ABSTRACT
For many years I have been fascinated by what one could describe as the sociology of place. This developed out of a concern with how people actually experience social relations, both those which are relatively immediate and those which are much more distant, and how these intersect. But this concern is not in any simple sense empiricist because places are not clear and obvious entities. The understanding of place cannot be undertaken without major theoretical endeavour. To know something as apparently simple as the social relations of place and its consumption is to have to engage with a sophisticated array of social theorising. Indeed almost all the major social and cultural theories bear upon the explanation of place in one way or another. However, such theories have not begun to explain the diversities of place, and this is because they have not engaged with the sociologies of time and space, the relations between the social and the physical environment, and the interdependencies between the consumption of material objects and of the natural and built environments.
