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Katrina Navickas, "Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England" (Reaktion, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Katrina Navicas about her book titled Contested Commons, A History of Protest and Public Space in England, published by reaction in 2025. Now, this book is doing a whole bunch of things. We are talking about a bunch of places, some of which are still really famous as protest spaces like Trafalgar Square. And we're going to be talking about a lot of time as well. Obviously things Happening pretty recently, going back to the 20th century, talking about, for example, the suffragettes, but going back further than that as well, to thinking about things like enclosure and conceptualisations of land, kind of in ways that might seem to not be related to protest. But as the discussion, I think, is going to show, and as the book definitely does, these things are a lot more connected than perhaps we realise today. So we have a lot to discuss. Katrina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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C
Thanks, Miranda. I'm really looking forward to this.
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A
I am as well. Can you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a book about public space? What even is public space?
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C
Sure. So, I'm Katrina Navicas, I'm professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire and I work on the history of protest, mainly in Britain, and I'm particularly interested in how crowds and protesting groups use public space, the spaces around them. I think it comes from being in a march and being in a protest. It's always interesting to see the interactions between how a crowd moves through a built environment, how they're policed, and I think it's really important to understand that. So, yeah, the big question, what is public space? Is one of the things I try and tackle in the book, really. We all think of public space as something that's open, that everyone can use for all different types of purposes. But actually, when you dig down into it and you look particularly at the right to protest, public space is quite constricted, it's quite restricted by laws, regulations, policing. So the book's about unpicking those complications about what we think is public space and then trying to see how that's changed over time.
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A
I mean, when you say it that way, it sounds like a very straightforward question to investigate, but of course, there's all sorts of ideas sort of tangled up in that. So, of course, when we're talking about public space, one kind of another way we might call it is the Commons. And of course, that goes to the title of the book, the Contested Commons. So when we're talking about change over time, what is the idea of the Commons in, say, the early 19th century? And then how does that change, for example, by the early 20th century?
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C
Yeah. So the Commons is the big theme of the book, because I think we tend to think of public space as a commons, as belonging to everyone. And so I wanted to look at the idea of the Commons in a period when the landscape was rapidly changing. So in the late 18th, early 19th century in Britain, we're industrializing very quickly, we're urbanizing very quickly. And building the big industrial cities requires land. It requires an occupation of different types of spaces, mainly commons. So there's always been common land in England and Wales, and it has particular uses, particular people can use it. But generally we think of common land as being open to all, when actually it isn't. It's a bit the analogies with public space again. There's lots of restrictions on who can use common land. And what I see in this whole period between the late 18th century and the early 20th century is that the commons are divided up, urbanised, turned into squares, turned into streets, turned into building land for new industries. And actually people's access to common land becomes a lot more restricted. And that's partly what they're protesting about.
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Okay, that's quite a lot, really, of change over not that much time. But when we're talking about kind of things like turning commons into squares or parks, that kind of sounds nice and neutral, but these words mean, like, have a lot of weight to them. And there's some other words I want to throw into the conversation as well. So we've got enclosure as something that comes up a lot, and we've got the idea of the waste as well. So what actually is the waste and why was it enclosed and by whom?
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C
Yeah, so waste is quite an evocative word, isn't it? It's part of the commons. So the lord of the manor in the early modern period would have commons and waste. Commons is the cultivated part of the land, Waste is the uncultivated part. That is usually upland moorland where you can't really grow crops. And what we see in the 19th century is that it's waste that gets enclosed in particular. So there's various waves of enclosure in England and Wales. And by enclosure I mean it's a particular process where the lord of the manor will remove the common rights from local people who are using the commons and the waste and divide it up, fence it off into parcels, usually for agricultural purposes, but increasingly to sell it off to builders as we urbanise in the 19th century. So there's a growing resistance to the enclosure of the commons. Enclosure of waste. Waste also has imperial colonial connotations as well. So the colonies are depicted as wasteland that the English and the British can go and colonize, because the idea of waste is about wilderness. There's nothing there. When, as we know, these places aren't uninhabited, they aren't wasteland. But there's a kind of colonial justification for taking over different countries through this idea of enclosure and waste. So I think all that mindset filters into 19th century landowners, 19th century political and economic elites who are changing the landscape both in Britain and abroad.
