British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Emma Griffin

Popular Recreation in England during the Long Eighteenth Century

The subject of my research is the history of popular sports and recreations in England during the period of industrialisation. My work moves the focus of enquiry away from the themes that have long dominated the study of popular culture – class and industrialisation – and aims to think about sports and pastimes from the perspective of space. Whether in urban, industrial or rural England, all sports required space, and since the labouring poor rarely possessed land of their own this requirement had important implications for their opportunities for recreation. Lacking extensive private land of their own, the landless either awaited the patronage of landowners or appropriated public spaces for themselves – sometimes common or waste land, sometimes the village green, and sometimes the market place and public streets.

This focus on space reveals that it was in fact in industrial areas that popular recreations fared best. These expanding communities tended to be weakly governed, and this served to produce an environment that favoured the continuation of popular sports. In areas less powerfully affected by industrialisation, popular recreations tended to fare worse. Market towns formed the home of movements to reform popular culture and they also possessed the policing powers required to realise the reformers’ visions; for both reasons they formed an unfavourable environment for plebeian recreations. In rural areas, the early-nineteenth-century enclosure movement significantly reduced the size and number of playing fields for the poor, but older customs of paternalism nevertheless helped to ensure the survival of existing patterns of recreation.

By exploiting a concept of space, it is possible to provide a new history of popular recreation during the ‘industrial revolution’. Focusing upon space undermines existing accounts of the terminal decline of ‘traditional’ recreations in the period of modernisation, and draws attention to the complex patterns of both decline and expansion in different settlements, and different regions.

Emma Griffin read History at QMW, London, and then went to UCL to do a Masters in History. In 1996 she moved to Trinity College, Cambridge to begin working on a PhD on the history of popular recreation in eighteenth-century England with Gareth Stedman Jones. She completed this in 2000, and spent one year in a temporary teaching post at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge. She stayed there in 2001, and began her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Emma was awarded a book contract in the British Academy/OUP series in 2002. She completed the book this summer, and is using this final year of her award to begin a new project.