The Invisible Ruins of Oil & Gas

“In the history of mankind the Industrial Revolution in Britain was a unique phenomenon whose repercussions have spread throughout the world. We live today in a society whose economy is essentially industrial, our prosperity is based on the fruits of industrial activity and our surroundings, both urban and rural, are largely the result of over two centuries of progressive industrialisation. Industrial archaeology is concerned largely with those surroundings. In simple terms it is the examination and analysis of the physical remains of the Industrial Revolution period.”

Neil Cossons (1975) The BP Book of Industrial Archeology, David & Charles: Newton Abbot, p.15

I have the BP Book of Industrial Archeology in my hands. It speaks of a different time, in at least two senses. It purports to speak of the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century, but it also speaks of the time when the book itself was written. With its confident talk of ‘mankind’, the uniqueness of Britain’s industrialisation and of a faith in industrial progress it is alien to the sensibilities of the early Twenty-first century.

But what strikes me most is the book’s association with BP, as the oil industry garners less than two pages of consideration in the works’ 500 pages of industry-by-industry exemplification. At that coverage is largely confined to the working of shale-oil deposits in West Lothian in the late 1800s. Meanwhile gas is addressed only in relation to municipal processing of coal at local gas works. The rise of crude oil importation and processing is not considered part of the book’s story, it is too contemporary. And the North Sea oil field – at the time of the book’s writing – was yet to send any oil and gas ashore.

All history-writing is selective, and reflects the preoccupations of the era in which the history is written. Industrial archaeology emerged first as a hobbyist pastime in the 1950s, and then reached a peak of popularity in the late 1960s / early 1970s. David & Charles (the publishers) had a lucrative business in publishing accessible ‘laymans’ guides to fuel this ‘serious-hobby’. And meanwhile BP (and Shell) were keen to support (to fuel in a literal sense) this ambulant pastime. The book has gazetteer sections: it is nudging the reader to get out and explore (and to consume petrol in the process).

The last decade, or so, has seen a boom in oil-related books, and whilst most take the form of an angry indictment, some are more concerned to summon a curious lament or nostalgia, and here I’m thinking of Marriott & Mccalister 2021’s Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation (Pluto Press). Both types of book seek to spotlight a phenomenon that we have lived along-side but have paid little heed to: the petrochemical estate, its shaping impact upon the UK (and global) landscape and its strange ability to lie unseen, in plain sight. But Marriott & Mccalister’s book, and the road-trip around the vanished footprint of the UK’s oil and gas industry that it presents, is not all that can be said (or noticed) about the oil and gas industry and its legacy. And I guess that’s the point that Just Stop Oil would make – that their protest actions at art galleries are about forcing oil and gas back into consciousness.

But for me the punctum moment was stumbling upon the ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal on Anglesey. Opened in 1974 the terminal stored pumped crude from the then-supersized oil tankers that were too big to navigate down the Mersey to Shell’s Stanlow refinery. So until 1990 their oil was stored and pipped from this rural site. But the site was closed in 1990 and lay vacant for many years. When came upon it, I wandered in and found the footings of multiple large tanks, and orderly lanes between them. With all tanks and pipes long gone the effect was of a strange embossing – a rural landscape faintly indented with hints of a previous super-ordered arrangement of space. But the site was completely open, isolated and context-less.  

(I acknowledge – of course – that oil and gas installations leave behind legacies of soil and groundwater contamination which are a much less wistful residues of former industrial activity.)

Last year my conscience was niggling me – I was feeling that I needed to address my knowledge gap around oil and gas, having been engrossed watching the Norwegian drama series State of Happiness (about their North Sea Oil era). So, I set out to read books that would bring me up to speed with the shaping impact of the Twentieth century’s dominant fuel (oil and gas): the petrochemical century and its’ hiddenness. In part there was a desire to knit make sense of time passing – for in the 1990s and early 2000s I’d had some association with BP facilities in South Wales, including its refineries and large petrochemical complexes spread along the Severn estuary.

Those places, when visited in the 1990s had felt a bit tired and speaking of an earlier optimism via their faded 1960’s design. But in their solidity I had assumed them to be eternal. I had no clear sense of what these locations must have been like before oil came, or that these mammoth complexes, with their gantries, pipes and tanks, might ever cease to exist. And yet, as an environmental lawyer I’d been a very small part of the creeping de-industrialisation process that would in due course (after I can left South Wales) culminate in the elimination of these sites.

Marriott & Mccalister chronicle this passing surprising well. I say surprising for two reasons. First, because I initially found their book too complicated by their attempt to weave reference to references to songs into their narrative. Secondly, because I thought that I would get a deeper insight and understanding from less psychogeographically inclined works. But how wrong I was. The histories of the oil industry that I found and read were dull, dull, dull. A succession of competitive commercial rivalries, imperial misadventures and mergers. My family laughed and me when I told them that I’d found these books boring. “Well, obviously”, came their reply.

But this begs a question, what makes the story of (for example) coal something that can be culturally embraced as an epic story of local and national identity, but oil and gas slithers into the shadows getting little purchase on consciousness?

Marriott & Mccalister suggest that the Oil and Gas industry likes this ability to have hid in the shadows, and that has served it well, largely. All the odder then that BP chose to sponsor an industrial archaeology book in the 1975s – I suspect that there is little chance that it would choose to do so now.

Picture credit: The embossed ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal https://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/site-former-shell-depot-anglesey-8462664

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“Creative Destruction” – announcing SHU Space & Place Group’s 2023 Theme – a call for contributions

‘The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. “All that is solid”—from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all—all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to “Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals”‘

Marshall Berman (1987) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The experience of modernity, London: Verso p.99

2022 was a pretty full-on year for the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group. Somehow we managed stage seven workshop online events, three on our originally proposed theme of ‘Changing Places’ and a further four on the spin-off ‘Changing Campuses’ theme.