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Yeah. I think this link with what's happening in the empire as well is definitely a helpful one to make at this point. The other type of land I'd love to throw into the conversation is the verge. What is the verge and how and why are ideas about kind of who gets to use it for what changing?
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C
Yeah. So I've done a whole chapter on verges because I find them quite fascinating. So they are part of the waste. So the lord of the manor will own the patches of land alongside the roadside. And again in the 19th century, because there's mass urbanization increasingly, lots of new roads, lots of new streets, and verges become another battleground for access to space. So I'm particularly interested in what happens to gypsy roamer and traveler communities in the 19th century. Traditionally, they camp out on commons and they've got particular resting points that they use so on the outskirts of London and on their way to Kent to do the hop harvest. And as London expands, urbanises, a lot of these commons are encroached on or built upon, and their traditional stopping places are removed. And there's quite a few battles between landowners and gypsy communities about where they can camp, where they can stop for the night. And increasingly, gypsy Roma travel communities are forced onto the verges of Rhodes rather than on commons. It seems to be particularly facing Surrey in southern England. There's some big landowners like the Onslow family and the Bray family, who seem to be fighting a big battle against gypsy Roman travel communities on their land. And in particular, I was fascinated by the story of the Onslows versus the Chief Constable of Surrey, the county of Surrey in the late 19th century, who is trying to uphold the law. And he doesn't want, you know, the lord of the manor sending out his heavies, his bailiffs, to forcibly get rid of the gypsies if they're peaceful. So he's constantly trying to enforce, you know, restrictions against the lord of the manor doing this in a kind of violent manner. And there's lots of letters from the Onslow family and the Bray family to the Home Office complaining about the chief Constable of police in Surrey saying that he's not respecting their rights as landowners. So I found this fascinating kind of tensions in and rapidly changing county that Surrey is as it urbanises as London expands.
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Yeah. And the urbanization of this, I think is a key part of this. And I'd love now to kind of pick back up on what you were saying earlier around the transformation of commons into squares, because this is not just kind of what the name. It's not just a name change. Like there's like putting down of pavement. Right. And kind of changing visually what these spaces look like.
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What.
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What does that mean in terms of who's allowed to use those spaces and what they're allowed or not to do in them?
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Yeah. So, again, I think we move from the idea that there's a commons open to everyone and public space that's open to everyone, to much more delineated types of public space that whereas before there might be a rough kind of marketplace where you not just have market activities, but you would have all sorts of goings on, increasingly with paved squares, increasingly what we'd now call, I guess, kind of regeneration, whether the lords of the manor or the local authorities would decide to improve, as they called it, streets and squares, by paving them, by knocking down derelict buildings, increasing. They want just the respectable people, as they call them, the middle classes, to occupy these spaces at particular times of day. And there's increasing bylaws and restrictions on who can use the spaces. So there's various paving acts and metropolitan police acts that specify that you're not allowed to loiter in these spaces, you're not allowed to hawk goods or beg or anything that is deemed as unrespectable. So, to some extent, British cities become a lot more regulated, a lot more. There was an argument that the middle classes are trying to civilize the working classes by enforcing all these rules and regulations. Obviously, that doesn't happen in practice. Cities are still very messy places, very lively, and all sorts of activities happen in these spaces. But certainly there's an attempt by the local authorities and local elites to control the kind of behaviours that go on in an urban space.
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What about if we think about urban space beyond the public squares and think about public parks? Why has that also been a space that's had a lot of contestation over the extent to which it can be used and by whom over, you know, the same sort of period of last 150 years or so?
