Richard Hornsey
Biographic Data
| ID | 165989 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Hornsey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Hornsey |
| SIGNATURE | HORNSEY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the West of England |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2521-3515 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A British Chain Store Out of Place: Boots The Chemists in Suva, Fiji, 1944–64
In 1944, Boots The Chemists, the UK’s leading retail pharmacy chain, opened a store in Suva, Fiji. It lasted less than twenty years. The brief and troubled history of this store – hitherto untold – reveals a great deal about imperialist retail cultures and their growing untenability in late-colonial Fiji. Boots’s Fiji branch sought to cater to a European clientele, adhering to principles of service rooted in paternalism, British ‘expertise’, and …
Becoming "Escalator-Legged" in Interwar London: Mechanization, Habit, and the Mobile Body
This article provides the first critical history of escalators on the London Underground railway and the ways their introduction reconfigured passengers' bodies. As the Underground became a coordinated and unitary technological system, its central Tube stations-particularly their elevators-created friction and exerted systemic drag. The Underground's executives initiated a major modernization program, replacing elevators with automatic escalators…
Learning about bodies and the lived consequences
From the perspective of a final year physical education and sport and exercise science undergraduate student, this article explores the relationship between learned and lived experiences related to the body. The research uses an autoethnographic approach that focuses on the educational and social issues that the first author faced as his physical identity changed. The author reflects on the ways in which his once acceptable body experienced decli…
The modern way to loveliness: Middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain
In May 1935, the British manufacturer Boots launched ‘Number Seven’, a premium range of skin-care products sold via its nationwide network of chain-store chemists. Using material from the Boots Archive, this paper traces the early history of Number Seven to explore the changing meanings of middle-class cosmetics across the mid-twentieth century. Number Seven offered provincial and suburban women an explicitly modern form of facial beauty that mar…
The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain
This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst onto Britain's commercial scene in the early 192…
The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: Navigational Performance and the Imagining of Urban Form
For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a s…
The Independent Group Looks at London’s West End
In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group’s discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profou…
Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use
This paper is in two parts. In the first half I consider the challenge posed by the recent performative turn in critical cartography to the urban historical geographer. If maps come into being only within the diverse moments of their use, then how can we compensate for the absence of such events within the historical archive? Building on Tim Ingold's work, I suggest that one approach is to make an analogy between printed maps and musical scores, …
After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness
Research Article| September 01 2007 After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness Richard Hornsey Richard Hornsey University of the West of England, Bristol [email protected] Richard Hornsey is senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. His recent work has appeared in the Journal of Historical Geography, Visual Culture in Britain, Gender, Place and Culture and the London Review of Books.…
Everything is made of atoms’: The reprogramming of space and time in post-war London
The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-war London
This paper examines the way in which the spaces, practices and pleasures of reading books during the post-war period became inscribed within a heteronormative geographical imaginary. The active state provision of cultural welfare framed London’s public branch libraries as key loci of knowledge and information, with their own attendant logics of reading, spatiality and time. However the growing visibility of paperbacks across the city during the 1…
Postmodern critiques: Foucault, Lyotard and modern political ideologies
Postmodernism’, or rather aspects of it, has posed a challenge to modern political ideologies. In particular, the works of Michel Foucault and Jean‐François Lyotard, through their attacks on the epistemology of modernity, have articulated persuasive critiques of modern ideologies as mechanisms of domination and injustice. Both writers extend their critiques to formulate new strategies of political action and struggle, creating modes of political …
The Grand Menhir Brisé: Megalithic Success or Failure
The Grand Menhir Brisé is one member of a complex of sites near the Breton village of Locmariaquer. When intact, it would have been the largest menhir moved by neolithic man. The cause of the menhir's fall has been the subject of debate for over 250 years. This paper considers the quarrying, transport and raising of the Grand Menhir from an engineering and archaeological viewpoint and the possible causes of the breakage are discussed in detail. I…
Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use
This paper is in two parts. In the first half I consider the challenge posed by the recent performative turn in critical cartography to the urban historical geographer. If maps come into being only within the diverse moments of their use, then how can we compensate for the absence of such events within the historical archive? Building on Tim Ingold's work, I suggest that one approach is to make an analogy between printed maps and musical scores, …
Everything is made of atoms’: The reprogramming of space and time in post-war London
The Grand Menhir Brisé: Megalithic Success or Failure
