City & County 15: London at the end of summer
The Royal Geographic Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference happens at the end of August each year, when students have yet to return to classes at UK universities, but in US many schools, including my employer, have already started. So attending the conference meant teaching my first class then heading to the Gainesville airport for a flight to London via Atlanta.
As a reminder, this is an occasional newsletter by Alan Wiig, a professor of Geography at the University of Florida. You can subscribe or unsubscribe at the bottom of the email.
The conference was lovely, I presented new research on beach replenishment as a sandy engineered system foundational to protecting coastal development in Florida, but at significant financial cost and material, ecological impact what with the dredging of and mining of sand to place it on the beach, all to be washed away with the next major storm.
In addition to professional networking, there was time between and after events to get out and explore the city, as seen below. The Royal Geographic Society sits adjacent to Kensington Gardens, its location reflecting the importance of traditional geographic skillsets like mapmaking and spatial analysis to British colonization and the spread of empire. While the discipline has, to a large extent, evolved, and critique of empire-building is now widely accepted, the institute’s location remains woven in to this history of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial expansion the the neighborhood’s growth during the same era.
I had not stayed in the Kensington and Chelsea area before; the modern wealth of the are reinforces twenty-first century London’s continued status as the ‘heart of empire’, metropole ambitions, with extravagant Victorian architecture, royal parks, and now a new generation of elite, cosmopolitan residents and visitors from the Middle East and Asia fueling luxury redevelopment and renovations.
Given the option, I would prefer to stay in other parts of the city, but being able to walk to the conference made staying in Kensington worthwhile. I still managed to get to East London two times, to eat at Ottolenghi Spitalfields and then the next morning to walk through Broadway Market then along Regent’s Canal, shopping for books, bread, and coffee.
Link to a Londonist story from 2013 re. the history of those boundary stones.