Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 224e242 241

originators: fairness. It was a system drawn up to no one's obviousadvantage, and its operations required no one's judgment’ (p. 426).

This may be true, insofar as the allocation of land itself wasconcerned. Drawing a straight line across the land meant, as henotes, that some farmers might benefit while others suffered, butthis was an impartial process. Yet the crucial basis upon which thesurvey itself proceeded e that these were unallocated lands, freefor distribution e is, of course, hardly fair to those who were therebefore. Once set in motion, the survey itself, we might also argue,helped in what Lefebvre would term the ‘pulverization’ of spaceitself, producing it as discrete, actionable parcels of individualizedproperty. Yet one could read Hubbard's account and remain utterlyignorant of the often violent, always wrenching colonial dispos-sessions upon which it was predicated, with only passing, anodynereferences to native people ceding territory or being induced togive up lands. A series of maps that show the sequential gridding upof the continent provide unwitting testimony to the deterritoriali-zation of the country's first settlers. To argue, as Hubbard might,that the survey is simply an outcome, not an instrument, of thisprocess seems hard to sustain.

Aswell as being the supposed epitome of American ‘fairness’, theRectangular Survey, for Hubbard, epitomizes American exception-alism. An entire continent was gridded up into discrete, legibleparcels of land in the space of a lifetime: ‘Once set in motion’, heenthuses, ‘manic American energy applied the system pervasively,a can-doAmerican spirit pushedpast obstacles, andAmericanknow-how inventedever-newways toget the jobdone faster’ (p. 427).Nowwemay raise some parochial caveats here about the efficiency withwhich land was surveyed in other settler societies, or the degree towhich, as Hubbard himself notes, the US model drew from andadapted European agrarian traditions.However,more interesting formy purposes are Hubbard's documentation of the failures and over-reach of the survey, as opposed to its clear successes. Particularly inthe earlier period, the survey constituted an act of staggeringambition on the part of the emergent state to render space legible byprojecting power from a centre into what was, largely, a void (anda dangerous one at that). Combined with the messy, embodiedrealities of the survey on the ground (ofwhich Hubbard does not sayenough), the result, frequently, were trade-offs, compromises,anomalies, and looseends, suchas the legalfictionwherebyCongressdeclared that no matter how many actual acres a section actuallycontained, the titlewould read ‘640’ acres, and the buyer could sell iton that basis, or the creation of Point Roberts, an American exclavecreated, it seems, largely by accident. The survey, like any enactmentof property, is far from straightforward, but is open to failure, re-working and contestation.

Hubbard's account, although an excellent technical survey, failsto get to grips with such important questions. Perhaps it is unfairto ask him to do so, given the ambit of his book. And it certainly isimportant (and often interesting) to know how a survey is actu-ally put together at such a broad spatial and temporal scale,perhaps particularly for postructuralists, with their textualfixations. Yet Hubbard's triumphalism invites such a critique, Ithink. Perhaps what is needed is something akin to HildegardBinder Johnson's Order upon the Land, the classic account of theRectangular Survey in the mid-West (Oxford University Press,1976) that is alert to both the practicalities and the politics of thecadastral grid.

Nicholas BlomleySimon Fraser University, Canada

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.019

Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Commu-nity: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England. Basing-stoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, xiv þ 243 pages, £52 hardback.

At the heart of this book is the desire to correct a persistentstereotype e that of the white working class as racist, backward,often feckless, geographically immobile and static, geographicallytrapped in local authority housing estates, stigmatised by thereputations of these places, and psychologically trapped by atti-tudes of suspicion and resentment e against the middle class, themore affluent, and minority populations, apparently receivingpreferential access to state resources. These are the sorts of atti-tudes that are too often assumed to typify the old white workingclass stranded by current economic change; attitudes that GeoffDench and others mapped in The New East End: Race, Kinship andConflict (Profile Books, 2006), in their return to Bethnal Green fiftyyears after Young and Willmott explored the dimensions of Familyand Kinship in East London (Routledge, 1957) which was thenpredominantly white. It is these attitudes which played into theview of an emerging conflict between the white remnant pop-ulation and the new post-colonial residents of London's East Endand for some commentators partly explained the rise of racist right-wing politics in parts of Greater London.

Rogaly and Taylor take us to quite a different place: the outerfringes of Norwich, a predominantly white, relatively isolatedmarket town in East Anglia that seems miles outside the main-stream of metropolitan Britain. They begin the book with a longquotation from a respondent that knowingly reinforces the verystereotypes that the respondent herself knows that the authorsaim to deconstruct. And so the reader is drawn into a sustainedexamination of the intersections between the lives of residents onthree housing estates in Norwich and the radical social andeconomic changes that have transformed individual identities inEngland between the 1930s depression and the astonishingconfidence of Blair's New Labour Britain before the currentrecession.

