ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the spatial machinery that enacted and materialised a civic space for the everyday praxis of civil registration. Drawing on archival research from the 1800s, including newspaper articles, popular magazines, and engravings, this chapter explores the centrepiece of administration, the General Register Office (Somerset House, London). The analysis reveals how state and non-state actors traced lines of movement through the General Register Office as a techno-legal device to materialise, perform, and communicate the creation of an everyday civic space for registration. Critical legal and historical studies of registration have cast the establishment of the General Register Office as a landmark moment in the emergence of modern bureaucracy. In this chapter, I argue that our popular understandings of civil registration are reflected in the social, spatial, and legal imaginaries populated by state and non-state actors in the nineteenth century. The framework for civil registration relied as much on a spatial machinery as it did on a system of paper-based bureaucracy that is typically attributed as the foundation of modern liberal societies. The importance of this spatial machinery is that it provides the ground for alternative pathways to unfold with the register.
