How might one tap the idioms of vanished communities once local knowledge has faded? How might one chart the mental landscapes of locales that have been overlaid by other people's understandings and whose material forms have been erased by urban redevelopment? This paper integrates history and archaeology as it attempts an ethnographic re-reading of one such precinct in Melbourne, Australia.

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Starting with Englander's denial (Urban History, 21, 2 (1994)), that ‘slums are … real only in words, … rather than being rooted in the material conditions of everyday life’, the article draws a distinction between historical analyses of slums, which entail an examination of words, signs and symbols, and analyses of inner-city neighbourhoods which have been overshadowed by slumland representations. It is claimed that this latter task entails a nuanced materialist historicism, attuned to the surviving material and oral culture of actual neighbourhoods, in place of Englander's faith in an older style of historical materialism.

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