The Changing Campuses theme carries on into 2023 via a series of events which Jill Dickinson (now At University of Leeds) is leading with Sam Elkington (University of Teesside) for the Society for Research in Higher Education, on the theme of the future of learning landscapes.  The three hybrid sessions are 1) Assemblages (22-2-23); 2) Networks (26-4-23) and 3) Flexibilities (14-6-23). Full details are here: https://srhe.ac.uk/landscapes-of-learning-for-unknown-futures-prospects-for-space-in-higher-education/

Meanwhile, as a follow-on to the Changing Places theme the SHU SPG’s theme for 2023 will be ‘Creative Destruction’. This post is a call for proposals, in order to see how much interest there is in engaging with this theme, both within SHU and beyond. The level of interest will then shape how this year’s series of online events is pulled together. So, please send me (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk) a proposal by 15 March 2023 if you would like to contribute, for this please provide a title, a paragraph setting out a summary of your project, idea etc and details of by when in 2023 you would be ready to present your contribution. 

At our online events (which are free to participate in) each contributor gets 15 minutes to give their presentation, followed by discussion. The focus in our events is on relaxed interdisciplinarity and on the creative power of juxtaposing “presentations that by rights wouldn’t normally appear in the same event, but when they do it gets you thinking”. In our 2022 sessions we hosted presenters from management studies, architecture, education, facilities management, tourism, creative writing, disability studies, film making, sports & leisure studies, criminology,  performance, graphic communication, law, museum studies, urban studies, jewellery design and social policy. 

Recordings of our themed sessions held over recent years are all available here: Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group – YouTube

Creative Destruction – a call for contributions

Growing out of 2022’s concern to examine through a variety of arts, humanities and social science lenses how places change, this year’s SHU SPG theme seeks to provoke an open (and playful) interpretation of the expression ‘creative destruction’. Perhaps there are four main sense that could be applied to this term:

1. how the act of destruction has certain aesthetic potentiality (i.e. can be used as a creative resource or object)
2. how the act of creativity necessarily often requires an (underacknowledged) element of destruction, elimination or subtraction (i.e. you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs)
3. how an urge to destroy-in-order-to-replace (i.e. to create the new) underpins capitalism and its urban processes
4. how the entropy in all things cannot be resisted, but can be curated (e.g. DeSilvey’s ‘palliative curation’ of ruins).

Through our call we seek contributions from any discipline that can speak to any of the above (or add new interpretations of the phrase). The only requirement is that the contribution either directly or indirectly applies to the built environment. An indirect contribution could be a presentation concerned (for example) with sculpture as a subtraction process, if the presenter was happy to allow an onward discussion to consider how the act of stone sculpture could be likened to urban subtraction processes. In other words: bring us the stimulus and then we’ll see where it can head onward to.

In disciplinary terms ‘creative destruction’ has a clear meaning in Marxist economics – in its theorisation of capitalism’s destruction drive in the quest for the constant production of new surplus value. Meanwhile in the arts, as expressed by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin in 1842, “the urge to destroy is a creative passion”. But destruction is more than just catharsis: destruction-based artworks embody a conundrum in that through subtraction, inflicted damage or disassembly the resulting / remaining item is rendered more noticeable, more noteworthy. Thus, destruction creates poignancy for a residual object (and/or memory of the moment of destruction). Meanwhile in the gritty realm of the prosaic, cities shrink through urban editing (de-densification) and buildings a subtracted through the industrial arts of demolition.

Our 2023 theme seeks to develop a conversation about creative destruction, editing-down, subtraction and disassembly that stretches productively across scales, domains and objectives to help inform consideration of creative destruction within urban change processes.

Image Credit: Sculptor Matthew Simmonds, https://www.yellowtrace.com.au/matthew-simmonds-architectural-marble-carvings/

Towards the within: a hospital psychogeography

“Browse a bookstore’s philosophy section and you will find hefty tomes devoted to the analysis of single concepts such as friendship, authenticity, guilt, power, morality, freedom, and evil. Scholars wrestle with the precise meaning of these concepts because they are inherently abstract. Unlike concepts that refer to categories of things that we experience with our sense, these concepts lack a concrete referent existing in the world outside ourselves.”

Landau, Robinson & Meier (2014) The Power of Metaphor: Examining its influence on social life. American Psychological Association: Washington DC, p. 3

Like intestines, UK hospital estates are a characteristic cramming together of a variety of eras, sizes and functions of buildings. Navigation through, along, between and into such an assortment of functional elements is a feat of achievement in and of itself. It calls for a unique culture of wayfinding instruction (by the institution) and active, ambulatory interpretation (by the visitor). What follows is an attempted psychogeographical account of one such navigation.

The hospital’s outer car park is quite a way from the destination, but it is convenient, familiar open space. It lacks that squeezed-in aspect of more proximate, characteristically inserted-feeling, hospital parking sites.

It is a cold, frosty morning. To get to my destination I must navigate the contorted labyrinth of paths, roads and buildings that make up this estate, its vital organs and its interwoven passages and dead-ends.

In leaving the bright, winter sunshine of the car park I must first enter and squeeze through the dark narrow lane that runs between the secure psychiatric ward and a high bank. The windows are bulbous at their base, their protruding metal caging preventing escape of the ward’s content, but allowing moments of controlled ventilation,

Next, I emerge onto a slippery path, set on a gentle (but today perilous-feeling) incline. The passageways have been carefully prepared over night with specialist salts in anticipation of my tentative passage. These surfaces are notably clear-looking and the crystals glisten in the early morning sunlight, reflected and magnified in the adjacent window screens.

Indeed, touring this estate is a constant dialogue with the myriad surfaces, screens and cameras that mediate this journey, by turns offering-up images of far away and (very) close at hand.

I step down into Central Lane. I turn South but soon find myself in a waste storage compound. Here, everything appears to have its place. There are laundry bays, clinical waste bays and a variety of refuse trolleys. But there are no people and no doors through which I think am invited (or permitted) to pass. So, I reverse from this dead end and head North, up the long straight channel of this service lane. To my left the otherwise smooth banking has been recently excavated. Mini-diggers sit abandoned there and fluffy brown earth billows out of the ground. This fibrous outbreak unmasks the two-dimensional appearance of this bank – reminding me that the bank has depth, substance beneath the surface that enables the surface to stay so, stable, taut, smooth and unremarkable-seeming.

