Simon Naylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 114271 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Naylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Naylor |
| SIGNATURE | NAYLOR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7747-1714 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 355 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Mapping the mills of early industrial Britain, 1729–1836
This paper examines the capabilities and limitations of Mills of Britain, a recently compiled Historic Geographic Information System (HGIS) dataset documenting over 20,000 water- and wind-powered mills recorded on large-scale late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century maps. These mills not only ground grain to feed Britain's growing population but also provided the mechanical power underpinning industrial growth. By uniting this corpus into an…
David Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate: A History of An Idea
The survey sciences in thin air
No abstract available
The art of earth-building: Placing relief models in the culture of modern geography in Britain
This article explores the overlooked history and significance of physical relief models in the development of geographical knowledge and education. By examining their use in academic, educational and public settings, it argues for a broader appreciation of these models as integral to the discipline's material culture. Historical debates around their function and purpose are highlighted amidst developments in modelling techniques, materials, and i…
Shaping landscapes and industry: Linking historic watermill locations to bedrock river knickpoints
Watermills have been an essential source of mechanical power for over two millennia. Their careful siting often took into account local hydrology, topography, and economic demand, attesting to the important place they held in premodern and early modern societies. This paper highlights the significance of Paul Bishop's work on mills over the last 20 years, which revealed that numerous historical watermills along Scottish rivers were closely locate…
Location, location, location: Reassessing W.H.K. Turner’s legacy for industrial geography in Scotland and beyond
For more than three decades between the 1950s and the 1980s, W.H.K. (Keith) Turner was a valued colleague and teacher in the Department of Geography at University College, Dundee (later, the University of Dundee). During that time, he researched extensively on the industrial development of Dundee and its environs, as well as the linen industry in East-Central Scotland more generally. His approach, combining a detailed understanding of human geogr…
Understanding weather futures based on the past: A case of Stornoway, Outer Hebrides
We present a weather history for Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, an island chain off the northwest coast of Scotland. It combines a new 164-year composite rainfall record representative of the settlement of Stornoway (1857–2019), alongside descriptive accounts of weather harvested from the school logbooks from the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway (1873–1974). The school logbooks record the experiences of the school, school children and wider comm…
Extreme weather, school logbooks and social vulnerability: The Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
This paper demonstrates the value of school logbooks, an unusual and hitherto underused archival source, to the field of the historical geographies of weather and climate. It examines logbooks for schools across the Outer Hebrides, or Western Isles, off the west coast of mainland Scotland, ranging from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. The weather had numerous and varied impacts on everyday life on the islands and was…
Nineteenth-century survey sciences: Enterprises, expeditions and exhibitions
This special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society addresses important aspects of the new kinds of intensive and ambitious schemes launched by early nineteenth-century British public agencies for worldwide surveys of the phenomena of astronomy and geography, physics and meteorology.Historians and historical geographers of science have already provided separate and increasingly detailed studies of several of these initiatives. 1Such focu…
Thermometer screens and the geographies of uniformity in nineteenth-century meteorology
By the 1860s a number of thermometer stands, screens and boxes were being used at public observatories and in private settings. The ultimate object of these humble pieces of scientific infrastructure was to protect the thermometers from precipitation and radiation. In response to concerns over the quality of designs and the comparability of results a trial of the various apparatuses was staged at Strathfield Turgiss, Hampshire, in 1868, and subse…
Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography
Dealing with the deluge of historical weather data: The example of the Tempest database
People have long been interested in the history of weather, particularly extremes, and chronologies of past events drawing on information from written records have been compiled and published throughout history. In recent years, concern over current and future weather and climate has triggered a new level of interest in past weather events and their impacts. This interest, alongside the development of digital humanities research methods, has resu…
Historical geography in Transactions
