Inner City

Inner City presents a new way of approaching the social history of contemporary urban England. By examining the emotional experience of England's heavily politicised and racialised inner cities, it shows how feelings and other affective states underpinned everyday lives during a period marked by repressive policing, racialised exclusions, disproportionate psychiatric detention, welfare state retrenchment, and urban 'regeneration.' It also reveals the centrality of emotion to moments of large-scale urban rupture, including the New Cross Massacre in 1981, the uprisings of the 1980s, and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017. Drawing on oral testimonies and a range of archives, Inner City asks how this affective terrain honed modes of endurance, survival, and resistance in impoverished city space. Through centring the affective entanglements of violence and vulnerability, the book looks specifically at how a range of projects and practices of resistance in the inner city were constituted by strategies, spaces, and enactments of care. When institutional violence was a relentlessly pervasive framework through which life was lived and felt, it considers what it meant for racialised individuals and groups to have provided and received care, protection, and safety in response. In so doing, the book offers timely and important insights into the historical dramas that played out in England's inner cities, particularly relating to race and resistance, in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Michael Romyn is a historian of contemporary urban Britain. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research and was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. His first book, London's Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the 'Concrete Jungle', was published in 2020.