Neither the spatial turn nor the popular movements of early-nineteenth-century England are particularly new trends or objects of study in historical scholarship. And yet, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place offers a fresh look at the struggles that swept across England from the time of the French Revolution to the heydays of Chartism. The book combines recent theoretical debates on the construction and restriction of public space with a rich and very detailed study of past movements fighting for democratic participation and civil rights in northern England. The sheer amount and breadth of archival evidence presented here is astonishing. From small town records to collections held at the British Library, Katrina Navickas draws on a variety of materials that make the book empirically rich without getting lost in detail.

In addition to a short Introduction and Conclusion, the book has nine chapters that are divided into three larger parts. Each part features a short vignette that highlights a particularly illustrative aspect of past struggles for space and place (namely, the significance of radical locales such as the industrial neighborhoods around Ancoats north of Manchester; the spatial strategies and symbolic meanings of radical processions; and the – inspiring but often also discouraging – influence of travel and migration to the US on radical thought at home).

Part I explores how, from the French Revolution to 1830, radicals’ access to public space was increasingly restricted by loyalist reaction and local elites’ encroachment on places previously considered private. This indicates that popular movements emerged in direct response to the privatization of space and the suppression of peoples’ right to assemble and express their opinion. Navickas also suggests that anti-radical repression was most successful where it could draw on (or was in fact interwoven with) popular loyalist sentiment among the local populace. Being pushed out of civic buildings and many local pubs, radicals and working-class activists moved their meetings to workshops or outdoors to street corners, parks, open fields or landfills. The violent repression of radical movements fighting for democratic reform and political participation – exemplified most dramatically by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 which left several marchers dead and hundreds wounded – caused reformers to rethink tactics and strategies, but it also gave places like St Peter’s Field in Manchester a heavily symbolic meaning for decades to come.

Part 2 covers the birth and growth of Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s. Against the backdrop of the notorious reform acts passed in the early 1830s, working-class radicals rallied against what they perceived an attack on not only their right to participate in the body politic but on their very presence in public space. In so doing, they formulated claims for liberty and democracy while developing new repertoires of collective action that drew heavily on bodily tactics and threats of physical violence. Chartists increasingly confronted the new administrative geographies and public institutions that were charged with implementing the recently passed reforms – such as the boards of guardians, the commissions for improvement or the new police forces. At the same time, working-class movements began building or appropriating places of their own that ranged from chapels to workingmen’s halls to rooms for education and leisure.

Part 3 finally shifts attention to struggles over rural places in particular. Amidst the exclusion from many urban sites and enclosures of even the remotest areas in northern England, Chartists, Owenites, and other labor activists all the more defended rural places that embodied an almost mythical legacy of liberty, protection, and collective rights to livelihood. Despite the industrial and urban character of popular protest at the time, notions of free land and the commons continued to influence working-class thought. Therefore, rural places also remained important meeting sites for the social movements of the 1830s and 1840s studied here. Rural communities, on the other hand, did not witness the same intensity of coordinated protest. But, as Navickas stresses, this should not make us blind for forms of rural protest that often drew on well-established repertoires of social action.

If there is one criticism that can be levelled at this masterfully researched and well-written book, it is its occasionally one-sided treatment of place. In the Introduction, Navickas argues that, thanks to several decades of interdisciplinary exchange, historians today no longer understand space as a sort of empty box. Rather, they largely agree that space itself is the result of complex processes of social construction drawing equally on discourse, representation, and power. But as the title suggests, Navickas is interested in both space and place. While analyzing how space was contested, imagined, enacted, and, therewith, constructed, the book convincingly argues that it was actual places that not only entailed and (re)produced feelings of community and social practice but that also provided the very material precondition for activists’ labor and life. This joint perspective of place and space makes the book an important contribution to the study of the political and social effects of privatization, commodification, and the increasingly restrictive use of place.

But it is the same promise of a joint perspective on which the book does not always fully deliver. Take, for instance, Navickas’ discussion of rural protest that seems somewhat out of place in an account of working-class movements that were tied closely to the industrial, urban (or semi-urban) parts of northern England. One reason this chapter stands out from the rest of the narrative is that the scattered instances of violent protest against enclosures and private property epitomize a dimension of place otherwise underrepresented. Throughout the book, protests about place are considered predominantly as struggles for political rights and civil liberties (most importantly, democratic participation, the freedom of speech, and the right of assembly). Yet while places undoubtedly carried important social, political, and cultural meanings – meanings which Navickas covers extensively –, places also had economic functions. Power over place, whether urban or rural, was not only an expression of middle-class paternalism, social control, political exclusion, and the protection of property; it was also a crucial precondition for the accumulation of capital. The privatization of public places in towns, for instance, clearly reflects the determination by upper and middle classes to restrict participation in the usage, governance, and representation of urban space. But it equally reflects new opportunities for investment in infrastructure, industry, finance, and real estate.

This observation raises issues that that go well beyond the scope of this book. As Navickas mentions in the Preface, the Occupy movement of 2011 demonstrates that struggles for place and space have not lost relevance for social movements today. But what does this tell us about the nature of spatial contention – if there is such a thing? Contemporary social movements are clearly struggles for democratic representation, but they also address gross social injustices ranging from international finance to urban redevelopment and ranging, therewith, from global to local. It was no coincidence that the 2011 protests focused on occupying Wall Street rather than Capitol Hill. As much as the slogan “They don’t represent us” mattered, it was “We are the ninety-nine percent” that united activists across space – and, arguably, across time.