Popular resistance to the enclosure of urban public space in the long 19th century: protest and the commons in England

This paper draws from the opening chapters of my next monograph, Contested Commons: a History of Protest and Public Space in England. It argues that urbanisation and industrialisation in England created new public spaces that facilitated political sociability and new sites for popular protest. An urban commons was created by democratic and labour movements in the early nineteenth century.  In reaction to the new working-class movements, the political and social elites sought to control and police such spaces. This paper draws on work by Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, Brett Christophers and David Harvey on rethinking the meaning of ‘enclosure’ and ‘commons’. The enclosure of the agricultural commons in this period was paralleled by a process of urban enclosure, whereby any collective activity in public spaces such as streets and parks was increasingly policed or prohibited by property owners. The state reaction against labour movements was an ongoing process of enclosure, dispossessing the working classes by elite accumulation of property and public space. The new political movements, especially the Chartists in the 1840s and the socialist parties and unemployed in the 1880s, resisted these processes by mass occupation and communal uses of such sites.