Graduate Student, History and Classics
Thesis Title: Workers' Fields: Sport, Landscape, and the Labour Movement in South Wales, 1858-1958
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Martin Johnes
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About
My research is currently focused on the use of playing fields by the Labour movement in South Wales as a mechanism to alleviate unemployment, to bring about land reform, and to transform the landscape of capitalism through the powers of municipal government. I follow the transition from parks as sites of contested Victorian moral values through to playing fields built by the unemployed at the height of the Great Depression through to the legacy of this urban success on Labour's ideas about rural Britain and the building of 'holiday' Britain through the appropriation of the rural and the institution of 'the countryside' as a quasi-rural but thoroughly urbanised space.
In an effort at keeping me sane (i.e. distracting me from the PhD slog), I am also working on a more long-term project exploring a comparative history of the Cape Breton and South Wales coalfields, their culture, politics, and social movements. More recent digressions include work on the development of Ice Hockey in Britain in the 1930s, on greyhound racing in South Wales in the same period, and the nature of youth politics in South Wales and the West Country in the first half of the twentieth century with a particular focus on the Labour League of Youth.
I am currently an executive member of Llafur: the Welsh People's History Society and am involved in teaching two courses at Swansea: Background to Wales, 1800 - Present and Europe of Extremes, 1789 - 1989.