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Yeah. Parks are a new invention. In the Victorian period, we've always had some areas of open land that people can go to. And again, the commons and waste are open rural spaces that people can access. But parks essentially come into being in the 1840s as local elites realized that because of industrialization, because of urbanisation, the poor and the working classes don't have access to open space in the way that they did before with the commons. So the first public parks open in Manchester and Salford in 1846, quite soon afterwards, there's one in Birkenhead on the Wirral. And these public parks are seen as people's parks because they're paid for by public subscription, but they are still very regulated spaces. So unlike common, parks obviously are railed off. So the councils pay for beautiful iron railings and gates to lock them up at night. They're paraded by a warden who wants to make sure that everyone's being respectable and not up to any nefarious activities. There's lots of bylaws around parks, so I'd argue actually that parks are one of the most regulated urban spaces, even though they come out of quite often quite open spaces like commons, where it was a lot more free to do what you wanted to do. There's some parks that come directly out of a reaction to popular protests. So the park that I perhaps write about the most in the book is Kennington park in South London, which is one of those iconic places for large protests. In the 1840s, when it was still a common, it was used by the Chartist Democratic movement for their grand meetings. So whenever you Google for the Chartists, quite often the image that you see is the big meeting on 10 April 1848 of the large Chartist crowd on Kennington Common listening to speakers on a stage, classic demonstration. And in reaction to these big meetings on Kennington Common, the local elites, in particular the local vicar of the church that's just next door, St. Mark's decided to enclose the Common. So they wrote to the government, they've got an act of Parliament passed enclosing the Common, making it into a park. So as soon as Kennington park was railed off with beautiful iron railings and park warden installed, no more political meetings were allowed on the space. So this common that had been used for hundreds of years for big gatherings suddenly becomes a much more regulated, specific type of space that's used for leisure purposes, recreation purposes only. So there's plenty of examples of that kind of restriction on political meetings in parks. And it's something that later movements like the socialist movement, the anarchist movement in the 1880s, 1890s really challenge, try and make sure that they can hold meetings in parks.
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C
Sure. So I think it's true all the way through the 19th and 20th centuries, but it particularly becomes important in that post war period. But what I mean about a global commons is that a lot of the protests that I talk about are fighting over really specific spaces, be they Kennington park or Hyde park or Grosvenor Square in London or many other spaces like Hillsborough park in Sheffield or Bogart Hole Clough in Manchester. All these really specific places involving local people trying to claim access to parks or squares or streets. And some historians and some commentators about social movements might think that that's really inward looking. They're only defending their locality, they're only defending their local interests, when in fact you look at most of the movements, they've got connections and networks across the world. So even the early democratic movement in the 1790s to the 1840s, the first groups like the London Correspondence Society, who are campaigning for the vote, campaigning for democracy, they're connected with the French revolutionaries, they're talking to the Irish rebels during the Irish revolution, and they've got a global worldview. Quite often at these big meetings, you know, any demonstration, there'll be a march with music and banners, they'll be holding the tricolor flag, they might sing the Marseillaise or other type global type Republican songs. So even though they might be fighting over access to a particular park or a square, they're connected to a global movement. And I think that really becomes evident in particular in the post war Cold War era, in the 1950s, 1960s, when the nature of social movements and protest movements changes. So whereas before the earlier democratic and social movements had been organised a bit like a political party or a trade union, quite traditionally, very hierarchically, with a committee and delegates and voting, the new social movements after the Second World War decide to be a bit more fluid. They're much more around getting a global membership, having looser hierarchies, appealing to global issues, rather than something like let's get the vote in Parliament or let's improve our conditions as a trade union. So these global movements, most famously the anti Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, they're still doing the same, they're still claiming spaces. So the most famous protests are around Grosvenor Square in London, which is outside the American Embassy. So various groups like the committee of Hundred hold kind of sit ins, try and occupy these spaces, try and get arrested by police in order to get into the papers, these kind of big media events. But they're doing so because they're campaigning from a global campaign rather than something specific to that particular place or that particular country. So I think that you can connect the local with the global. It's something that I'm really inspired by the late geographer Doreen Massey, who talks a lot about connecting local movements to global movements through occupying particular spaces.
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Yeah, that's really interesting to think about those kinds of links. Thank you for helping us understand kind of how they functioned over time. And even, as you said, till today, in fact, what is the state of public access to space in the UK now?
