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The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.

In keeping with the long-standing focus on cities and urbanism in sociology, the researchers in this volume contribute to our knowledge of children, youth, and the city. These scholars take up ideas connected to agency, belonging, citizenship, identity, participation, power, and relationality and explore both historical and contemporary ways children and youth co-construct, contribute to, are constructed by, navigate, negotiate, and resist their urban social worlds and urban relationships.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by Tony McSean, Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for VINE articles rests with the British Library Board, but opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription to VINE is £10 per year and the subscription period runs from January to December.

It tends to be called the corner shop, mainly because it occupied a corner building for extra window space, but also due to the impetus given to the name by television series seeking to portray life as it used to be. The village grew from the land, a permanent stopping place for the wandering tribes of early Britain, the Saxons, Welsh, Angles; it furnished the needs of those forming it and eventually a village store or shop was one of those needs. Where the needs have remained unchanged, the village is much as it has always been, a historical portrait. The town grew out of the village, sometimes a conglomerate of several adjacent villages. In the days before cheap transport, the corner shop, in euphoric business terms, would be described as “a little gold mine”, able to hold its own against the first introduction of multiple chain stores, but after 1914 everything changed. Edwardian England was blasted out of existence by the holocaust of 1914–18, destroyed beyond all hope of recovery. The patterns of retail trading changed and have been continuously changing ever since. A highly developed system of cheap bus transport took village housewives and also those in the outlying parts of town into busy central shopping streets. The jaunt of the week for the village wife who saw little during the working days; the corner shop remained mainly for things they had “run out of”. Every village had its “uppety” madames however who affected disdain of the corner shop and its proprietors, preferring to swish their skirts in more fashionable emporia, basking in the obsequious reception by the proprietor and his equally servile staff.