COMMONS-STEALERS, LAND-GRABBERS AND JERRY-BUILDERS - SPACE, POPULAR RADICALISM AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC-ACCESS IN LONDON, 1848-1880

This article places the campaign for rights of public access in London in context. It provides a structural analysis of the importance of pu blic space in metropolitan radicalism, and in so doing explores prevai ling assumptions about the different uses of such space in a provincia l and metropolitan setting. Its chief focus is upon opposition to rest rictions on rights of public meeting in Hyde Park in 1855 and 1866-186 7, but it also charts later radical opposition to the enclosures of co mmon-land on the boundaries of London and at Epping Forest in Essex. I n particular it engages with recent debates on the demise of Chartism and the political composition of liberalism in an attempt to explain t he persistence of an independent tradition of mass participatory polit ical radicalism in the capital, It also seeks explanations for the wea kness of conventional liberalism in London in the issues raised by the open spaces movement itself.