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Yeah, partly the reason why I wrote this book was that even, you know, five, six years ago, you could see that access to public spaces is decreasing. Is when I sort of wrote a lot of this book, it was under lockdown, when the spatial restrictions were one of the main features of lockdown, that you were restricted on where you could go. So importantly, during that period of lockdown and pandemic, there were some really important protests, like the Black Lives Matter protests, the crowd throwing the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour, and also the women's vigils after the murder of Sarah Everard on Clapham Common and the arrests of people for protesting. And the whole debate around the right to protest really crystallised in those moments and seems to have got worse. So we've recently had legislation like the Police Crime Court Sentencing act and a new Public Order act which restricts people's types of protest even further. So restricting protests to just being one person can be arrested for causing obstruction and creating too much noise, for example. The whole point of on the street protest is to create lots of noise, but that is also restricted now. So there's increasing legislative and policing concerns over the right to protest. That I think have really sort of makes this book quite relevant to the present day.
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Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a clear way in which it's relevant now. Is there anything else you particularly hope readers take away from this?
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C
Yeah, I think also a parallel movement. I talk a lot about the Commons in terms of the rural Commons and the right to Rome. And there's been a revival also of campaigns around the right to roam, right to access private land, footpaths that have been closed up. So Guy Shrubsall and Nick Hayes in particular have been leading quite important campaigns, I think, on enabling people to have access to the countryside. As we saw during lockdown, there was quite serious social disparities between lower income people just not having access to public space and an open space. So I think it ties in with those campaigns around mass trespass and the right to roam by looking at the longer histories. So I've got a chapter on the waste and the rise of the Right to roam movement, which is interesting because in effect, the right to roam was quite a minority movement. We tend to think about. Kinder scouts in the 1930s has been this big celebratory win for the right to roam movement. But actually our right to roam, still very restricted in England and Wales and you can still be prosecuted for trespass, as people on Dartmoor, for example, have recently found. So the longer history of the fight for access to public space again is tied up with enclosure of the Commons, the closure up of footpaths and groups that eventually coalesce into organisations like the Open Spaces Society or the National Trust as trying to conserve and preserve the countryside. But again, I argue in some ways that's restrictive in itself. You know, the National Trust has particular rules on what you can and can't do on its land and in effect is like a private body. So it's thinking about our where we can access, who owns the land is really important and what activities we can do where these big questions, I think, are picked up on in the book in terms of looking at the history behind it.
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Yeah. To help understand kind of how we've gotten to where we're at now, which helps link the past and the present and, you know, gives us more information going forward in the future as well. So it's on that final theme. I'd love to ask the final question, which is what you might be working on now this book is done. Are you continuing to investigate kind of the Commons? Are you moving on to something else? What's on your desk at the minute?
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C
Yeah, I've got two projects on the go. I'm always interested in what I call administrative resistance. I'm looking at types of protests that don't involve street protest or riots or shouting people. I'm interested in pedantic resistance is what I'm calling it. So I've been looking at the anti poll tax movement in 1990, 1988 to 1990. And I think a lot of the success of the anti poll tax movement was because people just followed the rules and did so very pedantically in a way that the whole system couldn't cope with. People sending in details that auditors and the council desks couldn't cope with the amount of information they had to gather. The courts couldn't cope with the amount of people who were sent there for non payment. And so actually part of the success of the movement wasn't to do with rioting, it wasn't to do with any illegal activity. It was actually people challenging the rules by being quite pedantic about them. So that's one of the themes I'm working on and I'd love to know any other types of protests that have that kind of theme of bureaucracy as a form of resistance. I'm also looking at tenants associations and tenants resistance again in the 1980s, looking at ways in which council association tenants use their collective voice to try to challenge both local authorities and government in the way that they are treated. I think, again, that's quite an important thing to think about today.
- [29:26]
A
Well, that's certainly going to keep you busy, I'm sure. And of course, while you're investigating both of those projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Contested Commons A History of Protest and Public Space in England, published by reaction in 2025. Katrina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you, Randa.
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