Meanwhile to my right I’m passing endless apertures of workshops and stores, their windows and doors acting hour-by-hour as membranes receiving and emitting supplies and services vital to the life of this hospital-organism. And still I have seen no people.

Reaching the end of Central Lane, I’m conscious that I’ve now spent many minutes walking in the opposite direction to my destination. But there have been no opportunities to enter the hospital complex through these walls. So, I feel somewhat relieved when I at last reach a sharp bend, which will finally enable me to turn South. But the bend is awkward, and requires me to contort my body and step out into the road. Here I must suddenly make sense of the road markings that seem to invite me to walk amongst the traffic. The clarity of Central Lane’s singular routing has given way to shapelessness and uncertainly. As a clarification of sorts, a sudden blast of cold, sharp air hits flaccid flesh, causing my face to wince.

Ahead of me a delivery lorry is parked perpendicular to the pavement, jutting out into the road. A yellow box painted onto the road shows me that it undertakes this awkward insertion on a regular basis. Through the evolution of this estate this kink in the route has become normalised, accommodating to the growing-over-time functional needs of the blank building into which it is now a necessary daily attachment. To move forwards I must step blindly out into the opposite carriage, and hoping to find nothing speeding towards me.

Time is now marching on, the deviation of my journey has eaten away at what I had though was adequate journey time. I am now breathing heavily. My heart is starting to pound as anxiety starts to mount. What else lies unexpectedly ahead? How much longer is this going to take? This site’s internal anatomy is not what I was expecting. Things looked more simple on the estate plan that I’d casually glanced at before setting out (and which I now wish I’d studied more intently).

I pick up the pace. I only have 10 minutes left now. I hug the edge of cluster of new buildings which look like the Westward turning point I’m seeking to transpose the required route from the map onto this terrain. (With time now tight I have abandoned my improvisational drift, and I am now surrendered to my phone’s map). But in self-admonishment – noting the mistaken fit between the cluster and the map – I chide myself that “the map is not the territory”.

Hastening towards my destination I finally find the entrance to the cluster of buildings which will deliver me to my destination. Upon entering I am reunited with the realm of people – all moving at notably slower pace than my now running-out-of-time stride. I chide myself again: “be grateful that you can move swiftly still, these folk are not choosing to be slow or uncertain in their movement”.

Once inside a new form of disorientation takes over. I now have to work in three dimensions: to find the right level and direction of travel. I get it wrong at first try and hurtle up, and then back down a flight of stairs. I passed through doors that lead onward to other doors, and pass through rooms within rooms (each seemingly smaller than the last). Generally, I’m passing further and further inside, but occasionally a corridor spits me out into gaps between buildings, a third space of exterior interior (courtyards of sorts).

Then with one further turn I finally reach my destination: Caecum House. And the procedure is completed.

Image Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Central_Lane,_Northern_General_Hospital,_Sheffield_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1078902.jpg

Riding out the catastrophe: reflections from SHU SPG’s ‘Changing Places #3: Sport & physical activity in catastrophic environments’ session, 3-11-22

“There is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something”

Mark Fisher (2016) The Weird & The Eerie, p61.

Last night we held the final online session in Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place group’s ‘Changing Places’ series. The event took the form of an online book launch for the exciting and timely new collection, Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments, edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Routledge, 2022). Featuring contributions from around the world, this collection looks at the ways in which sport and physical activity react to natural and man-made shocks to place, whether by armed conflict, natural disaster or socio-economic turmoil.

The event featured the following presentations:

Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)

Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments: Tuning to the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’

Dani Abulhawa (Leeds University)

Moving toward understanding through open and expressive physical activity: Findings from a preliminary study into the work of Skateboarding charity, SkatePal in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories

Kevin Bingham (Barnsley College)

An urban explorer’s experiences of meshwork, melding and the uncanny: invisible cities of the rubble

Kass Gibson (Plymouth Marjons University)

Informational Hazards and Moral Harm: Sport and Exercise Science Laboratories as Sites of Moral Catastrophes

Here’s the recording of the session, and my reflections on the event follow.

Jim and Jack opened the event by outlining their conceptualisation of ‘catastrophe’. They see catastrophe as more fundamental than disasters (which can be anticipated, and to an extent planned for). A catastrophe is a circumstance of rupture where we come to feel torn from familiar notions of being, doing, belonging and inhabiting. It engenders a feeling of ‘end times’ and forces us to acclimatise to a new, unsettling, environment and context. A catastrophe puts us in place where it is hard to dwell, and yet we still must strive to live there. So, we learn how to normalise the abnormal, whether that’s the climate emergency, war, socio-economic turmoil etc. In the face of catastrophe, we witness the end of what we were previously able to take as stable, familiar and grounding.

So (they then provocatively ask) what role does sport and physical activity play within these changed places and contexts of dwelling? It seems incongruous to ask: surely sport is for ‘the good times’? But being so deeply ‘of the body’, physical activity conducted within the context and environs of catastrophe melds two things: that heightened phenomenological sense of being alive that exercise can summon and that empirical confrontation with unsettled contexts and environments. In short, exercise and confrontation of catastrophe, both require physically and cognitive exertion in order to accommodate to altered capacities of body and place.

