Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013) 139e151140

anglicised elites left the deepest imprint upon Dublin’s landscapein the decades following the restoration of the monarchy. For theStuart lords lieutenant, military success or family prowess playedsecond fiddle to the visual dominance of the divinely-appointedking and his deputies. Nonetheless, Dublin’s conflicting identityas a national capital, yet one subordinate to London, meant thatfinance was lacking to construct a city to rival the architecture ofother European capitals like Paris, Madrid, or Vienna. The lordslieutenant most often had to make do with embellishing medievaloriginals, such as Dublin castle by turning an established fortressinto Ireland’s Whitehall where cannon vied with courtly display.Only sometimes were they able to build from scratch, as at theRoyal Hospital of Charles II at Kilmainham, opened to militarypensioners in 1684, an echo of Wren’s masterpiece at Chelsea. TheChurch of Ireland, representing Anglican hegemony, was anotherprominent locus of authority. Usher assesses the symbolic thrust ofDublin city’s churches via a series of case studies, especially ofthose erected during the remarkably energetic archiepiscopate ofWilliam King 1703e29. Roman Catholic chapels remained clan-destine, the architecture of Presbyterian meeting houses was‘respectfully meek’ (p. 93), but the Anglicans dominated theskyline. As King told a friend, churches without towers madeDublin resemble a cow without horns. His rebuilding programmedrove home his theological agenda. Usher argues, for instance, thatat Dublin’s premier parish church, St Werburgh’s, one of the mostaffluent in the country, King established ‘an intelligent visualarticulation of the view that Anglicanism was the only propervehicle for personal deliverance’ (p. 90). Further chapters follow ongovernment buildings, such as the Custom House, Royal Barracks,Parliament House and Royal Exchange (now Dublin City Hall), anddomestic dwellings for the burgeoning population. Usher’s centralthesis is that Dublin’s topography was not moulded by a singleagency, but by a range of collaborations, competing ambitions, andlocal interest groups. Therefore he warns against ‘abstract, inflex-ibly theoretical formulations of power as a functioning socialentity’ (p. 205) because the symbolic landscape of Ireland’s capitalreveals a more complex, diffuse, and multivalent reality. Moststimulating, and most significant, is Usher’s controversial analysisof Dublin’s eighteenth-century public sculpture, focused on threeequestrian statues of William III (unveiled by the lord mayor in1701), George I (commissioned by the city assembly in 1722) andGeorge II (commissioned in 1758). That of George I still survives: itwas removed in the 1750s and became a garden ornament, untilrescued by the Barber Institute in Birmingham where it nowstands. But the images of William III and George II were eradicatedduring the Irish Free State of the 1920s and 30s, blown to smith-ereens by republican bombs. Usher asserts, persuasively, that thisdramatic destruction has warped our understanding of the statues’signification. Regime change, whether in Sri Lanka, South Africa, orIraq, often includes the stage-managed toppling of the statues ofdeposed governors and their replacement by new revolutionary ordemocratic icons. Few can forget the live television images of thefall of Saddam Hussein’s vast image in Firdos Square, Baghdad inApril 2003, decapitated and dragged through the streets, stampedupon and smacked with shoes. But Usher pleads that carefulcultural historians look beyond the media headlines. Whenreading Dublin’s landscape, he strikes out boldly against the‘adherents of reductive colonial interpretive theories’, with their‘vague and anglocentric suppositions’ (p. 204). In particular, hechallenges the conclusions of Yvonne Whelan’s Reinventingmodern Dublin (2003) and Andrew Kincaid’s Postcolonial Dublin(2006) which portray the statues and public buildings of theGeorgian city as propaganda tools designed keep seditious rebelsin their place. Usher wants to break free from this grand meta-narrative of British conquest and Irish resistance, where the only

keymoments in interpreting statuary are erection and destruction.He accepts that William III was the hero of Protestant Ireland andthat annual parades passed his equine effigy were ‘part of what itmeant to be a Protestant, a patriot, and a Dubliner’ (p. 111). At thesame time, he insists that there was nothing explicitly ‘Protestant’or ‘British’ about the statue: it merely followed Europeanconvention, modelled on the image of Marcus Aurelius on Rome’sCapitoline Hill. Likewise the statue of George I was modelled onthat of Charles I, which has watched over Charing Cross since the1670s, and points to visual convergence between the Stuart andHanoverian kings. Usher maintains (though the evidence is heresomewhat lacking) that various meanings were invested in thesestatues over the generations, and that they came to stand forcultural enrichment rather than a partisan view of Irish history.When viewed exclusively through the twentieth-century lens ofpolitical violence and regime change, the internal variety of IrishProtestantism and the diversity of its iconography are easilyoverlooked. For most of their existence, Usher argues, these royalhorsemen were uncontroversial, not the focus of animosity, so itwould be a mistake to dismiss them as ‘the simple products ofa quasi-British “ascendancy”, calculated to give indecent pleasureto vengeful Protestant planters’ (p. 128). Although it is doubtfulthat Usher has produced enough archival evidence to prove hiswhole case, his cautions against simplistic and anachronisticreadings of Dublin’s multifarious visual landscape are well made.This volume will be of particular interest to students of architec-ture and aesthetics, as well as to cultural and political historians ofearly-modern British and Irish society.

