and economic history. Bruce has managed, in his choice of symposia themes, to respondto expectation and also, of course, to craft that expectation. The subsequent publicationsof these themes by Manchester University Press have provided extremely stimulatingworks, and have helped to guide the discipline. At the conference dinner, held at theStephen's Green Club after a reception generously given by Dublin City Corporation,those attending the conference were able to extend their warm appreciation to Bruce forhis considerable effort in organising these important events.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth PHILLIPP R. SCHOFIELD

The Eleventh International Conference of HistoricalGeographers, Universite Laval, Quebec, 12±18 August 2001

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Since the 1998 ICHG meeting in Ireland, historical±geographical research has witnessedfurther growth as a community of interest within the academy, providing both new andestablished practitioners with a dynamic and challenging environment. Rather thanadopting the `moveable feast' model of the previous two conferences in Asia and Ireland,this gathering ®xed itself to one location, Quebec City, for the duration of a week.Bringing a good range of research into a convivially critical forum, the utilitarianstructures of Universite Laval's Sainte-Foy campus provided spaces for both re¯ectionand direction.While the North American/British axis persists, there was some hearteningevidence of historical geography reaching out in terms of both the global origins ofparticipants (Israel and Japan sent signi®cant numbers of delegates), and the genderbalance. With ®nancial support from the university and Canadian government, as well asthe generous donations of fellow participants, the latter totalling $1700, students'conference fees were refunded.

The sessions themselves dissected the sub-discipline thematically, and in familiarfashion: urban-economic issues, urban form, nationalism, rural/natural landscapes,environmental change, leisure and recreation, and landscapes of collective memory.Three growth poles proved, not for the ®rst time, to be the most popular canvases onwhich to work: imperial and colonial geographies (with a signi®cant tip of the hat to post-colonial theory); heritage studies (closely tied to representations of the landscape but,refreshingly, including papers on the State and identity formation); and environmentalhistory (drawing mainly on that brand of US-centred thought closely linked to the newWestern history movement and attracting perhaps justi®ed claims of a lack of awarenessof environmental history's development outside North America).

As for variety, session-goers were spoilt for choice, with 227 paper contributions from256 participants. Five concurrent sessions was the norm, sometimes six, and rarely four.Some sessions were packed, others sparsely attended. In addition, more than just the oneopening plenary session might have engendered a real sense of intellectual collectivenessamong those present. There is, therefore, no easy way of providing a rounded picture ofthese sessions, but we can at least report a clear edging forward in terms of engagementwith theory. A number of axes seemed to emerge as valuable areas of debate, and itwould pay to mention two of these (space precluding more). First was a growing concernaround issues of representation. Many such viewpoints were grounded in researchon colonialism, which has clearly acted as a conduit for ideas from ®elds such as

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post-colonialism and post-structuralism to in¯uence historical geography. Similarly,scales of body and home as viable subjects for historical±geographical enquiry could beseen in a paper by Alison Blunt on Anglo-Indian experiences of the home, as well asStephen Legg's work on the use of the home as a site for resistance in colonial Delhi toname but two. Hayden Lorimer offered an entertaining deconstruction of the productionof geographical knowledge from the university lecture theatres to the great outdoors inScotland. The concept of networks emerged in two sessions concerned with theirgeographical manifestation in America. The diverse social and economic contexts inwhich the term is used were illustrated by papers on Irish families, inter-®rm `productioncultures' in Chicago, and the role of actors such as machinists and business elites inshaping regional and national network geographies. New research on humanitariangeographies attracted interest, as did perspectives on health, medicine, and gender.

Shared interests and the intimacy afforded by a small conference encouraged a healthynumber of presentations by non-geographers. This is a move to be welcomed ifgeography wants to build bridges to other subjects on its own terms. One particularlysuccessful paper was by classicist Denise McCoskey on Strabo. Elsewhere, historiansMary Corbin Sies and Andrew Wiese provided a session-long account of their efforts toestablish and connect the social and economic worlds of both white and African-American suburbs in post-bellum America: while suburbs have been seen mainly as aninvestment in an exclusive `whiteness' of sorts, African-Americans clearly had their ownform of a `suburban ideal'. Richard Dennis gave a sparkling presentation on elevatedtrains in late nineteenth-century New York City. Drawing upon evidence from novelists,painters, and ®lmmakers, Dennis charted the trains' initial but ¯eeting rise as an excitingcomponent of the city's modernity, only to quickly become modernity's `other'. Linkingwith heritage concerns, and the rich empirical ®eld of transition studies, Craig Youngreported on post-socialist place identity formation in Poland.

