Interwar London Research Articles

Interwar London after Dark in British Popular Culture By Mara Arts

Interwar London after Dark in British Popular Culture By Mara Arts

Neal Shasore, Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. xxvii + 432pp. 142 illustrations. Bibliography. £71.00 hbk.

Neal Shasore, Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. xxvii + 432pp. 142 illustrations. Bibliography. £71.00 hbk.

Book Review: Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London by Neal Shasore

Book Review: <i>Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London</i> by Neal Shasore

Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London by Stephen Legg (review)

Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London by Stephen Legg (review)

Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London

Journal Article Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London Get access Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London Neal Shasore, Oxford University Press, 2022. 464pp., b&w illus., cloth,£65.00. ISBN: 9780192849724. Eleanor Herring Eleanor Herring Lecturer in Design History and Theory The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, United Kingdom E-mail: e.herring@gsa.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Design History, epad032, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad032 Published: 17 June 2023

Becoming "Escalator-Legged" in Interwar London: Mechanization, Habit, and the Mobile Body.

This article provides the first critical history of escalators on the London Underground railway and the ways their introduction reconfigured passengers' bodies. As the Underground became a coordinated and unitary technological system, its central Tube stations-particularly their elevators-created friction and exerted systemic drag. The Underground's executives initiated a major modernization program, replacing elevators with automatic escalators. Yet for the new technology to succeed, passengers had to learn certain actions, develop competencies, and acquire new corporeal habits. This article examines the dynamic regimes of instruction and surveillance that the Underground deployed to achieve these aims and assesses the outcome. Despite the assurance that the escalator would mechanize movement and overcome physiological variation, certain users found it discriminatory. While contemporary critics depicted the machine as an agent of dehumanization, beyond rush hour and at less busy stations, "escalator-legged" Londoners found more expressive and autonomous ways of moving.

The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic ed. by David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg

Reviewed by: The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic ed. by David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg Natalia Telepneva Featherstone, David and Høgsbjerg, Christian (eds). The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic. Racism, Resistance and Social Change. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2021. xvi + 287 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £85.00: $130.00. In this collection of articles, editors David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg set out to contribute to a growing body of literature that investigates the impact of the Russian Revolution on black radicals during the interwar period and beyond. As outlined in the introduction, the ambition of the volume is three-fold: to show how black radicals understood and engaged with ideas generated by the Russian Revolution; to recover the history of physical and ideational connections forged among the black left across the Black Atlantic; and to show how these individuals engaged with the Soviet Union. In a helpful introduction that succinctly outlines the state of the field, the editors argue the collection will challenge the notion that Communism was a solely European phenomenon and reassert the 'missing and erased connections of antiracist politics and resistance' (p. 19). The ideas generated by black left intellectuals in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution constitute an important theme in this volume. Most chapters confirm what we already knew, namely that the events of 1917 had a major impact on black radicals who heralded Bolshevism because, as they saw it, it eliminated ethnic prejudice in the USSR. We learn some important details about how Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American black activist, adopted an 'unsentimental view of anti-imperialist struggle' (p. 68) largely, argues Winston James, due to his complex experiences of white proletarian nationalism in interwar London. Mathieu Renault adds to the portrait of American poet and activist Langston Hughes, who celebrated the impact of socialism in Soviet Central Asia, even though he still saw the region from an 'Orientalist perspective' as a 'massive harem' (p. 92). Cathy Begin draws our attention to the specific timing and the inadequacy of the local left in the USA to explain the appeal of Bolshevism, while Marika Sherwood similarly points to the continuous failure of the Left to take seriously the demands of anticolonial activists in post-war Britain. One wonders, however, whether the volume could shed have further light on exactly how these activists and movements, as the editors posit in the introduction, shaped 'Communist practices and ideas' (p. 16). For example, Olga Panova's excellent chapter argues that Soviet literary critics by and large toed the official line in their responses to African American literature. These chapters recover the diversity and originality of these important ideas, but their larger impact is left somewhat obscure. Another theme is black radicals' relationship with the Soviet Union and the Comintern. A number of authors address the developments in the aftermath [End Page 772] of the Sixth World Congress in 1928 — the peak of Soviet support for black liberation. Nigel Westmaas adds important details about the pre-war history of racialism in Guyana; Holger Weiss describes the activities of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers based in Hamburg; and Sandra Pujals describes the work of the Comintern's Caribbean Bureau in the 1930s. The story is a fairly familiar one, as many black radicals who admired and/or worked for the Comintern became disillusioned with the organization by the mid 1930s. Pujals's chapter probably goes the furthest in explaining why the Comintern's project in the Caribbean failed, as it ran up against divergent conceptions of race and local resistance to centrally-imposed bureaucratic structure. A number of chapters reconstruct the 'erased' connections of anticolonial politics across the Atlantic, but several leave the reader wanting to learn more about how these functioned in practice. For example, we learn about the existence of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, but little in terms of how the organization operated to, say, spread the radical messages across the Atlantic. Besides, Africa occupies little room in the volume. As the editors explain in the introduction, such a 'silence' exists because these conversations between Bolshevism and...