Andrew AtherstoneUniversity of Oxford, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.10.009

Mervyn Miller, English Garden Cities: An Introduction. Swindon,English Heritage, 2010, viii þ 116 pages, £9.99 paperback.

One of a series of books produced by English Heritage in its‘Informed Conservation’ series, English Garden Cities is a straight-forward, generously illustrated, somewhat unquestioning accountof what is presented as a quintessentially English phenomenon.Miller sketches a rapid and unexceptionable story of nineteenth-century social and sanitary reform as ‘a potent mix of idealismand pragmatism’: the former included ‘a Hegelian concept ofprogress, the Benthamite maxim of the greatest good for thegreatest number, Utopian philosophy, [and] Christian and Fabiansocialism’, the latter culminated in the Garden City and Arts andCrafts Movements (p. 2). There is no space in an introductory bookof this length to explore any of these themes in detail, nor any of thecontradictions between the various authors whomMiller identifieson Ebenezer Howard’s reading list: Thomas More, John Ruskin,William Morris, Henry George, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy,and Herbert Spencer among others.

Racing through Howard’s ‘Three Magnets’ diagram, we pauseslightly longer in front of his iconic ‘Garden City’ plan, here repre-sented by proof copies on which Howard’s own annotations andamendments emphasise its status as ‘a diagram, not amap, a sketchnot a filled in picture’ (p. 6). Howard’s time in 1870s Chicago isnoted, but he could hardly, as claimed, have witnessed much of ‘theemergence of the skyscraper’ (p. 3) or the development of Olm-sted’s Riverside before he returned to England in 1876. Thereafter,there are few references to American or continental parallels orexamples. Rather the garden city heritage is traced through Port

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013) 139e151 141

Sunlight, Bournville, and New Earswick, with a brief diversion intoco-partnership, for example as practised at Brentham (Ealing).

The book’s focus is on Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Citiesand Hampstead Garden Suburb, and on the principles embodied inplans by Parker and Unwin, and, perhaps less well known to mostreaders, Louis de Soissons, central to the development of Welwynfrom its beginnings in 1920 until the 1950s. Concise chaptersevaluate the success of ‘masterplanning’ in each settlement(though the word itself is not questioned) by comparison withHoward’s hopes and ideals; the ‘homes’, mostly viewed from theoutside, in terms of the deployment and evocation of differentarchitectural styles, culminating in some strikingly modern(e) flatsand ‘liner architecture’ in 1930s Hampstead; industry andcommerce, again principally architectural, such as the Spirella(corsets) factory at Letchworth and Shredded Wheat at Welwyn,but also alluding to the extent to which each settlement was eithera source or a destination for commuters, perhaps contrary toHoward’s original vision; and ‘the spirit of the place’ (chapter 5),disappointingly restricted to the familiar reputation of Letchworthand Hampstead for ‘Pacifism, internationalism, vegetarianism,temperance, Esperanto and theosophy’ (p. 67) together with a fewexamples of striking church architecture. This is not the place tolook for nuanced accounts of everyday life, or of how residentscoped with living on a permanent building-site as each settlementcontinued to grow through inter- and post-war years.

The final chapters take the story into the era of council housingand public control, not only in Welwyn’s translation to ‘new town’status but also in the example ofWythenshawe, GreaterManchester,variously ‘oneof themost completemunicipal experiments ingardencity design’ (p. 80) or, less graciously, ‘one of the largest councilhousing estates in Europe’ (Wikipedia); and into the era of conser-vation, ‘schemes of management’, ‘listing’, the challenges of findingnew uses for listed buildings, whether girls’ clubs and cottagehospitals or grain silos, and of recycling derelict industrial sites intobrownfield housing, underpinned by very different æsthetics andeconomics from the original communitarian principles.

