“Heave half a brick at a stranger”

A whole history remains to be written of spaces from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat. A very general impression respecting its inhabitants is, that "heave half a brick at a stranger," is the prevailing tone among them. If mentalities of violence are structured like a language, we might conceive of violent strategies as their spoken form: like any other form of utterance, they take particular forms and follow certain rules. Violence was a prominent way of expressing a wide variety of customary meanings. Working-class life was often lived publicly, in the sense of material as well as imagined geographies. Other aspects of working-class violence could be deliberately public and made use of violent strategies in order to gain legitimacy through the use of space. As civilizing pressures and urban demarcation increased, the working-classes became more contained in spaces that excluded them from respectability and power.