This editorial reviews recent works of historical geography published in Transactions . It highlights a number of prominent themes that bind the papers together: the historical geographies of geopolitics, the state and territory; landscape and environmental change; matters of memory and commemoration; and the production, practice and provision of knowledge
Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin
Teaching the history of geography: Current challenges and future directions
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a d…
Log Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth Century
This essay contributes to debates about the relationship between science and the military by examining the British Admiralty's participation in meteorological projects in the first half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on attempts to transform Royal Navy log books into standardized meteorological registers that would be of use to both science and the state. The essay begins with a discussion of Admiralty Hydrographer Francis Beaufort, who pr…
Knowing weather in place: The Helm Wind of Cross Fell
The Helm Wind of Cross Fell, North Pennines, is England's only named wind. As a product of the particular landscape found at Cross Fell, the Helm is a true local wind, and a phenomenon that has come to assume great cultural as well as environmental significance in the region and beyond. In this paper we draw on material from county histories, newspaper archives, and documents relating to investigations of the Helm Wind that were conducted by the …
Historical geographies of provincial science
Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel - Edited by P N Wyse Jackson
Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel . Edited by P N Wyse Jackson London : The Geological Society of London , Special Publications 287 , 2007 , 415 pp . £90.00 ISBN 978 1 86239 234 2 This book makes a welcome contribution to recent literature on the role of fieldwork in the history of science. As the title and subtitle suggest, the volume provides a broad-ranging historical account of tr…
On thick ice: Scientific internationalism and Antarctic affairs, 1957–1980
This paper focuses on the role played by scientific internationalism in Antarctica during the two decades that followed the signing and ratification of the Antarctic Treaty in 1961. The paper shows that the Treaty was a response to the threat to the ‘free world’ represented by the installation of Soviet bases in Antarctica. Scientific internationalism was used as a diplomatic weapon to respond to that threat. In the 1960s, the development of inte…
Data in Antarctic Science and Politics
The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carrie…
The IGY and the ice sheet: Surveying Antarctica
Accidents and opportunities: A history of the radio echo-sounding of Antarctica, 1958–79
This paper explores the history of radio echo-sounding (RES), a technique of glaciological surveying that from the late 1960s has been used to examine Antarctica's sub-glacial morphology. Although the origins of RES can be traced back to two accidental findings, its development relied upon the establishment of new geopolitical conditions, which in the 1960s typified Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific exploration. These conditions ext…
Historical geography: Geographies and historiographies
Historical geography: Natures, landscapes, environments
The mosque in the suburbs: Negotiating religion and ethnicity in South London
The geography of religi on for UK residents of South Asian origin is inexorably linked to the politics of the built environment. In particular, the siting, or expansion, of places of worship for minority-religious groups has often been bound up with the negotiation and contestation of the politics of identity. In this paper we explore the historical unfolding of a complex politics of identity and difference across one particular site of religious…
Religion, planning and the city: The spatial politics of ethnic minority expression in British cities and towns
This article examines the debates that have arisen in relation to the establishment of sites of worship by Britain's minority religious groups. Frequently, the buildings of non-Christian religious communities have been portrayed as `alien' and incommensurate with surrounding urban landscapes, and there are numerous cases in which such opposition has had a decisive bearing on the success or failure of plans to develop such sites of worship. Howeve…
The field, the museum and the lecture hall: The spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall
This paper contributes to our understandings of the geographies of science through an analysis of nineteenth-century natural history and, in particular, of the provincial natural history society. Focusing on nineteenth-century Cornwall and one of the main natural history societies operating in the county at that time - the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society - it is argued that a set of key spaces were integral to the operations and …
Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography
Introduction: Historical geographies of science – places, contexts, cartographies
This paper outlines the contours of a historical geography of science. It begins by arguing for the relevance of spatially oriented histories of scientific thought and practice. The paper then considers three different historical geographies of science: those concerned with the places and spaces of science, those that detail the spatial contexts of scientific endeavour, and those that analyse the internal ‘cartographies’ of scientific theories an…
Practising geographical knowledge: Fields, bodies and dissemination