The use of GIS in historical geography was notable in a number of presentations.Olson and Robert focused on the contribution of the horse to the shaping of Montreal'sgeography; Brian Page mapped agricultural commodity patents in Iowa; Kevin Henryimpressively charted the continuity of Francophone surnames in Quebec over threehundred years, and the use of GIS in framing First Nations land claims was demon-strated by Ken Brealey. Finally, those who visited the historical geography laboratory atLaval were given demonstrations of current efforts to put historical census data online.

This conference was a watershed in historical geography in a number of importantrespects. First, as an appreciative symbol of the in¯uence of his work, a receptionmarkedthe publication of a festschrift in honour of Alan Baker. His presence at the conferencewas part of a notably strong Cambridge contingent, something his ownwork over the lastfour decades has donemuch to facilitate. In addition, a two-session tribute to Cole Harrisprovided various insights on perhaps Canada's best-known historical geographer,suitably characterized by Ken Brealey as ``a learner, a listener, and a storyteller''. Theconference also witnessed historical geography ®nally acting on its recent resurgence andconsidering its future with the unanimous decision to found an International Associationof Historical Geographers/Association internationale de ge ographie historique (IAHG/AIGH). With its seat in Quebec City, and consisting of an as-yet provisional board, theassociation's portfolio will be to promote geographical research and education bothwithin geography and between other historical disciplines with an interest in the spatial.It was therefore timely that so many nationalities and departmental variations wererepresented and in a position to take up this call.

All told, Marc St-Hilaire and his organising committee did a highly commendable jobresulting in an important conference for the discipline that offered a selection of the depth

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and breadth of historical±geographical work, whilst showing a keen commitment to usethis as a ®rm base for future research.

University of Toronto WILLIAM JENKINS

University of Cambridge SIMON REID-HENRY

Robbie Gray Memorial Conference: Space, Place andIdentity in Victorian Britain, University of Portsmouth,10 November 2001

Robbie Gray, who died inMarch 2001, was well known for his work on class and culturein nineteenth-century Britain. His interest in linguistic approaches to history, informed inhis early work by Gramscian notions of power and authority, was pioneering and camelong before the recent and rather more theatrical `cultural turn' in social history. Over thelast few years, Robbie Gray's work had also taken a `spatial turn' and it was this themethat formed the basis for a well-attended memorial conference.

What was notable about the conference was the richness and diversity of thegeographical imaginations brought to bear on the issues being discussed. RobertMorris (Edinburgh) opened the day with a keynote paper examining the spatialconstitution of middle-class social networks. He argued that an understanding ofmiddle-class experience in nineteenth-century Britain is not just a matter of recognisingthe self-referential nature of bourgeois urban culture, but also of comprehending theposition of individuals in relation to the increasingly mobile and geographically far-reaching ¯ows of people, resources and knowledge. In an age of nascent globalisation,Morris suggested that social networks of family and kin offered a way of minimising therisks and uncertainties of middle-class life. SimonGunn (LeedsMetropolitan) drew uponideas of performativity to highlight how identities were fashioned more locally within thecontext of the landscapes of northern industrial cities. Invoking themes that have beenexplored widely in eighteenth-century urban contexts, he emphasised the importance ofthe city being thought of as a theatreÐa site of dramatic spectacleÐwhere power isconstructed through ritualised bodily practices. The formation and legitimisation ofauthority were also ideas that were central to Louise Purbrick's (Brighton) paper onnineteenth-century institutional portraiture. Focusing on John Lucas's A Conference ofEngineers (c. 1851±53), painted to celebrate the completion of the Britannia Bridge overthe Menai Straits in North Wales, she highlighted the ways in which the image's realistdepiction of bourgeois masculine character was bound up with the production of class-based power. Rohan McWilliam's (Anglia Polytechnic) paper on melodrama and thelanguage of radicalism in Victorian Britain, shared a similar concern with issues ofidentity formation. Focusing on the relationship between the French novelist Eugene Sueand the English Chartist journalist George W. M. Reynolds, he explored appropriationsof French melodramatic discourses in languages of radicalism, through the creation of a`Chartist Gothic' genre of writing. Donna Loftus (Open University), who had beenworking withRobbieGray at the time of his death, offered a different perspective on howidentities are created not just in, but also through spaces. She presented a lively paper onmiddle-class male autobiographies, emphasising the way in which such narratives located