Postwar London Research Articles

Naked Civil Servant: Queer Sex, Catholicism and Conformism in the Post-War London Diaries of George Lucas

Abstract The minutely documented diaries of an ‘everyman’ such as George Lucas enable us to view the complex pleasures and challenging realities of the post-war queer quotidian in remarkable detail. A sample of the years after 1957, when Lucas was aged in his thirties, suggests that more attention needs to be paid to age-differential relationships and to the problematic aspects of the sexual idolization of young men. Lucas’s respectably boring career and Catholic faith can, however, be understood as having provided the stability on which his emotional survival depended, helping us to view other such unglamorous queer lives with greater empathy.

Kray Twins of East London

The paper addresses the thin line between the world of criminals and celebrities. It focuses on questions how role models and their media representation as well as biographies, memoirs, and their film adaptations have created and kept up the image of gangsters, more specifically, the infamy of the two East London criminals, Reggie and Ronnie Kray since the 1950s. After an introduction to aspects of organised crime, mafia, and a few examples of famous gangsters and the role models of the Kray twins from American Al Capone and Frank Sinatra to the English gangster Billy Hill, the paper highlights the life, representation, and image-making methods of the Krays in postwar London until they died in prison (Ronnie in 1995 and Reggie in 2000) as well as their strange, ever-growing popularity and fame even 20 years after their death. The author argues and aims to prove that the systematically built and promoted Kray brand and their legend served as the forerunner to and paved the success of the 2015 American blockbuster under the same title, Legend, and further documentary films and biopics on the Kray twins ever since.

Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher, by John Davis

The London of the 1950s was a city the late Victorians would have recognised. By the 1970s, John Davis writes in his idiosyncratic and wide-ranging history of post-war London, the city’s driving economic, social and cultural forces had shifted in ways that would have confounded a Victorian observer. Davis examines this process of urban transformation in sixteen chapters that cover, among other things, the life and death of ‘the Sixties’, changing patterns in home ownership, the rise of the conservation movement, and the Notting Hill riots. Ultimately, he argues, these changes laid the groundwork for a political environment in which the ideology of Thatcherism could take root. In lieu of an introduction, Chapter One examines how the capital’s increasingly visible youth culture and a trend-hungry media converged to create ‘Swinging London’, a public relations exercise that nonetheless captured the city’s post-war optimism. So why did the party end? Davis highlights the obvious factors, notably deindustrialisation and the erosion of manufacturing jobs, paired with economic headwinds after the Wilson government’s deflationary measures in 1966–7. But the book also identifies a growing, if inchoate, resistance to the paternalism of the Beveridge welfare state. Chapters Six and Seven detail the backlash against urban modernism, as expressed in protests against motorway construction and a renewed impulse to conserve the Victorian cityscape. Chapters Nine, Ten, and Twelve chart the emergence of new, oppositional identities among groups as varied as East End cab drivers, suburban home-owners, and Black British youth. Chapters Eight, Thirteen, and Fourteen sketch the reorientation of municipal politics, from the demise of the consensus around the East End’s subsidised post-war prosperity to the emergence of grass-roots voluntary action groups that sought to redefine the imperatives of the welfare state, to the breakdown of local Labour Party hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s.

The post-war reconstruction planning of London

ABSTRACT The replanning of London following the Second World War is, in many ways, a familiar story. However it has often been told in fragments, usually prioritizing the best-known plans and the involvement of Professor Patrick Abercrombie. This paper positions the replanning more widely, considering a hierarchy from region to specific locales, and the problems of fragmented planning within such a structure. It explores issues of agents, agency and authority. The sanitized and orderly vision of a new London is set against a more complex and disordered reality of reconstruction-plan production. The urgency, scale and complexity of the task, and questions of why should ‘author’ plans, are significant issues. The realities of postwar London have been shaped by a messy and misunderstood process.

Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher by John Davis

<i>Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher</i> by John Davis

Landlordism on Trial: Rent Tribunals and Resistance in Post-War London, 1946-64.

Rent Tribunals were first established in England and Wales in 1946 as a means of regulating rents among furnished lets in the private rented sector, before their authority was extended to cover unfurnished dwellings in 1949. This article shows how rent tribunals created an informal space of justice that provided a forum for tenants' voices. Tenants used rent tribunals to dramatize their everyday complaints, articulate their sense of entitlement to better housing, and organize collectively to exert pressure on landlords and administrative machinery. The tribunals in turn reconfigured the state's relationship to the space of the home and echoed representational tropes circulating in popular culture. But in putting landlordism on trial, rent tribunals, and those who participated in them, also came up against the limits of traditional constructions of property ownership and the home. The expansion of homeownership intersected and in some cases fused with increasingly racialized notions of belonging, domesticity, and national identity. Through an examination of these novel regulatory forums, the article highlights both the centrality of working-class agency and the contradictory nature of the welfare state.

