Contested Commons is a commentary on the relationship between radicalism, protest and public space in England that is far more than the sum of these parts. Navickas rethinks the English commons not as a set of publicly owned locations, but as a series of claims to the right to exist in place, brought about through particular ways of acting in the world. The book articulates an expansive definition of how people have made claims to land: through asserting legal jurisdiction, marking physical boundaries, building housing and amenities, establishing behavioural norms and employing the body as a form of resistance. It is not simply a history of protest in England, nor merely an account of struggles over access to land. Through her framework of the ‘contested commons’, Navickas demonstrates that the right to protest is itself central to the historical production of public space. In doing so, she reconceives the historical commons as a relational concept, practised by people in place.
Navickas’ prose is charming and playful, grounded in a commanding grasp of the subject and its enduring significance. The first two chapters trace the development of England’s countryside into a patchwork of enclosed lands, where extraction and private interest had exclusionary consequences. Although the book’s first half has a rural focus, readers of this journal will appreciate that it fleshes out the layers of exclusion that have been historically woven into the country’s urban public spaces. When the book shifts topographical register – travelling to paved streets, roadside verges and local parks as sites of political action – it continues to emphasize the varied and intersectional ways common space has been contested. Navickas examines spaces shaped by trade union meetings and suffrage rallies, the settlements of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and the occupations and squatting practices of unemployed groups and environmental protesters, amongst many other forms of collective action.
Attempts to impose order and norm are also recurrent through the book, whether in discouraging the presence of ‘nuisances’ like litter and unwelcome minority groups – such as with Green Park’s vagrants and at Stonehenge’s ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ – or through regulating culturally acceptable forms of protest, evident in the tension between mass trespass and its ‘aggravated’ urban counterpart. But Navickas’ granular approach to storytelling allows her to rethink the history of public space beyond a simple dichotomy between resistance and oppression, instead accounting for the diverse people, perspectives and actions involved in producing the commons. This is achieved through a close focus on local events, which Navickas swells into compelling stories with assiduous archival work, in a way that resonates other recent spatially focused urban microhistories of modern Britain. The detail produced by this approach is astounding; in chapter 5, a narrow strip of land between the pavement and road in Whitechapel becomes the protagonist in a story of sectarian politics, allegations of municipal corruption and hostile discrimination against minority communities. Elsewhere, the book shrewdly weaves distinct localities into conversation. For instance, in chapter 3 the Socialist Democratic Federation’s newspaper Justice carries the reader between ‘land grab’ camps at a Yorkshire colliery, an East London tramline and back again to a West Riding railside allotment.
The book traverses several thematic concerns that are of current interest to historians of urban lived experience. Navickas’ enquiry into ‘sense of place’, for example, suggests the value of more explicit enquiries into the making and remaking of urban worlds through bodily encounter, feelings of belonging and relationships with the more-than-human. In doing so, the book also foregrounds emerging approaches to the history of protest that emphasize its material and embodied dimensions. Barricades shape the routes of protest marches, and can be made of metal, wood, plastic or human skin. Recognizing protest as an embodied practice raises larger historiographical questions about how historians understand political action as more than an ideology enacted in space. While this book surveys a range of spatially distinctive forms of protest whose differences were shaped by the protesters’ identities and the objects of protest themselves, perhaps the sites of embodied encounter might help to further historicize the differences between these protests and what they have contributed to the plurality of urban space.
