Recent proposals to establish a ‘managed zone’ for female street sex workers in Liverpool are placed in this paper in historical and geographical context. Liverpool is shown to be an exemplar of a late Victorian municipal management of prostitution that was just as firmly committed to the containment and ‘localisation’ of sex work. This model is contrasted with alternative municipal strategies, and set within a national legislative agenda increasingly hostile to tolerance and regulation. The contours of this governmental regulation of commercial sexuality are explored in some detail here, but this historical geography is also offered as a way of informing contemporary concerns, cautioning as it does against averring either the novelty or the progressiveness of contemporary policies on the zoning of sex work.

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This paper explores the faith that different agencies, state and social, placed in police data detailing drunkenness, how that data was extracted, and, as a consequence, those who would make claims based on the data. Statistical rankings both reflected and reinforced a nineteenth-century geography of drunkenness, which revealed Liverpool to be the drink capital of England; this paper reveals how that geography was propped on problematic figures, which were reworked in contemporary discourses of drink and crime, and argues for a spatial contextualization of drinking and drunkenness.

This article considers the late-Victorian and Edwardian legislative treatment of problem drunkenness in Scotland under the 1898 Inebriates Act. It examines the uneven enactment of the law, by geography and gender, and exposes how mundane questions of bureaucracy, of finance and jurisdiction, intersected with the institutional management of people convicted under it. I present an analytical framework of case geography to examine the ways in which bureaucratic and not simply medical interventions came together to shape people’s unfolding futures. Their removal to – and oftentimes between – institutions produced and did not simply resolve bureaucratic challenges. In conclusion I call for a greater awareness of the ways in which such mobile lives shaped policy: they tested the geographical imagination of government and with it the viability of this inebriate system.