ABSTRACT
Historians have been slow to consider space as a framework for understanding historical action and change. Their main frameworks have been based around time, and, more recently, text. Space is becoming a current buzzword, but there are potential problems with the way historians have embraced the ‘spatial turn’. They risk the danger of treating space as just another form of representation in the same mode as culture and text. They also tend to neglect or blur the relationship between space, place and time. This chapter explores the methodological problems for historians taking the spatial turn, particularly in the limitations of the primary sources. It offers a case study of political graffiti and placards in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century English towns. How can the spatial turn enlighten historians’ understanding of this form of popular protest? I suggest that other features of cultural geography offer useful ways of thinking about both space and place. There is more to space than its semiotics: its materiality, its relational nature, its role in shaping human emotions, and how humans embody space through performance and action.