“The Battle of the Bridges”: Temporal Modernity in the Reimagining of Interwar London's Cityscape

AbstractThe impending collapse of Waterloo Bridge (built 1811–1817) in 1923 led to wide-ranging debate among professional and political elites about the need for preserving or replacing the bridge and about London's inadequate river crossings in general. Over a fifteen-year period, cabinet-level discussions on the problem of the Thames bridges occurred every year; the government struck a number of committees and a royal commission on solving cross-river traffic issues. A powerful elite lobby formed to fight for the preservation of old Waterloo Bridge, and the building of a new bridge at Charing Cross, a constitutional squabble arose over the respective authorities of Parliament and of London municipal government over the bridges, and a rancorous debate among politicians, town planners, architects, engineers, and the general public raged over the issue of the existing and proposed new bridges. A number of issues were at play and are discussed, but ultimately this article argues that it was competing, temporally connected conceptions of modernity that divided the two camps into preservationists and rebuilders.

Stillness in Locomotion and Self-dissolution of Metropolitans in Bowen's To the North

This article is to justify that modern metropolitans suffer from the dissolution of identities and a loss of loving ability to be a modern man of complete personality. Motion and stillness, life and death coexist within the same urban space of metropolitans. And the stillness in urban life space is both the cause and effect to accelerate the process of self-dissolution of metropolitans. The identities and autonomy of Bowen’s city dwellers are formed and destroyed in the process of moving. Bowen represents the metropolitans’ predicaments of self-dissolution during interwar London by setting them in a depressing space of constant travels and emotional stillness in locomotion. The crazy mobility brings the destructive outcome to make its subjects into the absolute stillness and self-dissolution of the subjects, which is also a common living state of modern city dwellers. This article tries to bring an awareness as well as to show a sympathetic feeling towards those predicated modern man.

Creating a ‘Suspect Community’: Monitoring and Controlling the Cypriot Community in Inter-War London

Abstract This article offers a critical assessment of British policing and government monitoring and controlling of a ‘suspect community’ in inter-war London, which was also the subject of emigration control, the only colonial group to be thus treated prior to the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962. The case is that of the Cypriots, who began to emigrate to the imperial metropolis in significant numbers in the late 1920s and largely settled in and around Soho. Their concentrated geographical location made them easy to police, monitor and control once their criminality and deviant communist politics made them a ‘suspect community’. They were also subjected to immigration control at their homeland by the Cypriot Colonial Government. There was significant co-operation between the Home and Colonial Offices to achieve the controls in both London and Cyprus. The immigration controls served as a prototype for the subsequent restrictions on other groups after the Second World War (namely those from India and Pakistan) and formed the basis of the Commonwealth Immigration Act.

Behind a Pane of Glass: Collective Memory in Woolf’s Interwar London

This essay demonstrates how Virginia Woolf negotiates problems of temporal, spatial, and intersubjective distance through the modern—and increasingly transparent—landscape of interwar London. Through readings of “A Sketch of the Past” and Mrs. Dalloway, I argue that the perceptual oscillation between surface and depth glass affords as both medium and metaphor is particularly central to Woolf’s conceptualization of memory. While Woolf may have shared her contemporaries’ anti-Victorian fascination with “pure” surfaces (embodied architecturally in glass) and the solitary insight such surfaces might offer, her own evocations of glass nuance modernism’s relation to its antecedents and illuminate her investments in the problem and necessity of reckoning with others as we seek our individual pasts. Situated between two world wars and two glass cultures, Woolf offers a complex and tempered consideration of how the illusion of transparency invites connection to other times, places, and people—and just as readily forecloses it.

The Betrayed Father: Wyndham Lewis, Homosexuality, and &lt;em&gt;Enemy of the Stars&lt;/em&gt;

Broadly accepting of the greater tolerance and visibility of gay men in artistic circles in interwar London, Wyndham Lewis nonetheless frequently wrote of this phenomenon with misgivings, even anxiety. Judith Butler's suggestion that such anxiety may be a form of melancholia—blocked mourning for the loss of a love that cannot be acknowledged—and Lewis's estrangement at an early age from his father may together account for his feelings about male homosexuality. His polemical and critical works of the interwar period (The Art of Being Ruled, The Doom of Youth, The Lion and the Fox) link homosexuality with violence against fathers, and his early play Enemy of the Stars can be read as an erotically-inflected agon between a father and a son.