Now, that formula (which is my extrapolation from Jim and Jack’s comments, and they may not like the direction I’m taking this) sets up opportunity for their contributors to explore the presence and actions of moving, adaptive bodies and minds within catastrophic places. Thus, Dani Abulhawa introduced us to the role of skateboarding projects in the West Bank, and specifically of how the act of learning to skate instils a sense of agency, growth, accomplishment and resilience in the individual skater, and also summons that communally via the shared experience of developing these community projects. Meanwhile in his account of his urbex forays into post-earthquake Christchurch’s ruination, Kevin Bingham used Italo Calvino’s motif of ‘Invisible Cities’ to suggest how this destroyed cityscape offered up a site of open-reading, such that this was (but also no-longer was) New Zealand. Instead, the city had become a distorted (and or distortable) place in which (in his words) “our maps and memories are deceiving us”. Kevin detailed his body’s lines of flight, contortion and accommodation to new logics of movement across the rubble where “we were spared the boredom of following the building in the usual way” but instead had to invent your own path of movement across denatured streets and ruptured buildings. And as with movement, so with meaning-making – in this invisible city Kevin would forge new – personalised – frameworks for his aesthetic consumption of this terrain. Kevin is unapologetic about this appropriation of place, and tantalising holds together the eager to explain theoretical realm of his academic training and the reticence of the urbexer’s experiential consumption logics of ‘it is what it is, I do what I do, because I do it’ (that’s not a quote from Kevin). In his account Christchurch was an open-form playscape, evacuated of other humans. But he conceded in the Q&A that not everyone liked that he and his crew had come to the city to play (my word, not his). So, it was interesting that the final presenter, Kass Gibson, then placed moral considerations front and centre of his talk, examining fitness laboratories as sites of moral catastrophy and of how the origins of such lab’s measured and evaluated physical activity lie in the control sciences of prison regimes, military training, time and motion studies etc. In presenting this analysis, Kass presented the body as a changing place and a site of trauma, invoking the haunting title of Jean-Marie Brohm’s 1978 collection of essays: ‘Sport: a prison of measured time’.

Jim and Jack’s book is published on 8 November 2022, and this discount code FLA22 (or FLA23 in 2023) can be used for purchase at Routledge’s site: https://www.routledge.com/Sport-and-Physical-Activity-in-Catastrophic-Environments/Cherrington-Black/p/book/9781032125411

Image Credit: Kevin Bingham

SHU Space & Place Group: ‘Changing Places #3: Sport & physical activity in catastrophic environments’, online event, 3-11-22

The Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group is delighted to announce that for the next event in our ‘Changing Places’ series we are hosting an online book launch for an exciting and timely new collection edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black, entitled Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments as part of Routledge’s ‘Research in Sport, Culture and Society’ series. Featuring contributions from around the world, this collection looks at the ways in which sport and physical activity react to natural and man-made shocks to place, whether by armed conflict, natural disaster or socio-economic turmoil. Our online book launch event will feature presentations from the editors and three of the contributors:

Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)

Introduction. Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments: Tuning to the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’

Dani Abulhawa (Leeds University)

Moving toward understanding through open and expressive physical activity: Findings from a preliminary study into the work of Skateboarding charity, SkatePal in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories

Kevin Bingham (Barnsley College)

An urban explorer’s experiences of meshwork, melding and the uncanny: invisible cities of the rubble

Kass Gibson (Plymouth Marjons University)

Informational Hazards and Moral Harm: Sport and Exercise Science Laboratories as Sites of Moral Catastrophes

Places are free, but must be booked via Eventbrite (see below for the link). Registered delegates will be emailed the event’s Zoom link 24 hours prior to the start of the event.

This edited collection addresses a clear gap in the literature, as to date, there is a paucity of scholarly research that directly examines the role of sport and physical activity in the experiences of individuals and communities who have lived through catastrophe (Thorpe, 2015). This is surprising, since the ability of individuals and communities to maintain healthy relationships with their surroundings– most notably, before, during and after catastrophe – is an important point of focus, posing a number of significant questions for sport and physical activity researchers (Rowe, 2020). Namely: What happens when our existing geographical, topographical, sociological and political coordinates are shattered because of war or poverty? How can sport and exercise help us to cope when faced with unprecedented levels of planetary change? Can, and if so how, does life go on in the wastelands left over from resource extraction, industrialisation and economic decay? And what are the consequences of global pandemics for the (physical and mental) health of those whose everyday activities, hobbies, interests and forms of labour are dependent on stable notions of identity, embodiment and place? Here, sport and physical activity may seem trivial to many. However, research on the recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown how involvement in physical cultures provides an important locus of support in times of hardship and pain, as well as an important mechanism for managing the embodied, cognitive, and structural ruptures that accompany unprecedented events.

In attempting to address this lacuna, this session will present a series of case studies from an edited collection entitled: ‘Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments’, which will be published by Routledge on November 8th 2022. Key to this approach will be an investigation of both the negative (i.e. death, mental and physical health issues, human displacement) and positive (new social and political identities, increase in environmental awareness, personal growth) outcomes of a range of socio-cultural and political changes, specifically related to the ‘end’ of capitalism, socialisation, ‘nature’ and morality. By allowing for interdisciplinary contributions that are located at the juncture of sociology, geography, social psychology, political ecology, philosophy, and the arts, an analysis of how participants in sport and physical activity respond to the complexities of the environment will be provided. In so doing, the sessions will explore the cognitive and affective sensibilities used by both individuals and communities to experiment with new social, cultural and political identities as well as how these processes are adapted in times of chaos. In this way, we hope that the session will make a meaningful contribution to empirical analyses of sport, physical activity, and the environment, while also examining how such analyses might help in developing practical resilience strategies for those most affected by catastrophic change.

Copies of this book can be purchased directly from the Routledge website: https://www.routledge.com/Sport-and-Physical-Activity-in-Catastrophic-Environments/Cherrington-Black/p/book/9781032125411

Attendance is free – but you’ll need to book via the Eventbrite page:

Register on Eventbrite

Come On In!: Calling all legal geographers, place management scholars and spatio-normativity researchers! The Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law is in a listening mood…

“…to examine this background assumption, to consider the idea that law does not stop at the
utterance, but continues on through causal chains into the world of stuff. Actually, it was never
anywhere else. The violence that law authorizes or blocks happens on bodies and elsewhere in the
material world. This is not separable from law, nor are these simply ‘effects’.”

David Delaney (2003) ‘Beyond the word: law as a thing of this world’. In: Holder, J. and Harrison, C. E. (eds) Law and Geography. OUP: Oxford, pp. 67–84.