In this article we make a case for a renewed emphasis upon some of the generic, albeit often tacit, spaces of practice that we share across our sub–disciplinary boundaries. In this we seek to emphasize the ways in which everyday actions make up the grander facades of institutional agendas, empirical projects and disciplinary schools of thought. To achieve this we trace the performance of disciplinary contours and identities across three important…
Historical geography: Knowledge, in Place and on the Move
Log Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth Century
This essay contributes to debates about the relationship between science and the military by examining the British Admiralty's participation in meteorological projects in the first half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on attempts to transform Royal Navy log books into standardized meteorological registers that would be of use to both science and the state. The essay begins with a discussion of Admiralty Hydrographer Francis Beaufort, who pr…
Knowing weather in place: The Helm Wind of Cross Fell
The Helm Wind of Cross Fell, North Pennines, is England's only named wind. As a product of the particular landscape found at Cross Fell, the Helm is a true local wind, and a phenomenon that has come to assume great cultural as well as environmental significance in the region and beyond. In this paper we draw on material from county histories, newspaper archives, and documents relating to investigations of the Helm Wind that were conducted by the …
Teaching the history of geography: Current challenges and future directions
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a d…
Nationalizing provincial weather: Meteorology in nineteenth-century Cornwall
This paper examines the development of a quantified, standardized and institutionalized meteorological science in nineteenth-century Britain, one that relied on sophisticated instrumentation and highly regulated observers and techniques of observation in its attempt to produce an accurate picture of the national weather. The story is told from one of the numerous points in British meteorology's extensive collection network: from Cornwall, in the …
Collecting quoits: Field cultures in the history of Cornish antiquarianism
This paper traces a historical geography of antiquarianism in the English county of Cornwall, paying particular attention to the period from 1750 to 1900 and to research conducted into the region's ancient stone monuments. The paper argues that from the mid-eighteenth century onwards Cornish antiquarianism was largely a field-based activity. After a short discussion of the work of notable eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarians the …
Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity, and the Globalisation of Food
The author outlines the multivalent geographies of a particular food-preservation technology: the tin can. As well as detailing the technological evolution of the can, he pays particular attention to the integral role that it played in the expansion and maintenance of Europe's empires in the Victorian era. Beginning with the demonstration of the can as part of the United Kingdom, Colonies, and Dominions exhibition at the Great Exhibition of 1851,…
The IGY and the ice sheet: Surveying Antarctica
Data in Antarctic Science and Politics
The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carrie…
Historical geography: Geographies and historiographies
Discovering Nature, Rediscovering the Self: Natural Historians and the Landscapes of Argentina
Focusing on a small group of natural historians working in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I argue that the relations between travellers and their fieldsites are particular, complex, and multivalent. In opposition to the suggestion that the writings of all Euro-American travellers during the Age of Empire’ were determined only by a single, superior, and colonising representational economy, I assert that encounters with foreig…
Writing Orderly Geographies of Distant Places: The Regional Survey Movement and Latin America
Surveys of the boundaries, rivers and railways of Argentina have during the past cen tury extended a network of measurements around and over the country, covering it with a finer and larger mesh of surveyed lines and affording a general knowledge of the principal geographical features. 1
Extreme weather, school logbooks and social vulnerability: The Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
This paper demonstrates the value of school logbooks, an unusual and hitherto underused archival source, to the field of the historical geographies of weather and climate. It examines logbooks for schools across the Outer Hebrides, or Western Isles, off the west coast of mainland Scotland, ranging from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. The weather had numerous and varied impacts on everyday life on the islands and was…
That Very Garden of South America”: European Surveyors in Paraguay
This paper argues that regions typically dubbed “tropical” or “sub‐tropical” were often also inscribed as economic and agricultural resources. Specifically, it focuses on western European surveyors' descriptions of early twentieth‐century Paraguay. In these texts, Paraguay was constructed as a series of fertile tropical and sub‐tropical regions, easily harnessed by European capital. Moreover, to enable the appropriation of the myriad agricultural…
Dealing with the deluge of historical weather data: The example of the Tempest database