The authors' aim is to mobilise recent work in geography andsociology that insists on the relational and multiple construction ofidentity, and the understanding of spatial particularity as a conse-quence of the intersection of multiple social processes acrossdifferent spatial scales. Thus class, gender, and ethnicity are notmerely categories but mutable lived identities that cannot beunderstood without an analysis of structural changes and theintersections between multiple social categories, constructed inrelation (and often opposition) to other classes, genders, andethnicities. Whether this approach is quite the new ground that theauthors' claim is a matter for debate e there is a long heritage ofstudies initiated by the ESRC localities programme in the 1970s thatwas influenced by Doreen Massey's theorisation of place that isimportant in this text. And even earlier, many of the classic‘community studies’ of cities, rural areas, and provincial towns didnot neglect the effects of state policies, for example, or economicrestructuring that decimated community ties, whether throughmunicipal demolition and rehousing policies, or through thedecline of ways of life in communities dominated by a single, oftenmale-employing, industry. Where they do break new groundperhaps is in the long view, which allows greater consideration ofcross-generational connections and ruptures than is common inmany studies in this genre. And of course, places themselves areparticular and individual. Norwich has had a history of femaleemployment and of non-conformism that produced an indepen-dent working class as well as more recently a larger middle classthan many provincial cities of the same size, as the insuranceindustry and the University of East Anglia dominated the expand-ing service economy from the 1960s onwards. It is within this nexus

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 224e242242

of particularity and change that stories of diverse, contingent, andambivalent identities and senses of belonging are told, drawing on73 interviews, including 25 life histories, with residents of threelocal estates.

The aim is to contribute to a ‘moving’ history in two differentways: first, tomove or connect these stories into themainstream, toconnect the local to the global; and, secondly, to remind readers ofthe stories of emigration in which the white working class ofEngland moved, especially in the post-war era, both within andbeyond national boundaries. Even the least mobile respondentshad family members who travelled e temporarily as part of theBritish armed forces, or more permanently to Australia and NewZealand, Canada and the USA, or, more recently, to warmer parts ofEurope. And the stories are ‘moving’ in a third sense in that theyengage the emotions of the readers and of the authors as inter-viewers. Reflecting the arguments about positionality and reflex-ivity, Rogaly and Taylor have chosen to include some informationabout their own origins and identities in the introductory chapteras well as to ask questions about their own practice and relations tothe people to whom they talked during the research. The latter Ifound useful as they often raised interesting ethical issues aboutresearch practice; the former made me uneasy as I was unclearwhat it added to the book apart from producing a sense of inferi-ority in readers from more ordinary backgrounds than the authors.

After this introductory chapter the book is ordered thematicallyor conceptually, with chapters on place, poverty, state, class, and‘moves’, with two ‘interludes’ that consist of short pen pictures oftwo significant respondents. The purpose of these portraits wasnever made clear, other than to add greater depth. There is nodiscussion of why these two people were selected, what theirstories add or represent, and the information about each is notcomparable. We learn, for example, that Tom Crowther, who wasborn in 1929, died before the book was published but not when FloSmith, the subject of the second interlude, was born. The thematicchapters are more successful, each richly illustrated with quota-tions from the interviews, but too many fail, in my view, to illus-trate the authors' aim to connect the local with wider socialchanges. The chapter on place, for example, is about the reputationand micro-geographies of three estates, with no contextualmaterial on national housing policy changes over the decades. Ina book about class and community I expected to find at leasta mention of the effects of the right-to-buy policies initiated in theThatcher era and their effects on social divisions on estates, and of

why Norwich council was a doughty defender of state housing inthese years. In the chapter on class there is similarly little analysisof the connection between class, gender, and ethnic identity,although in the final thematic chapter on ‘moves’ issues ofethnicity and racism are addressed. And if, as the authors argue intheir introduction, ‘it is not possible to study the experience andidentifications of any particular class in isolation from otherclasses’ (p. 4), thenwhy is there no discussion of the changing classcomposition of the city and the different lives lived by Norwichresidents not penned up on these three outer estates? The bookends with a two-page comment on the research process ratherthan an assessment of the significance of the work presented inthe preceding chapter.

This is an ambitious book and it is, in parts, moving e the storiesare, in themain, of making do and getting by, with some pleasure inlives lived in what are, in objective terms, conditions of materialdeprivation. But in the very ambition of the book lies its failure. Thetime period is too long and the changes too complicated to becaptured in the five central chapters. The book falls betweena detailed oral history of change and an assessment of the changingnature of twentieth-century Britain. The theoretical structure isinsufficiently pulled through into the empirical chapters, and thenotions of relationality, complexity, and intersectionality are notwell-illustrated through the interview extracts. Finally there is noattempt to evaluate the significance of Norwich, to persuade thereader who has never been there that this case study has some-thing more to say about the condition of class and community inEngland than a story of a particular place where both authors hadlived during an important period in their own life history. As SandraHarding has argued in her defence of situated knowledge, richempirical, context-dependent work, drawing on the narratives ofthe too-often powerless, is merely the starting point for under-standing the structures of inequality that continue to disfigurecontemporary western societies. We need to know a good dealmore about the processes that produced Norwich's particularityand the lives of households living on the stigmatized estates inthe city. Nevertheless, this is an important and interesting book.

Linda McDowellUniversity of Oxford, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.020