Heritage Discourse and the Desexualisation of Public Space: The “Historical Restorations” of Bloomsbury’s Squares Johan Andersson School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK; j.andersson@leeds.ac.uk Abstract: In recent years, the local authorities in London’s historic Bloomsbury district have carried out a number of refurbishments of the area’s public squares. These landscaping schemes have typically been labelled “historical restorations” in attempts to predetermine the evaluation criteria as “historic” rather than political, social and aesthetic. Focusing on Russell Square and Bloomsbury Square, this paper illustrates how the “restorations” were selective: the introduction of gates and railings and the removal of planting were not primarily designed to restore these historical gardens, but reflect a surveillance-friendly ideal of urban space, specifically introduced to displace the men who used these squares for cruising. Through a detailed review of archival material from both mainstream and gay media, I illustrate the shifting forms of policing and landscaping in Bloomsbury’s squares, while also highlighting how homonormative capital has colluded with the regulation of public space in this part of London. Keywords: London, public space, revanchism, heritage discourse, queer, homonormativity Introduction Since the early 1990s, critiques of the privatisation and sanitisation of public space have proliferated and emerged into a relatively coherent genre of critical urban writing. While early trendsetters highlighted the domestication and surveillance of quasi-public spaces such as corporate plazas and shopping malls (eg Davies 1990; Sorkin 1992), another strand of literature has focused on the social homogenisation of parks and urban squares. Often using New York City as a paradigmatic example, influential case studies have critiqued the displacement of homeless people from iconic city squares such as Union Square Park (Deutsche 1996: 1–48), Tompkins Square (Smith 1996) and Bryant Park (Zukin 1996). These analyses, which highlighted how real estate speculation and crime prevention through environmental design have privatised previously public spaces in New York, also became influential globally. In the UK, similar perspectives were adopted to highlight the social profiling and active displacement of marginal populations from semi- public spaces in business districts such as the City of London (Borden 2000) and in urban parks more generally (Crouch 1994). At the same time, questions have been raised of whether the North American debate on the threats to public space can simply be imported and applied to different Antipode Vol. 00 No. 00 2011 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–18 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00960.x C  2011 The Author. Antipode C  2011 Editorial Board of Antipode.