Envisioning Urban Histories: Bristol as palimpsest, postcards, and snapshots

Crang, M.

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to juxtapose a variety of ways in which a city's history can be portrayed by working through various forms through which the history of Bristol has been envisioned. First, I hope to use the concept of the palimpsest from historical geography as a stage on which other ways of portraying the city can be interrogated. These other envisionings I subsequently stage are the visions bound up in touristic sights, that is in the pictures used in and created by heritage displays; and the 'dispersed memory' of archive pictures, principally the Reece Winstone archive of Bristol. By studying the connections and disjunctures in this triptych I hope to suggest the importance and complexity of technologies used to envisage the city. I try to suggest that pictures of the city cannot be used as naive documents to illustrate the passage of time -- despite how often they are used to do this. Different senses of historicity are manufactured through the space - times created by different processes of envisioning the city. I suggest the interlinkage of these technologies echoes through a specifically urban 'picturesque' photography that coalesces a sensitivity to the passage of time with a detailed cognisance of the city in visual depictions of Bristol.

Citation

Crang, M. (1996). Envisioning Urban Histories: Bristol as palimpsest, postcards, and snapshots. Environment and Planning A, 28(3), 429-452. https://doi.org/10.1068/a280429

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 1996
• Deposit Date: Oct 1, 2008
• Journal: Environment and Planning A
• Print ISSN: 0308-518X
• Electronic ISSN: 1472-3409
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 429-452
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1068/a280429
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1606880