This paper is an exploration of methodological and ethical issues in historical geography research. Drawing on the experience of researching the historical geographies of abortion in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Lancashire, the paper discusses some of the ethical and methodological questions that historical research on sensitive topics raises. This paper investigates the politics of the archive and the forms of censorship researchers may encounter. It also explores the possibility of a conflict of interest between researcher and participant, including the dilemmas researchers face when research participants are dead, but remain important figures in the community. Moreover, the paper argues that the recent burgeoning interest in family and local history makes questions of method and ethics far more urgent for the geographer. In conclusion, the paper calls for more dialogue within geography about researching sensitive subjects, and also between geography and other disciplines.

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It is thirty years since the first call to engage with gender as an analytical category was made in the sub‐discipline of Historical Geography. Significant advances in scholarship have been made in this time, particularly the re‐situation of women in the history of Geography as a subject. This paper looks to the next thirty years in Historical Geography and asks how the sub‐discipline can retain and develop its critical political edge. In the 2017 Women's Marches protestors dressed as suffragettes from the early twentieth century and proclaimed that little had changed in the fight for women's rights. Taking this ‘Victorian present’ as a starting point, this paper explores ways to connect Historical Geography to the gender politics of the present. The paper argues that the sub‐discipline has the methodological tools to use the past as a form of female power to engage with the inequalities that women still face. A sketch of a feminist historical geography of the present is provided using emancipatory and participatory research tools.

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.