Brad Beaven
Biographic Data
| ID | 1070809 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brad Beaven |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brad |
| FAMILY NAME | Beaven |
| SIGNATURE | BEAVEN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Portsmouth |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5748-0629 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
We Are About to Enter Satan’s Stronghold”
This article examines the myth of the Chinese opium den in mid-nineteenth-century London, focusing on how two opium houses in the maritime quarter became central to national fears about the Chinese community. Within the context of a growing hostility to Chinese labor in the shipping industry, popular literature and the press warned their readers of the malign influence of Chinese opium “dens.” The article challenges the stereotype of Chinese isol…
Nocturnal River Journeys
This article broadens the scope of Victorian urban exploration by extending it from the slums of London’s courts and rookeries to the River Thames, which was both a vital commercial artery and a source of fascination and fear. While the Thames supported imperial trade, it was also associated with poverty, crime, pollution, and moral decay, particularly in the eastern docklands. The article argues that the river offers an alternative perspective f…
Introduction to coastal imaginaries
This special issue explores the theme of ‘coastal imaginaries’ as a lens for understanding how coastlines and waterfronts have been perceived and represented across various historical periods and cultural contexts. Drawing on multi-disciplinary research, the collection of articles moves beyond viewing coastal spaces as mere physical locations, highlighting them as dynamic arenas actively shaped by human imagination, societal anxieties, and cultur…
One of the toughest streets in the world’
In 1923 the author Cicely Fox Smith described Ratcliffe Highway as ‘one of the toughest streets in the world’. Its reputation was largely made in the 1850s when the Highway was the principal sailortown of London and an international hub for foreign sailors. Commentators feared that foreign sailors had introduced knife-fighting customs alien to the traditional ‘English fair fight’. This article will explore the cultural contexts that gave rise to …
Regulating Sin in the City
Naval towns were regarded as potent symbols of imperial power. Beneath this image however, contemporaries were concerned about the prostitution and heavy drinking which were associated with the sailortowns of naval ports. While historians have analysed merchant ports to explore social structures and economic networks, this study will evaluate how imperial and national discourses created distinct moral geographies which separated sailortown from t…
Foreign Sailors and Working-Class Communities
For nineteenth century social commentators, the seafarer ashore crossed significant bourgeois boundaries that defined and maintained “good citizenship”; he was profligate, licentious, and nomadic. With these perceived characteristics, sailors have been viewed by contemporary observers and historians as having little connection with urban working-class communities. Indeed, the dominant narrative was that the naïve sailor, unfamiliar with his urban…
Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late‐Victorian London
Visions of empire
This book offers a ground-breaking perspective on how imperial culture was disseminated. It draws on a consistent set of themes that influenced urban life between 1870 and 1939, in addressing the impact of imperialism on popular culture of the British society. The book identifies the important synergies that grew between a new civic culture and the wider imperial project. It explores the local and imperial nexus and whether imperial wars in the f…
Citizenship, Nation and Empire. The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930
Citizenship, Nation and Empire. The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930." Cultural and Social History, 13(3), pp. 429–430
The City and Imperial Propaganda
This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in…
Port Towns and Urban Cultures
Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of marit
The resilience of sailortown culture in English naval ports, c . 1820–1900
Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity du…
Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850–1945
This book analyses the development of male leisure against the changing notions of citizenship which underpinned perceptions of British society during the period 1850-1945. It opens with an examination of the 'leisure' problem of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. After the defeat of Chartism and associated challenges to the employers' right to organise the workplace, factory owners, the clergy and philanthropists established schemes o…
Packaging Pleasure
This is an excellent book that examines the history of holiday camps and paid holidays and, in doing so, furthers our understanding of class and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. At the heart of the thesis is the contention that the rise of the holiday camp can only be understood within a broader political, economic and social context. In analysing this phenomenon, the book draws on key debates on the relationships betw…
Ben Jones. The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England
This bold and provocative book investigates the working class in southern England in the middle years of the twentieth century. Using Brighton as his case study, Ben Jones sets out to reclaim class, and particularly the class experience, in shaping shared identities and memories. He rightly argues that studies of the mid-twentieth-century working class have largely been left to contemporary sociologists, while fewer historians still have strayed …
