ABSTRACT
This paper explores how Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford used Positivist sociology to recover the typological essence and historical significance of a medieval building called ‘Crosby Hall’ in Bishopsgate, London. We will see how they used such interpretations to save the structure from demolition and to substantiate a proposal to make it a future-focused centre for eutopian ‘City Design’ called More’s College.
This essay thus begins with a discussion of Geddes and Branford’s sociological theory of ‘social formations’. Here the edifice will be presented as an index of alternating historical ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’ powers, from the point of its construction to the announcement of its imminent demolition. We will see that after coordinating its systematic removal to a new site in Chelsea, London, Geddes and Branford proposed to use their sociological survey method as the pedagogical basis of a eutopian school called ‘More’s College’. I will argue that Geddes and Branford aimed to link the building’s former association to the utopian Thomas More to a eutopian future affiliated to the father of Positivist sociology, Auguste Comte. Effectively this paper examines an instance in which sociology was used in the early twentieth century to justify acts of deep heritage conservation, in which a structure’s embedded symbolic meanings were inverted – to effectively serve as emblems of social empowerment.