People have long been interested in the history of weather, particularly extremes, and chronologies of past events drawing on information from written records have been compiled and published throughout history. In recent years, concern over current and future weather and climate has triggered a new level of interest in past weather events and their impacts. This interest, alongside the development of digital humanities research methods, has resu…
Historical geography in Transactions
This editorial reviews recent works of historical geography published in Transactions . It highlights a number of prominent themes that bind the papers together: the historical geographies of geopolitics, the state and territory; landscape and environmental change; matters of memory and commemoration; and the production, practice and provision of knowledge
Accidents and opportunities: A history of the radio echo-sounding of Antarctica, 1958–79
This paper explores the history of radio echo-sounding (RES), a technique of glaciological surveying that from the late 1960s has been used to examine Antarctica's sub-glacial morphology. Although the origins of RES can be traced back to two accidental findings, its development relied upon the establishment of new geopolitical conditions, which in the 1960s typified Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific exploration. These conditions ext…
Historical geography: Natures, landscapes, environments
Writing the region: Jonathan Couch and the Cornish fauna
The county of Cornwall was the subject of an early nineteenth century attempt to compile an exhaustive regional fauna, Jonathan Couch's three volume A Cornish Fauna (1838–44). Although the Fauna was part of a much broader contemporary impulse to document the natural history of Britain, it was a very early example of a zoological study organised by geography rather than faunal group. It therefore required the author to make an explicit defence of …
Writing Orderly Geographies of Distant Places: The Regional Survey Movement and Latin America
Surveys of the boundaries, rivers and railways of Argentina have during the past cen tury extended a network of measurements around and over the country, covering it with a finer and larger mesh of surveyed lines and affording a general knowledge of the principal geographical features. 1
Sovereignty and Subjectivity
This analysis of notions of subject and identity in international relations goes beyond discussions of identity politics to argue that sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other, together constituting the political.
Nationalism and regionalism in a colonial context. Minahasa in the Dutch East Indies
Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography
PART I - CULTURAL TURNS, GEOGRAPHICAL TURNS Introduction The Twistings and Turnings of Geography and Anthropology in winds of Millennium Transition More Words, More Worlds: Reflections on the 'Cultural Turn' and Human Geography: Taking a Cultural Turn? Struggles Over the Social in Social Policy. PART II - POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL TEXTS Introduction The Popular and Geography: Music and Racialized Identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand Between Acad…
That Very Garden of South America”: European Surveyors in Paraguay
This paper argues that regions typically dubbed “tropical” or “sub‐tropical” were often also inscribed as economic and agricultural resources. Specifically, it focuses on western European surveyors' descriptions of early twentieth‐century Paraguay. In these texts, Paraguay was constructed as a series of fertile tropical and sub‐tropical regions, easily harnessed by European capital. Moreover, to enable the appropriation of the myriad agricultural…
Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity, and the Globalisation of Food
The author outlines the multivalent geographies of a particular food-preservation technology: the tin can. As well as detailing the technological evolution of the can, he pays particular attention to the integral role that it played in the expansion and maintenance of Europe's empires in the Victorian era. Beginning with the demonstration of the can as part of the United Kingdom, Colonies, and Dominions exhibition at the Great Exhibition of 1851,…
Discovering Nature, Rediscovering the Self: Natural Historians and the Landscapes of Argentina
Focusing on a small group of natural historians working in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I argue that the relations between travellers and their fieldsites are particular, complex, and multivalent. In opposition to the suggestion that the writings of all Euro-American travellers during the Age of Empire’ were determined only by a single, superior, and colonising representational economy, I assert that encounters with foreig…
Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’
Practising geographical knowledge: Fields, bodies and dissemination
In this article we make a case for a renewed emphasis upon some of the generic, albeit often tacit, spaces of practice that we share across our sub–disciplinary boundaries. In this we seek to emphasize the ways in which everyday actions make up the grander facades of institutional agendas, empirical projects and disciplinary schools of thought. To achieve this we trace the performance of disciplinary contours and identities across three important…
Religion, planning and the city: The spatial politics of ethnic minority expression in British cities and towns
