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Zoë Crisp, BA (Lond), MPhil (Cantab)

PhD Candidate

My current PhD research is on the history of the English urban back garden in the long nineteenth century. I am using cartographic and census-based evidence, together with the literature on sanitary and housing reform, amateur gardening, and popular recreation, to provide a nationwide survey of the incidence, size, and type of back plots over time and between social classes, and to chart the development, contents, changing uses of the English urban back garden over time.

Biography

Career

  • June – October 2007 : Research Assistant, The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
  • August-October 2008: Cartographic assistant, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure

Qualifications

  • 2004-2007, BA (History), University College London
  • 2007-2008, MPhil (Economic and Social History), University of Cambridge
  • 2008 – present, PhD candidate (History), University of Cambridge

Research

‘The urban back garden in England in the nineteenth century.’

This is an ESRC-funded doctoral research project.

It is generally asserted (or assumed) by social, urban, and garden historians alike that urban gardens, variously: did not exist; that if they did exist, they were the preserve of the urban elites (eighteenth century aristocrats or nineteenth century middle-class suburbanites); that they were not provided for the working classes until some point in the post-First World War twentieth century; and that unless they were large or lavishly planted they were not ‘gardens’ as we know them today. This last assumption goes some way towards explaining the first: urban overcrowding and air pollution were, indeed, barriers to extravagant urban gardening on a large scale.

My MPhil and PhD projects, however, have pioneered a new quantitative approach to garden history, and showed that gardens for all classes existed in widely differing urban areas well before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and as early as the first quarter.

The project seeks to answer two broad questions: firstly, what was the nation-wide state of private plot provision for each occupational class over time; and, secondly, what were the contents and uses of the garden? How did these change over time?

The first question is approached by a detailed, in-depth analysis of a representative sample of five towns across England to provide accurate data on the provision and size of private and shared plots over time. Using data from the 1881 Census Enumerators’ Books, together with cartographic evidence from across the period, I have shown that, far from being the preserve of the middle classes in the last third of the nineteenth century, private plots were afforded to houses occupied by all classes across the nineteenth century. The cartographic evidence shows that these plots were not large or lavishly planted, but they did exist, and were clearly used; often as we might use them today. Nineteenth-century gardening magazines, the catalogues and business records of seed companies and nurseries, government reports into the state of large towns and working-class housing and sanitation, Public Health and Housing Acts, and working- and middle-class autobiographies and diaries, show how different classes of occupiers used their back plots over time – whether as planted or practical spaces – and chart how and when the very English obsession with the possession of a private patch of green came into being.

Publications

Published work / impact

Conference and seminar papers

  • ‘The changing face of the urban back garden in England in the nineteenth century’, British Association of Victorian Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham, 1st-3rd September 2011
  • ‘The urban back garden in England in the long nineteenth century: a chronological and class-based analysis of three English towns’, Economic History Society Annual Conference: New Researchers’ Session, University of Cambridge, April 2011
  • ‘The urban back garden in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,’ Economic History Society Graduate Training Course, Manchester, December 2009
  • ‘Gardens and gardening in the nineteenth century,’ McMenemy Seminar, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, October 2008
  • ‘The urban back garden in Cambridge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,’ Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History, University of Cambridge November 2008

External activities

  • Co-founder and convenor of the Graduate Workshop in Urban History, University of Cambridge, 2011 onwards
  • Convenor of the Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History, University of Cambridge, 2008 – 2011
  • LGBT Officer, Trinity Hall MCR, 2008 – 2011