Science and the City: Spaces and geographies of Metropolitan Science

The Metropolitan Science research project, based at the University of Kent from 2017–2020 and designed to run alongside the Science City gallery project, explores the significant place of craft, trade and commercial institutions in the development of London’s technical and experimental knowledge cultures. Drawing on this research, this paper presents three case studies to show what can be revealed by considering the spaces in and around such institutions – the Royal Mint in the Tower of London, the Trinity House on Water Lane and East India House on Leadenhall Street. These sites combined ceremonial and administrative functions with important roles in the processes of making, codifying, storing, disseminating and assessing knowledge of various kinds. We examine how, both as physical and imaginative spaces, they enabled, structured and limited these processes. Showing the various ways in which the spaces we discuss were defined, policed, used and networked, we consider how their multifunctional character, which often blurred distinctions between public and private, impacted on their communities of knowledge and practice and on broader metropolitan scientific cultures. This is a matter of how they related to other spaces, other authorities, and other resources, but also of how the communities that occupied them sought to balance commercial or craft secrecy with public accountability.