Anyone who’s read my work will know that I’m a lawyer-cum-geographer-cum-artsy kind of guy. I’m interested in that point where law as words and symbols collides with the physicality of the world around us, and how we take as natural many of these quite strange collision effects. But these collisions are necessary, important and they make fundamentally important regularities in the world, they form territories, they instruct us in how to move within and to co-inhabit our worlds. And its always struck me as odd that there is no academic journal targeted towards analysing these materialisations of law in (and into) the world, and how (formal and informal) rule frameworks form, subsist and fade for the spaces and places that we dwell in.

So, I’m very pleased to now announce that earlier this year I was appointed editor-in-chief of the established Emerald Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law. Admittedly that’s not the sexiest sounding journal title on the planet, but within the cover of that rather bland tagline, there’s great scope for the journal to become a home and heartland for investigation of the ‘rules’ of space and place.

Here’s the Journal’s recently refreshed Scope and Aims statement (featuring my editorial steer in bold) and an indication of the range (and scales) of studies that the journal has published in recent years from around the world:

The Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law publishes original legal research contributions for the benefit of scholars, policy makers and practitioners in these areas, including those operating in the fields of legal practice, real estate, place management, housing, environmental regulation and land use planning. It is an established, well-regarded journal; international in scope and with a commitment to comparative legal studies, the journal publishes scholarly legal articles dealing with the application of law in these areas as well as theoretical and policy orientated research. We are happy to accept articles taking a doctrinal approach as well as those engaging with empirical and socio-legal research.

JPPEL brings together scholarship from the inter-related areas of property, planning and environmental law, as well as a diversity of methodological approaches. The journal seeks to encourage new, interdisciplinary ways of examining how law (in its widest sense) shapes how places and spaces are conceived, made, used, owned, operated, managed, transacted, changed, harmed and/or eliminated. We are particularly keen to encourage contributions from fields such as legal geography, regulatory studies, political ecology and law & technology scholarship that explore the role of law in place-related matters.

To give an illustration of the breadth and importance of the subjects that we cover, here are some of the themes that our published articles have examined over the last three years:

• Situating real estate law for the new outer-space economy
• Transitioning towards circular systems: property rights in waste
• Blockchain technology in Dutch land registration
• The law and policy on coastal damage in New South Wales, Australia
• Regulatory failure in hotel projects in Bali, Indonesia
• Land expropriation in China
• Legal frameworks for Syrian urban reconstruction
• Developments in the law of repair in the UK private sector
• Civil liability for nuclear operators in the United Arab Emirates
• Logics of value in community ownership of UK pubs

We currently have an open Call for Papers, and are also open to proposals for special issues that align to the Journal’s Scope and Aims.

We also have a current specific Call for Papers (closing for submission on 21st February 2023) for a special issue to be guest edited by Dr Rebecca Leshinsky of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia on ‘Sharing sky high stories – A narrative research approach addressing the law of concerns, complaints, and conflict in multi-unit residential developments‘, here’s the text of that Call:

“Sharing sky high stories is a special issue for the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law. It supports a narrative research approach addressing the law of concerns, complaints, and conflict in multi-unit residential developments. 

Land use planning and environmental studies have a long tradition with the rich information that can be gathered from narrative research. This may be through interviews, focus groups or factual discussion from court judgements. Multi-unit residential development, be it private condominium or government/community housing, comprises of concerns, complaints, and conflict. Behind these matters are narratives involving humans as lot owners, renters, committee/board members, service providers, property/strata managers and other stakeholders. Dagan (2008, 814) reminds us there is no inherent or inevitable content to property law. We argue that the time is ripe for narrative research to play a role in gaining knowledge on the lived experiences of multi-unit stakeholders. Carruthers et al. (2021), regarding their research into the pedagogy of property law teaching, note findings from their longitudinal study that some teachers want a more critical socio-legal approach to property law, rather than strict doctrinal teaching. Sherry (2021) comments that land law contains social, economic, and political values that are obvious to legal and property theorists. These are values well known to judges but the time-pressures of modern justice limits the ability of judges to “explicate those values in their decisions”. In turn, lawyers cannot see the underlying social, economic or political rationale in property case law or doctrine (Sherry 2021). The rationale then for this special issue is to align narrative research in the legal context of property, planning and environmental matters as they relate to multi-unit residential developments. Knowledge from a legal lens on multi-unit developments, from the narratives, and stories of stakeholders, will add a richer understanding regarding the lived experiences of residents and stakeholders associated with multi-unit residential developments.”

Further details of the journal and our Calls are here: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jppel

Images references: The Author, Sheffield UK (2022)

Reflections on The Changing Campus #3 and #4: beyond the Multiverse?

“The ‘Idea of a University’ was a village with its priests. the ‘Idea of a Modern University’ was a town – a one-industry town – with its intellectual oligarchy. The ‘Idea of a Multiversity’ is a city of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some rise to the top within it; most fashion their lives within one of its many subcultures. There is less sense of community than in the village but also less sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose than within a town but there are more ways to excel. There are also more refuges of anonymity.”

Clark Kerr (1963) The Uses of the University, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p.41.

Writing over 50 years ago Clark Kerr’s nested (Village – Town – City) analogy for the evolution of the University as a place, and as an experience, seems at first glance quite modern (in the sense of contemporary). But thinking about it further it’s actually more Modern in the sense of a now-strange-to-us embrace of a diffraction of identity and experience. It’s a very liberal, mid-Twentieth Century, view of a university being a place of liberation, immersion, diversification.

Our Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s recent set of online ‘The Changing Campus’ sessions have perhaps identified an increasingly prominent diffraction of place-experience and place-identity. Across our final two sessions we’ve heard how campus spaces physically encode and sustain exclusionary assumptions about mobility, we’ve heard stories of enhanced senses of connection for some enabled by covid-era shifts towards online ‘places’ of interaction, and we’ve heard of the indeterminate boundaries of ‘the campus’ and of increasingly complex and hard to separate on-site and off-site university effects and impacts.

