Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City

Abstract

in the history of London’s voting behaviour. This leads to much repetition, without adding to clarity. I would have found it more useful if Tichelar had reversed this order and started out with a short section discussing the key variables impinging on voter behaviour and how they are shaped within the distinctive political geography of London. Indeed, more on the latter would have been particularly helpful. It would then have been easier to pick out the interplay between these factors in the analysis of the historical processes of electoral change. Instead, while a sense of the overall trajectory of Labour voting in the capital is conveyed, the detail of why Labour was more successful in some locales at different times than in others is not always so apparent. Even the case studies, broken up as they are across the thematic chapters, do not fully help to address this issue. This book would also have benefited from closer proofreading. Most books contain a few typographic errors, but this has more than its fair share. There are also too many minor factual inaccuracies, such as the date of the Poplar Rates Rebellion (196), for comfort. These factors undermine the value of this work. A good analysis of Labour’s differential success in the capital is certainly needed, if only to explain why it has been able to overcome apparent disadvantages such as the low trade union density in London. I just wish I could give this attempt to provide such an analysis a more unqualified endorsement.