Abstract: This paper is a theoretical and historical study which explores possibilities for thinking about gender and space through a number of different configurations of urban architectural space in early nineteenth century London. My paper investigates the activity of the urban ramble through sites of consumption, exchange and display. I argue that the activity of rambling represents a dominant mode of urban masculinity concerned with the physical and conceptual pursuit of pleasure, specifically sexual pleasure. The urban male rambler constructs his masculinity through various social and spatial codes which are articulated through vision, display, containment and movement: dress, language, fornicating, gambling and drinking. Integral to the identity of the urban rambler are the spaces he passes through.

This study is sited with reference to the political and methodological concerns of architectural history and feminism, and given my (explicit) intention of developing methodologies which describe, explain and critique how space is gendered and gender spatialised, I refer to and adopt theoretical approaches from various disciplines which deal with space and gender.

Such a study is, then, necessarily an interdisciplinary one. The notion of gendered space is of concern to architects, geographers, planners, anthropologists, historians and cultural critics alike. But despite differences in the methodological approaches, feminist analysis of gender and space has tended to focus on critiquing the paradigm of the separate spheres (the binary which describes space as two mutually exclusive and hierarchically placed categories – the male public realm of the city and the female private realm of the home). A particular approach adopted by a number of post-structuralist feminist historians has involved ‘deconstructing’ this binary, showing its ideological underpinnings in patriarchy and capitalism. My work in the discipline of architectural history has been informed by these strategies, but moves further in suggesting new ways for thinking about the gendering of space as an activity as well as a representation, through the physical and conceptual urban movements of display, consumption and exchange. I am concerned with looking at gendered space in terms of tensions between design intentions and lived spatial experience, the problematic gendering of spatial representations and the relationships between spatiality and identity.

The ramble was featured in a number of key texts published in the 1820’s. This paper is concerned with one specific rambling text, Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), this I argue, is an urban text which as well as describing London by moving through the city, is also a gendered representation of London as a place of consumption and enjoyment. Rambling provides a conceptual map of urban space, which rethinks the city as a series of spaces of flows of movement rather than a series of discrete (architectural) elements. The movement of the ramble represents spaces as being linked through temporal relations, and framed by a specific series of social events and activities or urban rituals.

This paper follows the route of the rambler from east to west, by day and night. It also focuses on a closer examination of a number of spaces in the upper class and masculine district around St. James’s – Almack’s Assembly Rooms, Burlington Arcade, the Royal Opera House, Crockford’s Gambling House, the brothels of King’s Place and several streets in the vicinity – the Quadrant, Haymarket, Pall Mall, Regent Street, Bond Street and St. James’s Street.

This paper was published as ‘West End Rambling: Architectural Space in London 1800-30′, Leisure Studies Journal, (May 1998).

On a leafy street in Clapham, minutes from the common, is a terraced house which was my home for two years. Scattered all over London, all over England, all over the world, are other homes, houses where I once lived. In some still standing, I return and revisit past lives and loves. Others have been destroyed, physically crushed in military coups, or erased from conscious memory only to be revisited in dreams.

Through its fragile structure this house physically embraced my need for transiency, and it was perhaps this unhomeliness, which made it feel more like home to me than any other.

This was the first piece of writing where I juxtaposed my own voice with those of various critical theorists, and where I referred to my life as the subject matter for theoretical reflection. This incorporation of the personal into the critical had different kinds of effect depending on the reader. Other academics and artist friends loved the piece – they liked it because I was so ‘present’ in the work. But my retelling of events had disturbed two important people in my personal life. My mum was upset by my description of this house, as ‘more like home to me than any other’. Iain Hill’s response was more antagonistic. My description rendered the house unrecognisable to him.

This writing is the first of what I have now come to call ‘confessional constructions’. The responses I received made me aware that words do not mean the same thing for writer and reader. The text also raised many questions about story telling. While the subject matter and subjective stance of a personal story may upset the objective tone of academic writing, writing for a theoretical context repositions and interprets events in ways that may be uncomfortable for those involved in the story. Writing about the transitory nature of a house in which I once lived, and the questionable DIY of my housemate in order to question the authorial position of the architect and the permanence of architecture assumed by the profession is not simply the recounting of a series of events in my life. But it may appear to be so because the critical take is in the form rather than the content, the adoption of the narrative style itself, an implicit rather than an explicit critical act.