There is also an intriguing but slightly frustrating ‘gazetteer’ ea ‘short list of garden city communities in England’ (p. 109), rangingchronologically between Swindon Railway Village (1840s) and theSpeke Estate, Merseyside (1936). Some of these, such as HarrowGarden Village (1930), were essentially speculative developmentsdressedup in garden-suburb language; others, like BrenthamGardenSuburb, were more centrally part of the garden city movement.

In sum, this is a very readable, useful, but necessarily briefhistory of English garden cities and suburbs, an accessible startingpoint for those unfamiliar with early town planning, an appetiserbefore delving into the politics and social history of the garden citymovement, or into the detailed architectural and planning historiesof particular places and individuals.

Richard DennisUniversity College London, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.10.008

Elin Andreassen, Hein B. Bjerck and Bjørnar Olsen, Persistent Memo-ries: Pyramiden e A Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic. Trond-heim, Norway, Tapir Academic Press, 2010, 215 pages, NOK 400hardcover.

A current cross-disciplinary fascination with ghosts, ruins, andmemories, shared across cultural and historical geography,archaeology, and visual and literary research, finds further vivid

expression in this collaboration between two archaeologistseHeinBjerck and Bjørnar Olsen e and a photographer, Elin Andreassen.Pyramiden is a substantial abandoned Soviet coal mining town onSvalbard, located well above the Arctic Circle at 78�400N. With themine established just after World War II, and the town expandingin the decades that followed, Pyramiden’s heyday came in the mid-1980s, by which time there were over a thousand inhabitants and(as this book documents) an extraordinary range of facilities forminers, managers, and their families: hotels, bars, schools, play-grounds, ice hockey pitches. As the authors remark, ‘miners came tolive in a modern town that provided them with most urban facili-ties and a higher material standard of living than most other placesin the USSR’ (p. 33). But decline and fall occurred quite rapidly atPyramiden in the course of the post-Soviet transition. Withdeclining productivity and a changing political and economiccontext, by 1997 the decision had been taken to close the mine andsettlement. By autumn 1998, Pyramiden was abandoned.

In Persistent Memories Andreassen, Bjerck, and Olsen present theresults of a field expedition e and in Bjerck’s case a return e toPyramiden, a dozen years after its abandonment. These results areoverwhelmingly visual in nature. Persistent Memories is effectivelyan artist’s book, an exhibition of photographs, rather thana conventional academic text. The majority of its two-hundred andfifteen pages present single, large, photographic images, and theaccompanying mini-essays are clearly ancillary in nature. Thisvisual emphasis of course reflects Andreassen’s professionalexpertise above all, and most of the images are hers, but some areby Bjerck and Olsen, and a handful comes from other sources.

The reader of Persistent Memories is thus presented witha striking visual archive. Pyramiden is a remarkable place now e

and it must, you sense, have been a remarkable place wheninhabited too. Even the most humdrum abandoned places quicklyacquire an uncanny aura, of course, as their contents begin to livemore independently than before, in ever-more shimmering still-ness and silence. But up here in the high Arctic, abandonment isintensified e doubled, trebled. The settlement has been emptiedout and exposed to a yet greater emptiness e the yawning empti-ness of the Svalbard tundra. And it is not just Pyramiden that haspassed on, but the entire Soviet cultural, political, and economicsystem that created it. One of the most memorable images inPersistent Memories sets a monumental bust of Lenin in handsomeprofile against the background of the coal-rich flank of mountain-side which drew the Soviets to Svalbard in the first instance. Sternstone on stone, this is a piece of sublime realism which restoresa sense of endurance and momentum to a landscape otherwise forthe most part falling slowly, inexorably to pieces.

The Lenin image is not a typical one, however. The majority ofAndreassen’s photographs are interiors, documenting hastily-abandoned bedrooms, garages, and saloons. In this rather rectilinearlandscape of abandoned paths and dwelling-places, surrounded bytriangular-faced mountains, many of the images are careful explora-tions of lines and angles, persisting in the face of frosty entropy. Thereis also clearly a certain ‘ruin æsthetics’ at work here that readersfamiliarwith theworkof geographers suchas TimEdensor andCaitlinDeSilvey will recognise. In one of their most sustained forays intotextual interpretation, the authors cite Walter Benjamin’s concept ofthe dialectical image, where ‘the past comes together with the pre-sentenot inharmonyor as a fusionofhorizons, but ina tension-filledconstellation’ (p. 152). Pyramiden today presents precisely such animage, they argue. Such ruins have ‘their ownhistoricalmission: theyrescue a forgotten past, not as heritage, at least not in any ordinarysense, but as a kind of involuntary memory’ (p. 152).

I would maybe have liked to have seen more in this vein here,but the textual essays running in themargins of Persistent Memoriesare mostly documentary and anecdotal. Overall, however, the heart