Spatial culture, processional culture and the materialities of social memory in nineteenth-century Sheffield
Journal: Distinktion Journal of Social Theory
Year: 2016

This article presents research about a wide range of processions and crowd activities in the English industrial city of Sheffield c.1790–1910. It identifies a theoretical weakness in the historical scholarship where an emphasis on the role of procession and protest in symbolically ordering the built environment too often serves to represent it as intrinsically un-ordered and lacking in definition. The effect, it is argued, has been to present symbolic regimes, particularly those of local elites,