Absent architectures: post-war housing in British children’s picture books (1960–present)

Abstract

In the decades following World War II, British cities—and, to a lesser degree, rural areas—underwent radical architectural and structural transformations. Yet, architecture associated with post-war reconstruction is significantly underrepresented in children’s picture books of the period. The home, the street, and the high-street are, more often than not, depicted in a formal language associated with Georgian, Edwardian and Victorian architectural ideals. This paper explores what kind of cultural ideologies children are integrated into when it comes to the representation of post-war architecture. Specifically, the paper focuses on domestic space and asks what ideas of the ‘home’ are promoted. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s exploration of the relationship between domestic architecture and emotional/psychological response in The Poetics of Space (1957), and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of communication in the age of postmodernity, this paper maps the influence of post-war architectural design on a selection of children’s picture books published during the 1960s and 1970s. The paper concludes with an examination of two popular picture books published in 1996 and 2013, which trace the legacies of post-war architecture.