This chapter describes the Bank Junction in the inter-war period and considers the rebuilding of the Bank of England by Sir Herbert Baker. By the 1920s Baker had a distinguished record as an architect in the service of empire. The question of rebuilding the Bank of England was first actively considered during the First World War. Once commissioned, Baker worked quickly to prepare his report, presenting it to the Rebuilding Committee. Baker's reports indicates, the rebuilding of the Bank required particular sensitivity to issues of conservation, historical continuity, public taste and opinion. For Baker, the architectural problem was maintaining the unity of the expanded building while preserving as much of Sir John Soane's work as possible. Baker, in giving architectural expression to the new Bank, was working within an imperial vision drawn from the Pax Britannica, the gold-sterling standard and the unquestioned imperial supremacy of the long nineteenth-century.

The Merchant of Venice abounds in allusions to the myth of the Golden Fleece, unlike the rest of the canon where key terms associated with the myth are rarely mentioned explicitly. The myth circulated widely in sixteenth-century Europe. This chapter analyses the significance of the Golden Fleece myth as a subtext of The Merchant of Venice. It contends that its contribution to the dramatic texture and spatial mapping of the play extends well beyond Ovidian and Senecan interactions. The Golden Fleece myth and biblical parables are brought together in an intricate network of ovine images that radiates through the whole play, inviting audiences to revisit initial, male-induced representations of the play's three female figures, Portia, Nerissa and Jessica. The Venetian Jasons are the product of myth and its reconfigurations, which are interwoven historically and contemporaneously.

The evidence drawn from Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds suggests that differing social, political and cultural contexts helped determine both a community's civic identity and, significantly, its engagement with national and imperial perspectives. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the urban elite in towns and cities consciously constructing civic identities that placed their own community at the heart of national and imperial narratives. Indeed, for many readers of the provincial press, the Empire became significant only when imperial issues were fused with the local. The new journalism's ability to engage with elements of local popular culture enabled them to serve a growing working-class desire for sports and coverage of their locality. In the late nineteenth century the English urban elites embarked on a mission to create strong municipal identities.

This chapter examines the inception, dissemination and development of Empire Day in Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds and illustrates the contrasting motivations for staging the annual event. It takes a different approach and systematically contrasts the influence of the movement in the three communities through the local press, institutions and, where possible, working-class testimony. In contextualising Empire Day within the three communities, the chapter endeavours to contrast experiences between the towns and thereby assess the movement's significance and impact. The commercial side of empire, which had always been present in the numerous imperial exhibitions from the 1880s, was showcased in the most extravagant fashion in the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924. National perspectives, however, mask the process of how Empire Day was implemented in the locality and filtered through the provincial press and civic elites and received by the populous at large.

Through an analysis of Love's Mistress, this chapter addresses how cultural tastes and approaches to classical learning evolved in the first half of the seventeenth century, and highlights the influence of French fashions. It considers why Love's Mistress was so successful with its elite public, despite or perhaps because of its sturdy, potentially subversive comedy. The chapter first explores the elite/popular divide through a comparison with the vogue for burlesque in seventeenth-century France - the native country of Queen Henrietta Maria. Second, it argues that taking sides in the play's several controversies matters less than appreciating the situations of arbitration that Heywood consistently emphasises, making this a play not just about mythology, but about the critical apprehension of mythology and drama. Finally, the chapter addresses the generic complexity of Love's Mistress, including its relationship to Heywood's earlier Ages, contemporary pageants, and masques.

The hospital movement in Europe arose out of a tradition of charity and religious life that originated in the earliest days of Christianity. The extensive, fast paced, urbanization of the high Middle Ages, nowhere more pronounced than in Italy, challenged the earlier ecclesiastical model of charity. The establishment of new forms of community created novel social, economic, and political relationships that tested the traditional authority of both the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Some scholars have viewed the rise of lay religious and semi-religious movements throughout medieval Europe as a result of theological reform and ecclesiastical leadership. At their most basic level, charitable institutions, such as the hospital, gave immediate relief to those who were in need, fulfilling a primary service to the urban community. Charity was a dual mechanism; it served to alleviate the poverty of others and the sinfulness of the self.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book re-examines the history of chocolate at a local and a global level, linking together the legacies of early imperial exploitation. It also re-examines the continued global hegemony of western capitalists with the hard work of ordinary women in a British factory and on the cocoa farms of British West Africa. The book begins with the romance of the cocoa bean, food of the Gods, in which women tend to feature as either over-indulgent consumers or 'colourful' exotic workers performing the lighter side of cocoa farming. It explains women's complex relationships to the former British empire and how such relations have been structured by the chocolate industry. The book concludes by emphasising the narratives told by women working in the industry.

This chapter presents an account of the activities and social formation of the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) punk band Crass to develop a critique of the notion of 'subculture' employed at the time of the group's existence by the Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It supplies a narrative of how the band and the cultural movement known as 'anarcho-punk' provided a 'milieu' where class identities could blend and develop hybrid forms of cultural and social capital. Crass were a band that provided an alternative response to the traditional class politics of the UK. Their cultural and political work forged a hybrid class identity that developed a cultural capital that moved individual perceptions and horizons to a new level. The band's version of anarchism, based on a DIY philosophy and individual responsibility, moulded a new and influential anti-political response to the post-consensus landscape.