Abstract
This article introduces a new perspective on the urban guidebook, playing with the concept of the network to demonstrate the genre’s value for spatial research. Using early twentieth century Bristol as a case study, it examines the collaborative relationship between guidebooks and transport networks to shed light on the dynamic, multivalent characteristics of human movements through the city. Using mapping methodologies, the article reveals guidebook texts’ spatial characteristics which contributed to the material makeup of the city’s mobility geography. It also explores how the genre highlighted subjectivity, and thus played a crucial role in elaborating the meanings and cultures of movement which have concerned mobility geographers. Overall, the article contends to the active role played by the guidebook in Bristol, in doing so elaborating its significance for urban geographers interrogating the richness and diversity of past mobilities.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 99-110 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Journal of Historical Geography |
Volume | 79 |
Early online date | 2 Mar 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 2 Mar 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Yet visitors were not the only regular passengers on these routes, joined by those travelling to and from their places of work in the industrial area adjacent to the station, or the commercial and financial districts in the centre, whose transport needs were once again very different. Cost was also a concern for industrial workers and as such the BTCC provided ‘a reduced charge for workmen's tickets on specially labelled cars.‘113 Stone, Bristol, Bristol Archives, 42512/3, 5. Bicycles were also common amongst those occupied in both ‘factory and office work’, and those working in ‘white-collar’ jobs might also have taken cars to work.114 Stone, Bristol, Bristol Archives, 42512/3, 34, 220. Here, particular networks were designated by both the guidebooks and transport companies for travellers from different classed backgrounds. This promotion of the BTCC's vehicular routes was likewise seen in the Bristol Tramways Official Handbook, here with the implication that particular ‘sensibilities’ might have also guided preferences for different routes.115 For elaboration on the cultures of middle-class sensory sensibilities, see: A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Cambridge, MA, 1986. Temple Meads station was positioned adjacent to the city's industrial district, St Philips, to support the importation of materials and exportation of goods. Here, Challenger noted that ‘a rude awakening awaits the traveller upon the slowing up of the train at St. Philip's’, the landscape of which evoked ‘the stern and uncompromising realities of a busy and prosperous city’. It was suggested that visitors of a higher social class, and thus more adverse to overwhelming sensory stimuli such as the ‘pungent smells from the factories’, should ‘not linger in St. Philip's’, but travel immediately away from this vicinity.116 Challenger, Tramways Official Handbook, Bristol Archives, 21745, 7; Nicholls, How to See Bristol, 1910, Bristol Archives, 43211/6, 131. Guidebooks thus not only provided the opportunity for socially diverse forms of travel, but actively encouraged the mobility segregation of visitors from working-class locals with the intention of fundamentally shaping spatial and mobility practices in the urban space.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s)
Keywords
- mobility
- urban transport
- mapping
- tourism
- Bristol