This two volume collection of British primary sources examines luxury institutions such as hotels, department stores, shopping arcades, libraries, museums, and performance spaces in the long nineteenth century. This period was marked not only by an increase of individual consumerism but also by the institutionalisation of opulent, often purpose-built spaces of consumption such as the much-admired new grand hotels, supposedly an American invention, and department stores, modelled on the French grands magasins, which, through their architecture and interior decoration alone, were veritable temples of luxury. At the same time, museums and big libraries advanced to becoming secular spaces in which cultural meaning was negotiated. Newly-built performance spaces, pleasure palaces, were important venues for enjoying one's spare time. These spaces were tied to the experience of leisure (no longer a prerogative of the upper classes) and thus to modernity. This two volume edition seeks to explore a fascinating but hitherto often neglected side of the British nineteenth century by bringing together a collection of annotated primary texts and visual material documenting these "temples of luxury" as they were seen by their contemporaries.

This volume explores institutions such as department stores, other shopping venues like drapers, as well as specialist stores that sell "luxury items". The violume also includes material on the Crystal Palace and other big "colonial" exhibitions, shopping arcades, bazaars, and planned shopping venues that did not materialise.

Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.

Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.