I Persevered with my Geography

This personal reflection traces some of the interconnections between Stuart Hall's work and the “new” cultural geography. The author, in the context of his own intellectual biography and indebted to Hall and to those geographers whose work has been influenced by him, is interested in “routes” rather than “roots” and in the traffic between cultural studies and “critical” human geography. Drawing on a selection of Hall's work and a number of published interviews, the essay reflects on several moments of traffic and interchange. The discussion is partial and personal, rather than systematic, and tracks back and forth across a particular period when cultural studies exerted a significant influence on the discipline of geography, perhaps most notably in the United Kingdom. Beginning and ending in the current conjuncture, and taking in various stopping-off points along the way, the essay reflects on the legacy of this traffic in ideas.