From lines on maps to symbolic order in the city? Translating processional routes as spatial practice in nineteenth-century Sheffield

This chapter considers the emergence in the English city of Sheffield of what the historian Gunn (2000b, 231)  has called the ‘processional culture’ of the nineteenth-century city. It takes as its starting point the fact that processional routes have rarely been subject to systematic treatment despite their importance in accounts of processional topography (for example, Howe 2007; Vandeweghe 2011). Scholarly interest in processional activity as a mechanism for asserting symbolic order on the built environment (Gunn 2000b, 230) proposes the processional route as a legitimate object of ‘topographical hermeneutics’ (Lünen 2013, 118, after Sombart 1992). As such the task of decoding processional routes as mapped materialities of social practice does not appear secondary to that of deconstructing the symbolism of the procession itself. The effect of a too-exclusive emphasis on processional symbols, it is argued, is to close down critical consideration of the historical relationship between the emergence of symbolically privileged urban regimes and broader patterns of changes and continuity in the quotidian life of the city. Such an historical elision is especially unhelpful during a period in which rapid urbanization created new possibilities for spatial practice.