Here are the recordings of our two final sessions (the recordings and reflections for our first two sessions are here), they feature:

The Changing Campus #3: Embodiment, Materiality & Flow

Petra Vackova (SHU) & Donata Puntil (King’s College London)

Rooms of Possibilities: Making Spaces for Posthumanist (Un)doings

In our talk we will be exploring and asking what it means and what it does to be a community in the post-digital era. We will reflect on a Dream Team session we organized at the 2022 European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in which we challenged digital capitalism, including digital labour and production, in academia by re-imagining and enacting a new approach to communing during a conference session that accounts for bio-digital becoming in/with/through rooms, both physical, virtual, and imaginative. As online, virtual ways of working are becoming normalized in academia, we argue that new meaningful and ethical ways of inquiring, living, writing, collaborating, and growing with/in/through bio-digital-material spaces must be developed to respond to the changing relationship between human and more-than-human others in the academia. Through a process of ‘quilting together’ with comments, images and connections in our online conference space, we paid attention to the role of bodies, objects, sounds and materials, the ways we encounter and entangle, across and between our physical and online ‘rooms’. By wandering and wondering between rooms, using all of our senses in physical movement, we diffracted, expanded, (re)experienced what is possible, what is valuable and what is often unseen or unheard in our bio-digital-material ways of working.

Carol A. Taylor (University of Bath)

Research-creation in the ‘posts’: Institutional kitchens, doors, cupboards

For a long time I’ve been interested in how mundane materialities constitute institutional life. In this talk, I focus on how human-nonhuman relations produce practices of mattering within material assemblages. The mundane materialities I focus on – kitchens, doors, cupboards – are often ignored, unnoticed, or taken-for-granted within the broader life of higher education workspaces. My argument is that such liminal, marginalized spaces/places/materialities can help shape the habits, routines, practices, values and norms of the everyday institutional life they are enmeshed within. The empirical materials I draw on were generated through a variety of research-creation encounters which favoured an experimentalist practice and an attentive stance. The analysis I offer is shaped by three ‘posts’: posthumanism, post-methodology and post-disciplinarity. I draw out some insights into the material, affective and political dimensions of the mundane materialities of our institutional lives and how these vital materialities produce resonances and connections across bodies, spaces and times

Pamela Holland & Nick Russell (on behalf of the SHU Staff Disability Network)

The Changing Campus: Challenging ableism

This session will explore the challenges faced by disabled staff when working on campus and remote Hybrid working. The importance of consulting disabled staff from a wide range of disabilities when designing and renovating campus buildings and facilities cannot be emphasised enough. Inclusion shouldn’t be an afterthought; it should be ingrained as part of the normal process from the start. Pamela and Nick will talk about their own positive and negative experiences as well as drawing on experiences from the wider staff disability network. We will cover a range of disabilities including physical, hidden, mental and medical within the case studies. On campus and Hybrid working challenges will be discussed to raise awareness of disabled staff experiences from both positive and negative aspects.

The Changing Campus #4: Wider learning Environments & Interactions

Teri-Lisa Griffiths (Criminology, SHU) & Jill Dickinson (Law, University of Leeds)

“I’m in a lecture hall with chairs and a big screen and someone talking […] it felt special in a way to me […] it felt like all my hard work had come to something”: Exploring what learning spaces mean to the student experience.  

During the 2020-21 academic year, campuses across the UK were in lockdown. Our research explored how students’ learning spaces had changed as a result of these restrictions. In this presentation, we will report on our key findings and explore how learning spaces can support and inhibit the social, cultural, and academic ‘becoming’ of learners. Using a sociomaterial framework, we will illustrate how students adapted and managed previously unimagined spaces of learning and what we may ascertain about the student experience as a result. We will invite discussion about the long-term considerations for policy and pedagogy which arise from our research findings.

Vicky Mellon (Tourism, SHU) 

“It feels like a job” : Understanding commuter students: Motivations, engagement and learning experiences (Stalmirska & Mellon 2022)

The number of students choosing to commute to university and remain at home, rather than relocating to the place of studying is growing, particularly within post 92 HE settings. Increased tuition fees and introduction of student loans is attributed to this growing trend. Subsequently, they are a valuable part of the student population. However, there is a lack of research on commuter students, including focus on their motivations, engagement and learning experiences. Here, the qualitative study addresses this gap and explores their reasons for commuting, their engagement and disengagement with extracurricular activities and their sense of belonging at university. The research highlights the challenges facing commuter students and how these differ from other cohorts, and offers some recommendations for overcoming barriers preventing engagement.

Julian Dobson (CRESR, SHU) 

The long shadow of the campus: ‘place’ and the civic university 

Universities cast a long shadow over places. The notion of the ‘university town’ is baked into European history: places where cultural identity and spatial form are significantly shaped by their higher education institutions. Even modern, isolated campuses ripple out beyond their boundaries, skewing property development, housing markets and neighbourhood dynamics. As universities become more conscious of their civic mission, they increasingly position themselves as agents of economic and social change within their wider communities. But the consequences of such interventions are not always fully considered. This talk will explore the porous interface between places and institutions, and present an emerging framework for understanding and assessing universities’ impacts on the places that host them.

Image credit: Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus Masterplan: https://www.rmcmedia.co.uk/vibe/movers-and-makers/article/Sheffield-Hallam-reveals-city-centre-campus-plan-

The Changing Campus #4: wider learning environments and interactions, Thursday 16 June 2022, 3-5pm (online SHU SPG event)

“As the twentieth century draws to a close the idea of a virtual campus – paralleling or perhaps replacing the physical one – seems increasingly plausible.”

Bill Mitchell (1996) City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press p.70

25 years on from Mitchell’s prophecy, the physical death of the University campus still has yet to come to fruition. Yes, the place-shocks of the covid era have certainly left the spaces of Higher Education looking pretty sparcely occupied, but teaching and learning has continued. The ‘university’ now exists in a hybrid form, part in-person, part on line. But the university campus looks unlikely to vaporise fully into a dematerialised form anytime soon. The university still has physical bulk, it squats resolutely in-place. Sitting at the heart of individual, economic and social networks, it exerts a gravitational influence both upon the lives, routines and movement of individual students and upon the towns and cities captured in it’s zone of interaction.

In the fourth event in Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group’s ‘The Changing Campus’ series of online seminars, on Thursday, 16 June 2022 (3-5pm) we will be examining the interconnection between university campuses, surrounding towns and students’ travel between them.