Health, wealth and party in inter-war London

ABSTRACTThis article examines public health spending, health outcomes and political complexion in London's 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils (MBCs) in the inter-war period. It describes the place of the MBCs in the governance of the capital and demonstrates the variety of experience across the different boroughs in terms of wealth, politics and mortality. Searching for potential causes of differences in outcomes, it discovers some positive statistical relationships between the extent of Labour party presence on the councils, local spending and health outcomes. Our tentative conclusion is that local democratic processes could lead to distinctive and beneficial public health policies, albeit within the context of other local and structural determining factors.

Michael John Law, The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London

Michael John Law, <i>The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London</i>

Changing Conceptions of the “Poor Child”: The Children’s Country Holiday Fund, 1918–1939

From 1919–1939, nearly 600,000 holidays were organized for London schoolchildren by the Children’s Country Holiday Fund (CCHF). This article uses the CCHF to explore changing conceptions of the “poor child,” as the charity struggled to reconcile a sense of mission born in the 1880s with the social challenges of interwar London, yet also looked forward, anticipating the developments of the post-1945 period. The article also highlights the reactions of the young Londoners themselves. Despite the CCHF’s concern that an urban environment could stunt emotional development, the children’s comments demonstrate a self-awareness and self-confidence that was grounded in an attachment to London and their families.

London's criminal underworlds, c. 1720-c. 1930: a social and cultural history

1. Introduction 2. 'Now we have the informing Dogs!': Crime Networks and Informing Cultures in the 1720s and 1730s 3. 'A Noted Virago': Moll Harvey and her 'Dangerous Crew', 1727 - 1738 4. 'The pickpockets and hustlers had yesterday what is called a Grand Day': Changing Street Theft, c. 1800 - 1850 5. 'There goes Bill Sheen, the murderer': Crime, Kinship and Community in East London, 1827 - 1852 6. 'A new species of swindling': Coiners, Fraudsters, Swindlers and the 'Long-Firm', c. 1760 - 1913 7. 'A London Plague that must be swept away': Hooligans and Street Fighting Gangs, c. 1882 - 1912 8. 'The Terror of the People': Organised Crime in Interwar London 9. Conclusion

Business returns from gold price fixing and bullion trading on the interwar London market

From September 1919, the world price of gold was ‘fixed’ daily in London by a small group of licensed traders. The arrangement was not ideal, as it advantaged the traders concerned, but it was seen by the Bank of England at the time as critical to British economy recovery and to the maintenance of London’s position as a world trading centre. This article examines the available archival evidence on whether direct knowledge of the workings of the mechanism enabled Mocatta and Goldsmid, traders central to the operations of the ‘gold fix’, to earn unusually high profits across the interwar period.

‘To help keep the home going’: female labour supply in interwar London

Most prior work on historical female labour supply has been confined to looking at the female labour force participation decision. This article uses the detailed information on weekly hours of work and wages contained in the New Survey of London Life and Labour (NSLLL) (1928–32) to provide the first estimation of both the participation and the hours‐of‐work decisions for female workers prior to the Second World War. The main finding is that the labour supply curve was negatively sloped—women worked longer hours at lower wages. It is also possible to compare the determinants of the labour force participation decision and the hours of work decision among females in the NSLLL. It appears that the labour force participation decision was more strongly related to household income level than to own wages, while the hours of work decision among working women was more strongly related to the wage level than to household income. Finally, the article also examines the differential labour market behaviour of married women, female household heads, and young single women; most striking among these results is the evident added‐worker effect on married women of the onset of the Great Depression in 1930.

Ken Inglis Postgraduate Prize Winner 2012: ‘Australians who come over here are apt to consider themselves quite large people’: The Body and Australian Identity in Interwar London

During the 1920s and 1930s, it was believed that an Australian physical ‘type’ had developed under the bright antipodean skies, superior in size and appearance to its English counterpart. When Australians visited the metropole, therefore, locals and visitors alike claimed that they could be identified by sight alone. This article explores the notion of Australian physical distinctiveness, examining the body as a site for the construction and performance of Australian identities in interwar London. I argue that the imagined pre-eminence of Australian bodies became a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, yet could simultaneously connote mental vacancy, vulgarity or even racial otherness. In consequence, the metropole often became a site of physical transformation and re-definition, in which antipodeans sought to improve their chances of assimilation by disavowing the Australianness of their bodies.

‘Constable dances with instructress’: the police and the Queen of Nightclubs in inter-war London

The campaign against the nightclubs in the 1920s metropolis, headed by the crusading Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, is well known in popular histories of the inter-war period.1 This woul...