This article examines the debates that have arisen in relation to the establishment of sites of worship by Britain's minority religious groups. Frequently, the buildings of non-Christian religious communities have been portrayed as `alien' and incommensurate with surrounding urban landscapes, and there are numerous cases in which such opposition has had a decisive bearing on the success or failure of plans to develop such sites of worship. Howeve…
The field, the museum and the lecture hall: The spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall
This paper contributes to our understandings of the geographies of science through an analysis of nineteenth-century natural history and, in particular, of the provincial natural history society. Focusing on nineteenth-century Cornwall and one of the main natural history societies operating in the county at that time - the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society - it is argued that a set of key spaces were integral to the operations and …
The mosque in the suburbs: Negotiating religion and ethnicity in South London
The geography of religi on for UK residents of South Asian origin is inexorably linked to the politics of the built environment. In particular, the siting, or expansion, of places of worship for minority-religious groups has often been bound up with the negotiation and contestation of the politics of identity. In this paper we explore the historical unfolding of a complex politics of identity and difference across one particular site of religious…
Collecting quoits: Field cultures in the history of Cornish antiquarianism
This paper traces a historical geography of antiquarianism in the English county of Cornwall, paying particular attention to the period from 1750 to 1900 and to research conducted into the region's ancient stone monuments. The paper argues that from the mid-eighteenth century onwards Cornish antiquarianism was largely a field-based activity. After a short discussion of the work of notable eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarians the …
Writing the region: Jonathan Couch and the Cornish fauna
The county of Cornwall was the subject of an early nineteenth century attempt to compile an exhaustive regional fauna, Jonathan Couch's three volume A Cornish Fauna (1838–44). Although the Fauna was part of a much broader contemporary impulse to document the natural history of Britain, it was a very early example of a zoological study organised by geography rather than faunal group. It therefore required the author to make an explicit defence of …
Introduction: Historical geographies of science – places, contexts, cartographies
This paper outlines the contours of a historical geography of science. It begins by arguing for the relevance of spatially oriented histories of scientific thought and practice. The paper then considers three different historical geographies of science: those concerned with the places and spaces of science, those that detail the spatial contexts of scientific endeavour, and those that analyse the internal ‘cartographies’ of scientific theories an…
Historical geography: Knowledge, in Place and on the Move
Historical geography: Natures, landscapes, environments
Nationalizing provincial weather: Meteorology in nineteenth-century Cornwall
This paper examines the development of a quantified, standardized and institutionalized meteorological science in nineteenth-century Britain, one that relied on sophisticated instrumentation and highly regulated observers and techniques of observation in its attempt to produce an accurate picture of the national weather. The story is told from one of the numerous points in British meteorology's extensive collection network: from Cornwall, in the …
Historical geography: Geographies and historiographies
On thick ice: Scientific internationalism and Antarctic affairs, 1957–1980
This paper focuses on the role played by scientific internationalism in Antarctica during the two decades that followed the signing and ratification of the Antarctic Treaty in 1961. The paper shows that the Treaty was a response to the threat to the ‘free world’ represented by the installation of Soviet bases in Antarctica. Scientific internationalism was used as a diplomatic weapon to respond to that threat. In the 1960s, the development of inte…
Data in Antarctic Science and Politics
The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carrie…
The IGY and the ice sheet: Surveying Antarctica
Accidents and opportunities: A history of the radio echo-sounding of Antarctica, 1958–79
This paper explores the history of radio echo-sounding (RES), a technique of glaciological surveying that from the late 1960s has been used to examine Antarctica's sub-glacial morphology. Although the origins of RES can be traced back to two accidental findings, its development relied upon the establishment of new geopolitical conditions, which in the 1960s typified Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific exploration. These conditions ext…
Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel - Edited by P N Wyse Jackson
Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel . Edited by P N Wyse Jackson London : The Geological Society of London , Special Publications 287 , 2007 , 415 pp . £90.00 ISBN 978 1 86239 234 2 This book makes a welcome contribution to recent literature on the role of fieldwork in the history of science. As the title and subtitle suggest, the volume provides a broad-ranging historical account of tr…
Historical geographies of provincial science
Geography (26 works) · Political science (24 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (17 works) · History of Science and Natural History (15 works) · History (14 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · History (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought (11 works)