Our presenters will be:

Teri-Lisa Griffiths (Criminology, SHU) & Jill Dickinson (Law, University of Leeds)“I’m in a lecture hall with chairs and a big screen and someone talking […] it felt special in a way to me […] it felt like all my hard work had come to something”: Exploring what learning spaces mean to the student experience.  

During the 2020-21 academic year, campuses across the UK were in lockdown. Our research explored how students’ learning spaces had changed as a result of these restrictions. In this presentation, we will report on our key findings and explore how learning spaces can support and inhibit the social, cultural, and academic ‘becoming’ of learners. Using a sociomaterial framework, we will illustrate how students adapted and managed previously unimagined spaces of learning and what we may ascertain about the student experience as a result. We will invite discussion about the long-term considerations for policy and pedagogy which arise from our research findings.

Vicky Mellon (Tourism, SHU) “It feels like a job” : Understanding commuter students: Motivations, engagement and learning experiences (Stalmirska & Mellon 2022)

The number of students choosing to commute to university and remain at home, rather than relocating to the place of studying is growing, particularly within post 92 HE settings. Increased tuition fees and introduction of student loans is attributed to this growing trend. Subsequently, they are a valuable part of the student population. However, there is a lack of research on commuter students, including focus on their motivations, engagement and learning experiences. Here, the qualitative study addresses this gap and explores their reasons for commuting, their engagement and disengagement with extracurricular activities and their sense of belonging at university. The research highlights the challenges facing commuter students and how these differ from other cohorts, and offers some recommendations for overcoming barriers preventing engagement.

Julian Dobson (CRESR, SHU) The long shadow of the campus: ‘place’ and the civic university 

Universities cast a long shadow over places. The notion of the ‘university town’ is baked into European history: places where cultural identity and spatial form are significantly shaped by their higher education institutions. Even modern, isolated campuses ripple out beyond their boundaries, skewing property development, housing markets and neighbourhood dynamics. As universities become more conscious of their civic mission, they increasingly position themselves as agents of economic and social change within their wider communities. But the consequences of such interventions are not always fully considered. This talk will explore the porous interface between places and institutions, and present an emerging framework for understanding and assessing universities’ impacts on the places that host them.

The event is free to attend, and registration is via Eventbrite, here:

Register on Eventbrite

Recordings of our previous ‘The Changing Campus’ sessions are viewable here:

Image credit: City Campus Redevelopment, Sheffield Hallam University, 2022

Changing Places #1 & 2: reflections on our recent SHU Space & Place Group sessions

“…whenever [Mozhayev] forgets who he is, and what he should do next in life, he gets on a bus and rides to the old familiar bus stop where he grew up and suddenly everything makes sense again”.

Peter Pomerantsev (2017) Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Faber & Faber: London

In his book chronicling the strange, ‘through-the-looking-glass’, world of modern Moscow, Pomerantsev presents a chapter chronicling the hectic and disorienting pace and nature of that city’s recent ‘regeneration’, wherein:

“The city changes so fast that you lose all sense of reality, you can’t recognise the streets. You look for a place where you went to eat a week ago, and before your eyes the whole block is being demolished.”

Set against this disorientation, Pomerantsev introduces Alexander Mozhayev, an urban explorer cum psychogeographer cum rescue archaeologist. Mozhayev leads walking tours in search of vanished and vanishing buildings, who declares there to his audience:

“We’re here to say a wake, to this building, to old Moscow, all these buildings are set to be destroyed.”

In Pomerantsev’s portrayal at least, Mozhayev is driven by a strong sense of a need to find and preserve the past, in order to hold his own sense of individual identity together. For Mozhayev:

“When my parents died, I could remember them through the building that we lived in. Buildings aren’t so much about recollecting time as about the victory over time.”

This strong sense of the power of place to ground an individual’s identity, and in particular of the role of the local and familiar material environment and its arrangement as a cherished store of personal memory and meaning struck me as running deeply through the five presentations given in our recent two ‘Changing Places’ online events, for which the session recordings are now provided here.

In Changing Places #1: Changing Places & Changing Identities (held on 24 March 2022) Nantia Koulidou (Art & Design, SHU) explored her experience of international migration through the design of electronically activated jewellery that could be programmed to comfort the wearer through release of visual and/or audio mementos when triggered by the environmental effects (e.g. altitude) of travelling between home countries and new horizons. This brought a sense of the way in which both jewellery and mobile electronic devices are now intimate companions in our life-journeys, props by which we remember, below and move-on.

Then Jess Scott (Social Science, SHU) outlined her ongoing research into how younger residents of care homes acclimatise to their new dwelling places, and make sense of their past, present and future by reference to the physical arrangement of their new surroundings. Jess’ concern is to better understand ow such transitions occur, in order to find ways in which the managing of that adjustment can be made to be the most positive experience possible.

Finally Joanna Dobson (SHU Humanities) presented an intimate account, through memoir and wider reflection, of a very formative family event, showing how the experience and recollection of childhood home and holiday locations was framed for her and her family members by that event and its perceived incorporation into the very form of the local landscape. [Joanna’s presentation was not recorded]

Meanwhile, in Changing Places #2: Change and the Material Fate of Place, Joanne Lee (Art & Design, SHU) and Rosemary Shirley (Museum Studies, University of Leicester) outlined the five key areas of inquiry that they are developing for their intended project to explore ‘the local’ (and it’s quality of ‘local-ness’) led by development of creative methods for the investigation of place. Growing out of their own experience of dwelling within narrowed ranges of existence during the covid years, their work seeks to find ways to characterise and explore the multiple locals inherent in any seeming place, and of the mundane (but fundamental) ways by which such senses of the local are made and transacted. In discussion it was noted that teasing out how ‘community’ and ‘locality’ differ (but potentially overlap) could be key, as will showing how qualitative (and narrative) based ‘creative’ techniques now used by marketeers and ‘place branding’ consultants can be distinguished from the more holistic (and less instrumentalist) aims of their project.

