ABSTRACT
In recent years, legal geography, a relatively new sphere of cross-disciplinary enquiry, has begun to investigate “the co-constitutive relationship of people, place and law” ( Bennett and Layard 2015: 406 ) and has taken as a starting point “the premise that the legal co-creates the spatial and the social while the social and the spatial co-create the legal” ( Layard 2015 ). In making these associations visible, legal geography has begun to open up new perspectives on the hidden forces that shape places and social relations within them. The relationship between people, place, and law can be a similarly productive area of investigation for design historians seeking to account for the circumstances of the production of historical aesthetic, spatial, and material worlds, and their infl uence on those we inhabit today. This chapter approaches that relationship from the vantage point of design and with reference to a single building typology, that of the late-nineteenth-century public house.