Creating the Exemplary Citizen
Recent historiography on the development of citizenship in Britain has drawn attention to the changing nature of citizenship discourse, shifting from active to passive forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be argued here that this binary notion of passive or active citizenship tends to underestimate the subtle changes that the concept underwent between 1870 and 1939. Indeed, we argue that citizenship was an amorphous concep…
A history of leisure - Peter Borsay
Challenges to civic governance in post-war England
This article analyses the problems encountered by municipal authorities in containing social unrest in the aftermath of World War I. Focusing on the Peace Day disturbances of 1919, the article examines how the civic elite failed to respond to the challenges of the post-war period and instead reverted to a Victorian model of governance that emphasized civic ritual and deference. It will explore how the towns that experienced the most severe distur…
Urban Elites, Socialists and Notions of Citizenship in an Industrial Boomtown
The emergence of social citizenship schemes between 1870-1914 have largely been explained through the urban elites' increasing anxiety over poverty in the late nineteenth-century city. However, it is argued here that historians should reconceptualize social citizenship within broader parameters than have hitherto been set. This article will argue that in boom towns such as Coventry, schemes of social citizenship were developed to civilize a ‘new’…
The blitz, civilian morale and the city
One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban …
Port Towns and Urban Cultures
Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of marit
Creating the Exemplary Citizen
Recent historiography on the development of citizenship in Britain has drawn attention to the changing nature of citizenship discourse, shifting from active to passive forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be argued here that this binary notion of passive or active citizenship tends to underestimate the subtle changes that the concept underwent between 1870 and 1939. Indeed, we argue that citizenship was an amorphous concep…
The blitz, civilian morale and the city
One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban …
The resilience of sailortown culture in English naval ports, c . 1820–1900
Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity du…
One of the toughest streets in the world’
In 1923 the author Cicely Fox Smith described Ratcliffe Highway as ‘one of the toughest streets in the world’. Its reputation was largely made in the 1850s when the Highway was the principal sailortown of London and an international hub for foreign sailors. Commentators feared that foreign sailors had introduced knife-fighting customs alien to the traditional ‘English fair fight’. This article will explore the cultural contexts that gave rise to …
Challenges to civic governance in post-war England
This article analyses the problems encountered by municipal authorities in containing social unrest in the aftermath of World War I. Focusing on the Peace Day disturbances of 1919, the article examines how the civic elite failed to respond to the challenges of the post-war period and instead reverted to a Victorian model of governance that emphasized civic ritual and deference. It will explore how the towns that experienced the most severe distur…
Urban Elites, Socialists and Notions of Citizenship in an Industrial Boomtown
The emergence of social citizenship schemes between 1870-1914 have largely been explained through the urban elites' increasing anxiety over poverty in the late nineteenth-century city. However, it is argued here that historians should reconceptualize social citizenship within broader parameters than have hitherto been set. This article will argue that in boom towns such as Coventry, schemes of social citizenship were developed to civilize a ‘new’…
The blitz, civilian morale and the city
One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban …
Urban Elites, Socialists and Notions of Citizenship in an Industrial Boomtown
The emergence of social citizenship schemes between 1870-1914 have largely been explained through the urban elites' increasing anxiety over poverty in the late nineteenth-century city. However, it is argued here that historians should reconceptualize social citizenship within broader parameters than have hitherto been set. This article will argue that in boom towns such as Coventry, schemes of social citizenship were developed to civilize a ‘new’…
Challenges to civic governance in post-war England
This article analyses the problems encountered by municipal authorities in containing social unrest in the aftermath of World War I. Focusing on the Peace Day disturbances of 1919, the article examines how the civic elite failed to respond to the challenges of the post-war period and instead reverted to a Victorian model of governance that emphasized civic ritual and deference. It will explore how the towns that experienced the most severe distur…
A history of leisure - Peter Borsay
Creating the Exemplary Citizen
Recent historiography on the development of citizenship in Britain has drawn attention to the changing nature of citizenship discourse, shifting from active to passive forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be argued here that this binary notion of passive or active citizenship tends to underestimate the subtle changes that the concept underwent between 1870 and 1939. Indeed, we argue that citizenship was an amorphous concep…
Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850–1945
This book analyses the development of male leisure against the changing notions of citizenship which underpinned perceptions of British society during the period 1850-1945. It opens with an examination of the 'leisure' problem of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. After the defeat of Chartism and associated challenges to the employers' right to organise the workplace, factory owners, the clergy and philanthropists established schemes o…
Packaging Pleasure
This is an excellent book that examines the history of holiday camps and paid holidays and, in doing so, furthers our understanding of class and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. At the heart of the thesis is the contention that the rise of the holiday camp can only be understood within a broader political, economic and social context. In analysing this phenomenon, the book draws on key debates on the relationships betw…
Ben Jones. The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England
This bold and provocative book investigates the working class in southern England in the middle years of the twentieth century. Using Brighton as his case study, Ben Jones sets out to reclaim class, and particularly the class experience, in shaping shared identities and memories. He rightly argues that studies of the mid-twentieth-century working class have largely been left to contemporary sociologists, while fewer historians still have strayed …
The resilience of sailortown culture in English naval ports, c . 1820–1900
Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity du…
Citizenship, Nation and Empire. The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930
Citizenship, Nation and Empire. The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930." Cultural and Social History, 13(3), pp. 429–430
The City and Imperial Propaganda
This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in…
Port Towns and Urban Cultures
Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of marit
Visions of empire
This book offers a ground-breaking perspective on how imperial culture was disseminated. It draws on a consistent set of themes that influenced urban life between 1870 and 1939, in addressing the impact of imperialism on popular culture of the British society. The book identifies the important synergies that grew between a new civic culture and the wider imperial project. It explores the local and imperial nexus and whether imperial wars in the f…
Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late‐Victorian London
Regulating Sin in the City
Naval towns were regarded as potent symbols of imperial power. Beneath this image however, contemporaries were concerned about the prostitution and heavy drinking which were associated with the sailortowns of naval ports. While historians have analysed merchant ports to explore social structures and economic networks, this study will evaluate how imperial and national discourses created distinct moral geographies which separated sailortown from t…
Foreign Sailors and Working-Class Communities
For nineteenth century social commentators, the seafarer ashore crossed significant bourgeois boundaries that defined and maintained “good citizenship”; he was profligate, licentious, and nomadic. With these perceived characteristics, sailors have been viewed by contemporary observers and historians as having little connection with urban working-class communities. Indeed, the dominant narrative was that the naïve sailor, unfamiliar with his urban…
One of the toughest streets in the world’
In 1923 the author Cicely Fox Smith described Ratcliffe Highway as ‘one of the toughest streets in the world’. Its reputation was largely made in the 1850s when the Highway was the principal sailortown of London and an international hub for foreign sailors. Commentators feared that foreign sailors had introduced knife-fighting customs alien to the traditional ‘English fair fight’. This article will explore the cultural contexts that gave rise to …
We Are About to Enter Satan’s Stronghold”
This article examines the myth of the Chinese opium den in mid-nineteenth-century London, focusing on how two opium houses in the maritime quarter became central to national fears about the Chinese community. Within the context of a growing hostility to Chinese labor in the shipping industry, popular literature and the press warned their readers of the malign influence of Chinese opium “dens.” The article challenges the stereotype of Chinese isol…
Nocturnal River Journeys
This article broadens the scope of Victorian urban exploration by extending it from the slums of London’s courts and rookeries to the River Thames, which was both a vital commercial artery and a source of fascination and fear. While the Thames supported imperial trade, it was also associated with poverty, crime, pollution, and moral decay, particularly in the eastern docklands. The article argues that the river offers an alternative perspective f…
Introduction to coastal imaginaries
This special issue explores the theme of ‘coastal imaginaries’ as a lens for understanding how coastlines and waterfronts have been perceived and represented across various historical periods and cultural contexts. Drawing on multi-disciplinary research, the collection of articles moves beyond viewing coastal spaces as mere physical locations, highlighting them as dynamic arenas actively shaped by human imagination, societal anxieties, and cultur…
Law (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (9 works) · History (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Working class (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)