Then film-maker Esther Johnson (Media, SHU) outlined her multi-modal attempts to preserve both the form and symbol of Hull’s Co-Op department store’s ‘three ships’ mural. Esther’s project, and its collaborations with Hull residents and contemporary heritage campaigners, brought us back round to the question of where the urge to preserve the cherished built environment comes from, and how it reflects both individual and collective identity and (perhaps) a positive dimension to nostalgia, now that modernism’s faith in the-future-as-progress has itself become something of the past. It also flagged how, if (contrary to Mozhayev’s desires) buildings themselves are not good bets for “victory over time”, then perhaps a more durable victory (and aspiration to memory-survival) can be achieved by multiplying and disseminating the most iconic symbolic representations of the building’s former identity-power. Through Esther’s efforts the ‘locals’ of Hull now connect as a community of collective memory, carrying the three-ships mural emblazoned on T-shirts and other printed, portable media even in the face of the Hull Co-Op building’s imminent demolition.

Image Credit: Esther Johnson, mural on former Hull Co-Op department store

The Changing Campus #1 & #2: some reflections on our recent SHU Space Place / HEC online seminars (session recordings here too)

“In an increasingly home-based, privatised society, universities are among the few surviving institutions that draw people out of their private spaces and, for a brief but crucial time, encourage them to engage in shared public activity.”

Krishan Kumar (1997) ‘The Need for Place’ in Smith & Webster (eds) The Postmodern University: Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, SRHE/Open University Press: Buckingham, p.34

The covid pandemic has shaken education – like so much else – to the core. For long periods of lockdown and transitional caution, Higher Education has lurched online, the physical focus of ‘the University’ shifting from the communal classrooms and cafes of campus life, to solitary student bedrooms and tutor kitchen tables. In a sense far removed from what Kumar was contemplating, Higher Education has become very privatised.

As we (hopefully) start to emerge from covid and its warping effects on daily life, questions are being asked within – and beyond – the sector, about the future of place within University life. Talk is of an ‘extended campus’ of hybrid spaces and modes of teaching and learning.

We all nod in resignation, that – somehow that we can’t yet fully express – things are unlikely to ever return to how they once were. Sometimes this feels good – that the disrupting break with how things were, opens up new possibilities, perhaps even new freedoms. But at other times the prospect seems bleaker – institutions now used to running on a crisis footing of ‘change everything, daily’, now have much higher expectations of the gymnastic, change-absorbing capabilities of their staff, and of the adaptability of their now-less-fully-occupied buildings.

So how to make sense of this challenge to the timeless physicality of the University and its civic presence? How can a new – distributed – sense of the University’s purpose as device to draw people together and to encourage them to work and grow together be instilled?

In the SHU Space & Place Group (working in collaboration with our university’s Interdisciplinary Higher Education Research Cluster) we’ve recently hosted two online seminars to consider these issues. The recordings are below, and my other recent posts summarise the content. And we are now planning a third event for May 2022.

In The Changing Campus #1 we considered how the experience of being on campus can be researched using visual and narrative methods to understand how users of University space seek to carve out territories, temporary possessions of space that they hope will protect and/or empower them.

After a short introduction from me, surveying the different ways in which University place-makers have envisaged an instructional power to their campus formations, Harriet Shortt (University of the West of England) presented an intriguing account of her use of visual methods to capture how staff and students experience the environment of a new, flagship, university building. In doing so Harriet flagged how user generated photographs reveal the multiplicity of place, and of the micro-contestations and territorial emplacement that acts of inhabitation entail. Meanwhile Amira Samatar (SHU) then gave us a powerful account of black women’s experience and use of campus spaces, and in doing so showed how the trend towards opened-out, free-for-all space can unsettle some precisely at the moment at which the place-makers are proudly declaring greater inclusivity.

In The Changing Campus #2 we looked at how being on campus entails multiple engagements with things – the stuff of the world and its arrangement: intentional or otherwise. In dynamic interaction with others: other people, other objects and their respective resistances and affordances, a person is affected (for good or ill) by the act of being upon campus.

The session was chaired by Becky Shaw, who opened up the event by pointing to the myriad ways in which our (human) lives on campus are enmeshed with inanimate (but nonetheless potent) non-human objects. Hiral Patel (Cardiff University) then took us further into this multiplicity, setting out how her research work seeks to account for how buildings (and the things that comprise and fill them) change over time, and do so via complex – multiple – ontologies, formed amidst any single building’s enmeshment in multiple parallel projects, perspectives and temporalities.

James Corazzo and Layla Gharib (SHU) then took us into their design studio and in the course of exploring the instructiveness of informality, emphasised how that informality is an active socio-material creation, something forged and sustained by hard work with choices of movement, manner and soft furnishings. In choosing to include the viewpoint of a sofa within their presentation James and Layla attracted the scorn of Private Eye which (some how) found their abstract and published it in their magazine’s Pseud’s Corner section. But James and Layla give a wonderful repost to the sneering satirists in their presentation, rightly questioning the ‘don’t they know their place?’ condescension of those who ridicule others as upstart imposters, and denying their right to think and question.

Sofa’s matter! (As do all aspects of the formation and enactment of spaces intended for learning – and we need to understand how each element operates (and its other possibilities and potentialities) in order to create and sustain places that can (in Kumar’s words) “draw people out of their private spaces and, for a brief but crucial time, encourage them to engage in shared public activity“.

Finally, Justine Pedler, Programme Lead for the Future Spaces Project (Extended Campus) at SHU followed this theme of how the campus can be arranged to enable learning in place – and to do so by acknowledging multiplicity – by titling her presentation as “Variety is the condition of harmony” (Thomas Carlyle). She gave us an insider’s insight into an ongoing project at Sheffield Hallam aimed at understanding how the new campus spaces being created at the University are being perceived and used by a variety of students. She showed how photo elicitation has been used to get a student ‘eye’ on these developments and as an aid to focus group insights.

[NB: As a change to the originally published programme, Professor Carol A. Taylor was unable to join us as a presenter for The Changing Campus #2 – but we hope to welcome Carol to a future session in this strand.]

Picture credits: Author, January 2022; Private Eye, 3-2-22