James Greenhalgh's insightful book examines legislative approaches to outdoor advertising in Britain, from 1817 to 1962, as a prism through which to understand ideas about the governance of space and governance through space, by state and municipal governments. Greenhalgh unpacks overlapping imaginaries of shared environments and brings to the fore material experience in an original contribution to debates about lived space, law, and capitalism. On his account, governmental approaches to advertising conceived it as a problem, yet the type of problem changed as a function of changing conceptualizations of space.
Following an introductory chapter, Chapters 2–5 proceed chronologically to show how concerns with spatial nuisance and obstruction gave way to liberal governmentality, then to city planning and urban modernism. In the first 70 years of the nineteenth century, Greenhalgh argues, advertising was treated as part of the detritus and disorder of city life. Opposition to it was embedded in ideals of improvement and focused on physical flow. From mid-century, governments attempted to regulate advertising display from more ambitious theoretical perspectives interested in the civilizing impact of space, conceived in terms of civic display, morality and public health. For their part, billposting companies tried to adapt to these demands through their management of advertising stations. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, the organized efforts of the Society of Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising (SCAPA) favoured a theory of amenity as a characteristic of space worthy of protection from advertising. Here, well-being and recreation became public goals, embedded in legislation over the twentieth century. Laws initially prioritized rural and historic spaces, but after the war, mundane urban space too was conceived as potentially dignified, and its residents were imagined as social-democratic subjects entitled to space free from commerce. At the inter- and post-war era, local governments led the way with expanding protections inspired by town planning and urban modernism. By the end of the 1950s, Greenhalgh shows an orthodoxy for which governmental management of advertising was mandated across all types of space, under the assumption that lived environments have profound effects on well-being.
Injurious Vistas focuses on governance and space offers a thoughtful account from these angles, and an illuminating analysis of their combination in urban history. Yet, the study can easily open additional vistas in terms of legal and advertising history. Its legal history unfolds as a story of control, in which political action constrains market forces. However, the legal powers brought to bear on advertising were diverse, consistently breached divides between politics and commerce, and their effect was not only control but also mainstreaming. As Greenhalgh observes, over the period advertising became accepted as a necessary component of lived space. This was not a forgone conclusion; the spread of advertising depended on forms of legitimation and functional infrastructure anchored in law. Everyday legalities, among them practices of contracts and uses of property, and amalgams of state and market actors who shaped legislation, were at work in this history. It began with the so-called rent system of advertising stations discussed in Injurious Vistas. This system could not be stabilized without aesthetic justifications, supplied by the industry in conjunction with courts, municipalities and citizens, which gradually turned an unstable property regime into a stable visual and material environment. Greenhalgh observes some of these dynamics, which, if given more conceptual room in the analysis, would show that legal processes mainstreamed advertising as much as they controlled it. Features of legislation that he examines as a mode of control, including the concept of amenity meticulously unpacked in the book, were part of a legal aesthetic outlook that incorporated views of poster advertising as indeed suspect but also as decidedly more beautiful than competing forms of outdoor advertising, and thus established it as an accepted feature of outdoor life. Early twentieth-century legislation thus built on prior industrial legal efforts rather than opposed them. It did mark a break in a specific sense, namely, that it incorporated a conceptual opposition between beauty and commerce that had been uncertain until that point. Functionally, the opposition may have underwritten expanding limitations on advertising display in the longer term (when a shift in views of residential space occurred, as Greenhalgh shows), but it also had a paradoxical effect: the more entrenched the opposition between beauty and commerce, the less the advertising industry considered itself bound by ideals of aesthetic progress.
The inseparability of politics and commerce, and the support they lent to advertising, also shed light on the question of advertising's cultural meanings. In Injurious Vistas, theories of space are a changing variable, while advertising is a constant, viewed by actors as an unplanned negative commercial phenomenon; injurious indeed. However, if the type of injury changed over time, this already implies the unstable valence of advertising, which deserves more weight. To deepen this point, it bears observing that anxieties about advertising were not only spatial; they had parallels in other public controversies, which implicated additional cultural spheres and advertising media. Controversies about the relationship between advertising and outdoor spaces occurred alongside debates about its boundaries with news, science, and religiously inflected morality. The treatment of space was thus part of a wider examination of advertising as a feature of modernity. Advertising disrupted views and hopes that British modernity was a process of progressive rationalization, and cast doubt on the cultural authority of fields that stood for rationalist values: the aesthetic education of the democracy (art), the communication of information (news), the dissemination of the products of science (most importantly in the context of advertising – medical science) and the preservation of rational self-control (common morality). Advertisers claimed affinities with these values, yet often seemed to undermine them and indeed to challenge rationalism and disenchantment more generally. The meaning of advertising therefore was in flux that did not emanate only from changing ideas of space; and in that flux, it was not consistently negative. Over time, legal mobilizations incorporated supportive views that associated advertising with rational progress, yet with a critical edge that guarded field boundaries. If advertising was legitimate, it was also framed as inferior to other fields and located at the margins of progressive ideals: it admittedly had aesthetic value – but tending to vulgarity; its informational worth was shadowed by bias; its knowledge value inclined to exaggeration. All this created a conceptual tension that Injurious Vistas demonstrates in relation to space: advertising assumed the status of an obvious and even indispensable feature of modern life, but also a disparaged one, considered suspect in aesthetic and epistemological terms. This status was not a given, but a product of wide-ranging contestation in which legal means, governmental but also bottom-up and industry-driven legalities, shaped the meaning of this system of capitalism.
