This is a remarkable study of the senses that commences with a memorable description of Liverpool Street Station, London, c.1900. Simeon Koole invites the reader to imagine the maelstrom of humans, horses, and vehicles that converged around Britain’s largest railway station built on the former site of Bedlam asylum in order to explore what the history of touch can offer those interested in studies of embodiment. Koole explores the situated nature of the senses in relation to the urban environment that would define the twentieth century and become a common experience for ever more individuals in an urbanizing world. Koole’s particular focus, however, is on the British context, for the British people, he and others suggest, are “more selective about where they are touched than are people from other countries” (19). The book is also written in the context of concerns about vulnerability and disability in the very recent context of the #MeToo movement, disability rights, and even supply chains, which are becoming more transparent and acknowledge, for example, the connections between tea shops and global trade.

A wider history of the senses is covered in the introduction, starting with Marx and his suggestion that the senses were conditioned through the relationship between people and objects. The work also draws heavily on Simmel, namely his work on the senses and the city, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s writings stressing the situated nature of perception. Rather than tell the story of touch as one of desensitization, Koole frames the city as a disorientating place, not least because of the world he depicts outside Liverpool Street Station. He concentrates on the way in which the spaces of the city were inhabited, the manner in which people engage with material culture, from railway carriages to the newspapers they read in them, and how this changed with technology and encouraged people to reconceptualize the way they situated themselves, understood their minds and bodies and their interconnections. Discussion of other senses is of course inescapable, as it is in the best works of sensory history. At the same time, he critiques the way in which we think about embodiment in the present and how these stories shaped the way we have come to understand touch historically.

The first chapter drops the reader in the late nineteenth century, with the emerging field of neurology, and a period when there was a recognized epistemological shift in the way the senses were understood. Koole describes neurologist Henry Head exploring the direct relationships between stimuli and sensations, and the role of touch as central to the body–mind relationship, before locating Head's research in the wider metropolitan environment. Jabbing, stroking, and pricking each other, neurologists like Head naturally described what they felt (or did not feel) during such experiments and continued to reflect on their sensations after leaving their labs and resuming ordinary everyday tasks and even love lives. Another chapter shifts to the world of blind schools, where visually impaired students made sense of space differently, being educated in ways that attempted to compensate for blindness. For example, they ran their fingers over relief maps in efforts to refine their senses and were trained to undertake tactile work, such as piano tuning and typewriting. This story is followed into the 1960s when blind people began to challenge these ideas of compensation and reconceived their disabilities as social effects. Koole then returns to the world of transport, and the way in which the public, and especially London ladies and working girls, negotiated transportation networks like the underground, “one of the most fraught spaces” (21) in terms of personal boundaries, alongside a growing army of male clerks and City gents who learned about when and where it was both possible or prohibited to touch. From assault on the underground, Koole takes us into the embodied labor of the teashops to question how the senses have historically been educated and shaped by unwanted touch often generated through the emotional labor expected of waitresses.

A final chapter serves as a climax and explores the way in which touch was shaped by the law and regulated in many of the spaces visited in earlier chapters, primarily by examining specific crimes that took place during the bewildering and uncanny atmosphere of the London fog. Koole not only uses the fog as a clever metaphor for the potential breakdown of law, but he subtly weaves individuals and places from earlier chapters into crimes and courtroom dramas that demonstrate the way in which law was constructed, shaped, and regulated through touch. Besides being carefully crafted, Koole’s innovative historical study is impressively layered, drawing on the best histories of twentieth-century Britain, as well as work on the emotions, technology, even labor and economic thought, to make this a rich addition to the field of sensory history and, above all, an absolute pleasure to read.