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Oxford Street is one of the best‐known shopping streets in the world, but it suffers from serious problems. Investors are cautious about it; many of the buildings are of poor physical quality, and new developments pose technical difficulties. Russell Schiller offers several solutions to these problems. Oxford Street could be better managed, as are some of our better quality covered shopping centres. But in itself this would not be sufficient: what is also needed is a courageous decision to reduce traffic and introduce more pedestrianisation. Another possibility is to increase the physical depth of Oxford Street. This article is based on a talk given by Russell Schiller at a conference in September on the future of Oxford Street, organised by Westminster City Council.

The evidence is confused, but it looks as if shop numbers in the UK may be rising, according to our contributors. There are interesting implications if this is so; fringe areas round town centres may not be declining, and there may be growing variety in our high streets.

British town centres are suffering from the growing trend towards out‐of‐town retailing. The Continental model for the future of town centres appears attractive, but there are problems. National durable multiples face a locational dilemma – they have a commitment to town centres but wish to follow the market out of town if that is necessary. The result is that many run both town centre and out‐of‐town operations in parallel. The three waves of retail decentralization – food, bulky goods and comparison goods‐have varying effects on different sizes of centre. Larger durable‐based town centres are likely to suffer slow attrition, but some food‐anchored district centres could suffer from new, smaller, out‐of‐town supermarkets. There is a growing amount of leisure‐based shopping which could work to the advantage of some small market towns. The tide of out‐of‐town retailing is running so strongly that the new tighter government policy is unlikely to stop it completely. Many town centres could contract commercially, but they could continue to prosper by encouraging housing and services.

Before we consider the subject matter of this paper we should briefly remind ourselves as to what investment is! Basically, this involves a sacrifice of something now for the prospect of a future gain. This will inevitably cause the individual or company to give up the purchase of goods or services today in order to achieve greater consumption in the future, despite the uncertainty of the return of the investment made.

Marks & Spencer's decision to go out of town is one of the most significant in the retail sector in recent years, but so far little research has been done into its implications. In July 1987 Marks were granted planning permission to put up a shopping complex at Sprucefield, on the southern edge of the Belfast conurbation, and trading will probably start in December 1988. A survey into this development, of both retailers and consumers, was carried out by the Department of Marketing at the University of Ulster. The favourable views of shoppers were perhaps not all that surprising — but the support of retailers is contrary to received wisdom.

Predicting the future is a risky business, and in retailing in particular it is especially hazardous. Which may be the reason why only one or two of the speakers at the Financial Times conference, “Retailing to 1996”, actually dared to prophesy. Nonetheless the two‐day conference, held in London in May, was valuable in that it put forward some useful analyses of current trends in retailing. The range of themes tackled was comprehensive; it included the changing consumer, the two‐nations syndrome, multi‐niche formulae, the specialists versus generalists debate, the emergence of the cellular household, out‐of‐town developments — and the retailer as entertainer! The 150 delegates comprised a wide range of interests — retailers, market analysts, technologists and property developers — and included our contributor, Michael Poynor.

The means to quantify the inputs to be used by a valuation surveyor in an explicit model for appraising contaminated land are explored. These relate to treatment techniques and cost estimates; and forecasting techniques and the forecasting of future rent and capital flows, cost changes and depreciation. A comparison is made with a “traditional” valuation approach. It is concluded that an explicit approach is more likely to satisfy the calls for more sophisticated and creditable approaches and more explanation and justification in appraisals and valuations.

This note presents new archival evidence about John Maynard Keynes’ attitudes toward Jews. The relevant material is composed of two letters sent by Robert G. Wertheimer to Bertrand Russell and Richard F. Kahn along with their replies. Between 1963 and 1964, Wertheimer – an Austrian-born Jewish immigrant then professor of economics at Babson College – wrote to Russell and Kahn asking for their personal reminiscences concerning Keynes’ anti-Semitic utterances. In their brief but still significant responses, both Russell and Kahn firmly denied any hint of anti-Semitism in Keynes, thereby providing significant first-hand testimonies from two of his closest acquaintances.

This essay brings structural intimacies – theorised as the meeting of social structural patterns with interpersonal lives – to the border to consider transnational LGBTQ kinships. Specifically, the paper considers ‘the border’ and its state-driven bio-regulations as a reproductive technology that produces LGBTQ, racial/ethnic and social class inequities through the consolidation of heteronormative, bio-genetic kinship institutions and ideations of family. Structural intimacies harnesses intimacy as both subject and as an analytic lens for queering reproductive sociology that insists on re-conceptualizing institutions central to our lives. Structural intimacies move our analytic gaze from how the border structures sexuality, and vice versa, to consider the border as at once a structural and an affective domain. Structural intimacies is a conceptual tool useful for cross-disciplinary inquiry into the social and structural contexts in which reproductive technologies render meaning, as well as produce families, and to illustrate the analytic necessity of storying both content and method as integral to queer/ing scholarship. Straddling the most proximal forms of daily care and labor patterning everyday intimacies with the policies and practices of the state, the concept of structural intimacies reveals moments of encounter between state institutions with the most intimate components of a person's life and identity, in this case amplified by the bio-politics of the border.

Mobilization by diaspora activists against illiberalism in their country of origin and by immigrants for equality in their country of settlement has received widespread attention in political science and sociology, respectively. However, because extant studies treat these mobilizations as distinct types, little is known about the relationship between diaspora and immigrant mobilization. This chapter addresses this theoretical gap using 167 interviews with Syrian and Yemeni activists in the United States and Britain. The findings demonstrate how Syrian and Yemeni diaspora mobilization in support of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions facilitated their visibility and voice as immigrants. Syrians built an organizational field with the capacity to contest host-country discrimination and local extremism; Yemenis instituted protests and brokerage that shaped the context of reception for home-country elites and challenged intragroup inequality. At the same time, economic disparities between national groups shaped their capacities to diversify tactics and sustain efforts over time. My chief claim is that diaspora mobilization facilitates immigrant voice and visibility but is mitigated in important ways by group-wise resources. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of voice and visibility among marginalized groups subjected to intersecting repressions.