This paper was published first as Jane Rendell, ‘Doing it, (Un)Doing it, (Over)Doing it Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse’, Jonathan Hill (ed.), Occupying Architecture, (London: Routledge, 1998) and then as ‘(Un)doing it Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse’, Journal of Architecture, (Spring, 1999).

Abstract: This paper explores the notion of gendered space through varying configurations of public and private with specific reference to a number of clubs in early nineteenth century London’s St. James’s. The male-only venue of the club is considered to represent public masculinity through two forms of male control over space; first, patriarchal mechanisms which exclude women and second, fraternal mechanisms which exclude certain men. The paper outlines how the male club also operated as a private space within the public realm, both as a space of intimacy and domesticity rivalling the familial home, and as a site of private property and exclusivity. The male clubs of St. James’s, specifically the four at the top of St. James’s Street; Boodle’s, Brooks’s, Crockford’s and White’s, were frequented by men of the same class who used their control of space to assert social and political allegiances and rivalries between men.

The exclusivity of the first floor gambling room, a place of secrecy and privacy, is contrasted with the ground floor bow window, a site of public display and exclusivity. Male leisure pastimes, such as drinking, sporting, gambling, are explored as social and spatial practices which, by establishing shared codes of consumption, display and exchange, represent public masculinities.

The paper was published as ‘The Clubs of St. James’s Street: Exclusivity, Domesticity and Secrecy’, Journal of Architecture, (Summer, 1999).

See Kathy Battista, Brandon la Belle, Barbara Penner, Steve Pile and Jane Rendell, ‘The Pleasure of Treasure’ Cultural Geographies, (2005).

This paper looks at how the Italian Opera House was represented as a site of sexual pursuit in a particular form of urban literature – the ramble. It specifically discusses how this opera house figured as a desirable destination for ramblers in a few key early nineteenth-century rambling texts. In the ramble, the Italian Opera House is represented as a place where visual pleasure is experienced through the exchange of looks between performers and audience within the auditorium – boxes, gallery, pit and stage – as well as in the performer-only spaces, such as the green room, and audience-only spaces, such as the lobby and saloon.

This paper was published as Jane Rendell, ‘The Italian Opera House’, Visual Culture in Britain (2000), v. 1, n. 2, pp. 1-24.

Iain Borden and Jane Rendell

This article explored the relationship of critical theory to architectural history in terms of a progression through nine different methodological moves: from theory as object of study, to new architectures, to framing questions, to critical history, to interdisciplinary debates, to disclosing methodology, to self-reflexivity, to re-engagement with theory and finally to praxis. 

The article was published as Iain Borden and Jane Rendell, ‘From Chamber to Transformer: Epistemological Challenges in the Methodology of Theorised Architectural History’, Journal of Architecture (Summer 2000), v. 5, pp. 215-27.

This essay was first published as ‘From Austin, Texas to Santiago Atitlan, and back again, Felipe Herandez (ed.), Journal of Romance Studies, Special Issue: Architecture and Transculturation in Latin America, (2003) and republished in, Felipe Herandez, Mark Millington and Iain Borden (eds.), Architecture and Transculturation in Latin America (forthcoming 2005).

This paper was published as Jane Rendell, ‘Between Two: Theory and Practice’, Jonathan Hill (ed.) Opposites Attract, special issue of the Journal of Architecture (Summer 2003) v. 8, pp. 221-37.

This paper was published as ‘Architecture-Writing’, in Jane Rendell (ed.) ‘Critical Architecture’, special issue of the Journal of Architecture, (June 2005), v. 10. n. 3, pp. 255-64.

This paper was published as ‘Architectural Research and Disciplinarity’, ARQ, (2004), v. 8, n. 4,  pp. 141-7.