This thesis explores the relationships between different memory narratives within the unglamorous, everyday spaces of the city, drawing upon ideas of memory as a fluid and dynamic process that is under constant negotiation. It is increasingly argued that we can read places as possessing multiple, overlapping temporalities that have the potential to erupt or dissolve at any time. Therefore social memory should not be considered a predetermined narrative based upon shared pasts and associated with (and represented by) specific sites. Instead, the production of memory should be recognised as an ongoing process, constantly (re)formed by interaction with a range of narratives and traces of the past that are encountered through everyday spatial practice. Using in-depth empirical research from Kingston-upon-Hull; a modern, post-industrial British city, the thesis argues that the city's everyday spaces should be seen as part of wider topographies of memory. It goes on to explore how these topographies might be interrogated through acombination of traditional and more innovative methodologies, using both visual and participatory techniques (including photo-elicitation and walking practices) along with personal accounts and oral histories, to trace the production of memory across a range of everyday spaces. Central to this work is the development of a virtual walking tour methodology which, it is argued, presents new possibilities for engaging with different memory processes across the wider city.

After an anthropological study of a Danagla village, Mushu, in 1974/5, many questions arose as to the process of agricultural development in the area which was beyond the scope of the first research. I developed an interest in the causes which contributed to the transformation of the Danagla peasant economy as it was in the period just before and after the Re-Conquest of the country in 1898, to the type of economy which is more and more becoming capitalist in the sense of the increasing role of capital in changing what was once a totally subsistence type of economy. I had a faint idea about the determinant factors on the development of the present socio-economic structures; basically these were premised on the prevailing production relations and their gradual change from those totally instituted in the kinship relations to those seemingly individualistic, secularized and commercial relations of production of today as seen in the different forms of sharecropping practised in the area. A possible determinant cause was sought in the activities of local entrepreneurs especially traders whose activities have had an important role in the agricultural developments and the economy of the area. The results of the fieldwork (extending from September 1976 to June 1977) are documented in this thesis. To study a region whose population is scattered in a vast number of villages and settlements along the river banks, in oases which are difficult to reach with conventional means of transport, and in the basins which have contributed a lot to the heterogeneity of the region, it was difficult to select a representative unit. Instead, I adopted a different approach which allowed for wider coverage of the region as a whole. Since I was concerned with the agricultural development I found it plausible to focus on one important dynamic factor in bringing about changes affecting that development - that is capital. In an arid zone the necessity for irrigation presupposes relatively large investment resources, and hence the focus on the process of capital accumulation within the peasant economy and also trading profits and their reinvestment in agriculture and trade. The study of the class of traders, the small shopkeepers scattered all over the villages, and wholesalers who are concentrated in the towns, allowed me a better chance of covering the whole region as a geographical entity and seeing the local differences in the forms of economic and social organization. The methods used were mainly documentary sources, interview schedules, life-histories and case studies. Sampling for the interviews (one for the study of pump schemes and one for the traders) posed a difficulty as the records were at variance with the real number of traders in the area, for example. The mode of selection of the sample from the traders for study is described in Chapter Six. The objective of interviewing the traders was to collect basic demographic data and to elucidate their activities past and present in agricultural investment (see Appendix 2). This necessitated the conducting of these interviews mostly by myself as the life histories of some of those interviewed were documented as well. From these most of the information on the history of trade, credit relations and development and organization of co-operatives was collected. Documents and case studies are mostly utilized in Chapter Two and Four regarding the history of the area and its population and the developments in the material means of production. However, non-traders and government officials provided me with indispensable information or helped to introduce me to potential informants on the history of the region, and its social organization especially the elderly informants without whose help it would be very difficult to document the recent history of otherwise neglected aspects of these people's life.

Following economic stagnation and deindustrialisation in 1970s and 1980s Britain, the shift toward neoliberalism and entrepreneurial urbanism has had profound effects on the ways in which cities are experienced by different socio-cultural groups. As many urban commentators have noted, in the pursuit of maintaining a spatial capital fix, some groups have found themselves increasingly marginalised through various image-related redevelopment processes. The working classes, the homeless and, increasingly, young people continue to be faced with a number of curtailments which restrict access and spatial freedoms. Taking Newcastle upon Tyne and its night-time economy as a case in point, this thesis examines the roles of class identity, delinquency, and exclusion in contemporary nightlife, and how current representations of troublesome youth such as the ‘chav’ are used to articulate exclusionary practices. This thesis, though, also illustrates that exclusion is ultimately driven by commercially-defined imperatives commensurate with extant urbanentrepreneurialism. However, whilst it was initially speculated that the young ‘lower’ classes were excluded from city centre nightlife outright, it was actually found that the night-time economy functions through a number of channelling and redistributive processes. The ‘chav element’, whilst being rejected from many venues, is not wholly excluded from the city centre, but segregated and contained in certain locales. Pointing to a more nuanced idea of exclusion as a spatial restructuring process, this thesis suggests that urban cultural geography should pay closer attention to a temporal, fluid, and fragmentary notion of exclusion that is constantly shifting and transforming alongside other changes in production and consumption.

This thesis contributes an Actor Network Theory inspired approach to the study of rock climbing to argue that climbers are more-than-human fusions comprised of the human and non-human. The research explores this notion of hybrid climbers, which I term the ‘hybrid climbing assemblage’. The complicated relationships between these human and technological co-agents of climbing are durable but dynamic, although technological developments aid climbers, the benefits of these fusions cannot be reduced to physical, technical and mental elements. Rather, each piece of technology worn or carried by the climber has its own situated set of relations which are interwoven into the complex socio-technical assemblage that co-constitutes the present day climber. Empirical data to support this study has been collected via participant observation, and interviews with 40 rock climbers based in northern England. Although some of these voices debate the roles of these technologies and their experiential impacts upon climbing, these developments are not necessarily damaging to the experience. Indeed, climbers are careful to retain the ‘desirable’ and ‘essential’ experiential aspects of the activity – notably the risk and uncertainty climbing entails. Finally, the thesis also adds to debates concerning the materially mediated experience of places, and how places are also involved in the development of socio-technical assemblages and their practices. In these ways this research aims to help us rethink our activities as implicitly mediated by technology.

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