Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

All Outputs (8)

"The Penguins are coming": brand mascots and utopian mass consumption in interwar Britain (2018)
Journal Article
Hornsey, R. (2018). "The Penguins are coming": brand mascots and utopian mass consumption in interwar Britain. Journal of British Studies, 57(4), 812-839. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2018.116

This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material fr... Read More about "The Penguins are coming": brand mascots and utopian mass consumption in interwar Britain.

“The modern way to loveliness”: middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain (2018)
Journal Article
Hornsey, R. (2019). “The modern way to loveliness”: middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Women's History Review, 28(1), 111-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2018.1457126

In May 1935, the British manufacturer Boots launched ‘Number Seven’, a premium range of skin-care products sold via its nationwide network of chain-store chemists. Using material from the Boots Archive, this paper traces the early history of Number S... Read More about “The modern way to loveliness”: middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form (2016)
Journal Article
Hornsey, R. (2016). The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form. cultural geographies, 23(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015572600

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affe... Read More about The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form.

The independent group looks at London's west end (2013)
Journal Article
Hornsey, R. (2013). The independent group looks at London's west end. Journal of Visual Culture, 12(2), 292-312. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412913488756

In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with thi... Read More about The independent group looks at London's west end.

Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use (2012)
Journal Article
Hornsey, R. (2012). Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(4), 675-693. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1410

This paper is in two parts. In the first half I consider the challenge posed by the recent performative turn in critical cartography to the urban historical geographer. If maps come into being only within the diverse moments of their use, then how ca... Read More about Listening to the Tube Map: Rhythm and the Historiography of Urban Map Use.