Life Between Walls: Race, Subdivision and Lodging Houses in Postwar London

Alistair Cartwright

doi:10.5334/ah.378

Abstract

Four solid walls and a roof over one’s head. These, from an essentialist standpoint, are the minima of homely existence. What happens then under conditions of speculation and subdivision when domestic walls are no longer stable givens, but become flimsy, mobile and contested? Drawing on a rich seam of popular British films from the late 1950s and early ’60s — set in the transitional world of postwar London lodging houses — this paper examines how partition walls refashioned the interior space of the terraced house. Analysis of popular visual culture is supported by archival research centred on local valuation lists, which allow us to read the traces of these sometimes temporary, often illegal structures. The paper argues that partition walls were key to the extraction of value from a declining private rental sector by property traders and landlords. At the same time, these ubiquitous structures formed a series of highly charged thresholds between disparate individuals. Partition walls were instrumental in the ‘spatialisation’ of race in postwar Britain, serving to heighten an awareness of otherness while simultaneously bringing individuals into uncomfortable proximity. Finally, the paper asks how people overcame or lived between these divisions, and how this affected questions of visibility and representation.

Highlights

Lynne Reid Banks’ 1960 novel The L-Shaped Room (2004) is a book built on descriptions of rented rooms
Having been forced out of her family home when her father hears of her unexpected pregnancy, Jane chooses this run-down part of West London, because, in the narrator’s words, ‘in some small way I wanted to punish myself ... to bury myself in this alien world ... feeling that I and the other inhabitants ... would scarcely speak the same language, and that they would all remain unknown to me except as closed doors to pass, or occasional footsteps or voices through walls’ (2004: 36, 38)
1988: 80–81; Marriott 1967: 39); tenure categories were recast via the growth of both public housing and homeownership (Malpass 2005); and new mechanisms of state and capital began to take effect, from enhanced compulsory purchase powers (Massey and Catalano 1978: 17–19) to a range of new ways of extending and underwriting mortgage finance (Scott 2008: 7–8)

Summary

Alistair Cartwright

Four solid walls and a roof over one’s head. What happens under conditions of speculation and subdivision when domestic walls are no longer stable givens, but become flimsy, mobile and contested? Drawing on a rich seam of popular British films from the late 1950s and early ’60s — set in the transitional world of postwar London lodging houses — this paper examines how partition walls refashioned the interior space of the terraced house. The paper argues that partition walls were key to the extraction of value from a declining private rental sector by property traders and landlords. These ubiquitous structures formed a series of highly charged thresholds between disparate individuals. Partition walls were instrumental in the ‘spatialisation’ of race in postwar Britain, serving to heighten an awareness of otherness while simultaneously bringing individuals into uncomfortable proximity. The paper asks how people overcame or lived between these divisions, and how this affected questions of visibility and representation

Introduction

Findings

Kensington Park Road Ledbury Road Clarendon Road Blenheim Crescent Powis Square