, Milton Keynes has been represented symbolically in terms of the ideologies which were understood to have created it, both in terms of political ideologies and particular theories of urban planning practice. While early responses to the town reflect concerns with its potential to over-determine the landscape, representations of Milton Keynes quickly adapted to the economic and political changes of the mid-1970s to reflect anxieties about the role of postwar socialism in having generated a form of national decline, and to have inscribed this decline on the landscape itself through the postwar housing and reconstruction policies which had led to Milton Keynes’ designation. By 1978, the town was consistently understood as symbolising a technocratic positivism opposed to ideals of national heritage, and therefore as undesirable and foreign, whether as a threat or as a “joke”. Even as it adapted to the political and ideological climate of post-1979 Britain through reimagining its public image and administration, in media and political representations Milton Keynes continued to function as a symbol of a failed Keynesian postwar reconstructionist state, and of the ideal of newness itself. As such it has also acted as an ongoing reminder of a political alternative to neoliberalism and its legitimating cultural narratives; it has therefore continued to challenge what and where can be considered a normal, typical or ideal representation of English and British landscape, and how particular landscape forms are understood as containers of both people and of national heritage. Historicising Milton Keynes' reception and meanings helps render explicit the “common sense” which underpins judgements about ideal landscapes, the role and value of heritage in narratives of Englishness and Britishness, and how these symbolic identities are made and remade.
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ItemThe tragedy of the common law: the ancient constitution in the Age of Reform, 1830–1909( 2017)The method of legitimating political claims by appeal to constitutional precedent—first developed by English common lawyers in the early seventeenth century—was in nineteenth-century Britain an important political language among democratic reformers and popular radicals. Legalistic in its method and historical in its referents, ‘ancient constitutionalist’ discourse supported narratives of constitutional history as a tragedy of decline from a lost golden age. In these dramas of dispossession and lost virtue, the prospect of structural political change was articulated as the redemptive ‘restitution’ or ‘restoration’ of that supposedly lost. Following the reform crisis of 1830–32, such narratives were given up in Westminster politics, becoming almost exclusively the preserve of popular politics. Commencing with the reform crisis, and focusing on debates over reform of the franchise, the central ‘constitutional’ question of the nineteenth century, I trace the termination of ancient constitutionalism among the governing classes, and its continued employment by popular radicals, by the Chartist movement, and later by women’s suffrage campaigners. Primarily the ideology of the voteless, ancient constitutionalism was used by these movements as a means of justifying their claims for inclusion within constitutional structures. It was both a device of political rhetoric, and an impetus for serious historical investigation that generated novel accounts of constitutional history. The thesis offers a new narrative of the relationships between historical knowledge, political discourse and the common law in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that ancient constitutionalist reasoning, far from becoming extinct in the early nineteenth century or merging seamlessly into the nascent professional historiography, as has sometimes been described, remained a crucial source of political legitimacy up to the ‘socialist revival’ of the 1880s, and in some forms persisted into the early twentieth century.