2 - Claiming Public Space: Competing Perceptions

Summary

At Norwich fine, for me and myne, a Citie trim.

Where straungers well may seeme to dwell,

That pytch and pay, or keepe their day,

But who that want shall find it scant so good for him.

The previous chapter considered two competing visualisations of one city. On the one hand was a stylised prospect laden with symbolic meaning and representing the interests of a relatively small social group, on the other was a city as it was lived and negotiated by its inhabitants. In the former, the city is conceptualised from above as one entity and the eye is drawn to landmarks, such as the walls, castle and cathedral, as ways of deciphering the landscape and, in the latter, the city is the sum of its parts, conceptualised from the bottom-up as parishes, neighbourhoods and people. Inhabitants thought about the city around them in terms relating to their immediate lives and these can be identified by the use of common linguistic tropes in the records of people’s words and voices. Understanding these two different perspectives is one way of unpacking contemporaries’ understanding of their urban landscape but they were by no means the only frames of reference available. Every individual had their own unique way of referencing, seeing and negotiating the city around them. The city that governed the lives of the poor, for example, was not the remote, static, and romantic affair portrayed in its maps, but a gritty reality. Indeed, if the poor had had the opportunity to view any of the artistic cartographic portrayals of their city, they might have been surprised that the sanitised bird’s eye view they were seeing was the same place that they inhabited. This chapter explores the tensions that were produced when different social groups attempted to use or claim public space, especially the efforts of the corporation to more effectively manage the streets and open areas. Problems occurred when different agendas collided, and conflict often arose over the question of who had the dominant claim to a certain place, especially when one group tried to enforce boundaries to restrict the freedoms of another, in this case the corporation (as representatives of the better sort of inhabitants) and the impoverished or unsettled.