The Grand Menhir Brisé is one member of a complex of sites near the Breton village of Locmariaquer. When intact, it would have been the largest menhir moved by neolithic man. The cause of the menhir's fall has been the subject of debate for over 250 years. This paper considers the quarrying, transport and raising of the Grand Menhir from an engineering and archaeological viewpoint and the possible causes of the breakage are discussed in detail. I…
The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-war London
This paper examines the way in which the spaces, practices and pleasures of reading books during the post-war period became inscribed within a heteronormative geographical imaginary. The active state provision of cultural welfare framed London’s public branch libraries as key loci of knowledge and information, with their own attendant logics of reading, spatiality and time. However the growing visibility of paperbacks across the city during the 1…
The Grand Menhir Brisé: Megalithic Success or Failure
The Grand Menhir Brisé is one member of a complex of sites near the Breton village of Locmariaquer. When intact, it would have been the largest menhir moved by neolithic man. The cause of the menhir's fall has been the subject of debate for over 250 years. This paper considers the quarrying, transport and raising of the Grand Menhir from an engineering and archaeological viewpoint and the possible causes of the breakage are discussed in detail. I…
Postmodern critiques: Foucault, Lyotard and modern political ideologies
Postmodernism’, or rather aspects of it, has posed a challenge to modern political ideologies. In particular, the works of Michel Foucault and Jean‐François Lyotard, through their attacks on the epistemology of modernity, have articulated persuasive critiques of modern ideologies as mechanisms of domination and injustice. Both writers extend their critiques to formulate new strategies of political action and struggle, creating modes of political …
The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-war London
This paper examines the way in which the spaces, practices and pleasures of reading books during the post-war period became inscribed within a heteronormative geographical imaginary. The active state provision of cultural welfare framed London’s public branch libraries as key loci of knowledge and information, with their own attendant logics of reading, spatiality and time. However the growing visibility of paperbacks across the city during the 1…
After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness
Research Article| September 01 2007 After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness Richard Hornsey Richard Hornsey University of the West of England, Bristol [email protected] Richard Hornsey is senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. His recent work has appeared in the Journal of Historical Geography, Visual Culture in Britain, Gender, Place and Culture and the London Review of Books.…
Everything is made of atoms’: The reprogramming of space and time in post-war London
Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use
This paper is in two parts. In the first half I consider the challenge posed by the recent performative turn in critical cartography to the urban historical geographer. If maps come into being only within the diverse moments of their use, then how can we compensate for the absence of such events within the historical archive? Building on Tim Ingold's work, I suggest that one approach is to make an analogy between printed maps and musical scores, …
The Independent Group Looks at London’s West End
In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group’s discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profou…
The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: Navigational Performance and the Imagining of Urban Form
For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a s…
The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain
This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst onto Britain's commercial scene in the early 192…
The modern way to loveliness: Middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain
In May 1935, the British manufacturer Boots launched ‘Number Seven’, a premium range of skin-care products sold via its nationwide network of chain-store chemists. Using material from the Boots Archive, this paper traces the early history of Number Seven to explore the changing meanings of middle-class cosmetics across the mid-twentieth century. Number Seven offered provincial and suburban women an explicitly modern form of facial beauty that mar…
Learning about bodies and the lived consequences
From the perspective of a final year physical education and sport and exercise science undergraduate student, this article explores the relationship between learned and lived experiences related to the body. The research uses an autoethnographic approach that focuses on the educational and social issues that the first author faced as his physical identity changed. The author reflects on the ways in which his once acceptable body experienced decli…
Becoming "Escalator-Legged" in Interwar London: Mechanization, Habit, and the Mobile Body
This article provides the first critical history of escalators on the London Underground railway and the ways their introduction reconfigured passengers' bodies. As the Underground became a coordinated and unitary technological system, its central Tube stations-particularly their elevators-created friction and exerted systemic drag. The Underground's executives initiated a major modernization program, replacing elevators with automatic escalators…
A British Chain Store Out of Place: Boots The Chemists in Suva, Fiji, 1944–64
In 1944, Boots The Chemists, the UK’s leading retail pharmacy chain, opened a store in Suva, Fiji. It lasted less than twenty years. The brief and troubled history of this store – hitherto untold – reveals a great deal about imperialist retail cultures and their growing untenability in late-colonial Fiji. Boots’s Fiji branch sought to cater to a European clientele, adhering to principles of service rooted in paternalism, British ‘expertise’, and …
History (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Politics (5 works)