Between Transgression and Conviviality: Everyday Urban Space and the Carnivalesque Strategies in The Lonely Londoners

This article examines how the everyday space of postwar London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is reimagined by Caribbean migrants, whose resilience generates comedy and the spirit of the carnival. I argue that Selvon uses his depictions of the city to show his Black Londoners at play as culturally assertive and sexually eccentric types who counter the adversity in the host society. While discussing how the novel’s portrayal of the carnivalesque allows for the expression of immigrant agency, I stress the convivial nature of sex and comedy as a central model of their cultural negotiation.

Paying Homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Revision and Reversion in Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg

This article examines Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), a novel which pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s canonical work of literary modernism, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Yet the Johannesburg of Melrose’s novel is devoid of the transforming cosmopolitanism that characterizes Woolf’s London and which allows for new social relations to be imagined across historically entrenched boundaries. While the implicit comparison between Woolf’s post-war London and post-apartheid Johannesburg finds the latter considerably wanting, Melrose’s novel also reminds us of the limits of Woolf’s fictional imagination, which are, perhaps, most overtly marked by her representation of the servant class. I argue that Johannesburg engages, at one level, in an act of extended literary redress by privileging the perspectives of domestic workers in Johannesburg who continue, after apartheid, to labour in homes and for families that are not their own. At the same time, however, the novel maintains its appeal to a ‘postimperial’ metropolitan gaze by adopting white characters unable to extract themselves from a range of reactive phobias about Johannesburg. The novel, I conclude, thus finds itself caught between the contradictory impulses of revision and reversion; between redressing the representational conventions which entrench historical inequalities and regressing into the tropes which perpetuate our difference and separation.

The translation of images and West Indian creole into Spanish in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

Abstract Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is considered a classic of West Indian literature in the style of Migrant Modernism (Brown 2013). First published in post-war London in 1956, it was not translated into Spanish until 2016, probably due to the challenging features of the novel and its language. A case of text creolisation (Buzelin 2000), the translation of the novel required an active effort to construct a language variant that could convey Selvon’s peculiar literary style and sociopolitical intent. The present work aims to investigate the images of West Indians portrayed in the original novel and, more specifically, how they are transposed into the Spanish text. The research method includes an account of the editorial process, an interview with the translator, and an analysis of the paratexts and translation excerpts. Finally, the reception of the translation in literary reviews shall also be discussed.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Material Cultures of Reconstruction in post-war London

This introduction to the special issue on material cultures of reconstruction in post-war London highlights the key contributions of the articles included. Together the papers contribute to an everyday history of post-war reconstruction in London. This introduction also highlights the broader relevance of these contributions to the study of urban reconstruction by drawing attention to the importance of material culture in the reshaping of urban life after crisis.

An Emigré Critic at Postwar London Theatres: The Reviews and Essays of Tymon Terlecki

An Emigré Critic at Postwar London Theatres: The Reviews and Essays of Tymon Terlecki

Building Site Ontologies: Post-war London in the Paintings of Auerbach and Kossoff

This paper develops an account of post-war London from the building site paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. It approaches these paintings as a visceral and embodied source of data regarding the post-World War Two landscape of bomb damaged London. It contrasts this form of knowledge with the narratives of memorialization, and order and control, which I argue characterize post-war reconstruction. In this context the paintings are read as an ontological statement about the complexity and ambiguity of the urban landscape, one which contrasts with historical and contemporary narratives of the urban built environment. The paper posits that knowledges which preserve the complexities and materialities of urban space have the potential to provide political interventions into both historical and contemporary narratives of the city.

Night Raiders: Burglary &amp; The Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968. By Eloise Moss (New York, Oxford University Press, 2019) 272 pp. $35.00

Night Raiders is the “first history of burglars and burglary in modern Britain,” exploring confrontations “between criminal and householder inside their homes during the period 1860 until 1968” (2). Generally subsumed in the broader category of theft within academic literature, burglary, according to Moss, needed a “fresh appraisal” (4). Charting the history of burglary, considering what burglars stole, and where they stole it from, alongside broader social and political conceptions of the crime and the criminal, Night Raiders connects the offense to its shifting, “social, cultural, political, economic and technical context” (12). While acknowledging the inherent limitations in researching the history of burglary, Moss’s approach focuses on the narratives relied upon by the State, popular media, and commercial sectors in relation to burglary, and the implications of the shifting versions of the offense, thus offering a grounded approach to historical research. The approach is interdisciplinary, contributing to historical, sociological, legal, and criminological literature, and built upon a foundation of varied archival sources, including newspaper reports, official documents, popular media and fiction, and commercial marketing. Night Raiders provides a history of burglary that offers a nuanced perspective, within a broader social and cultural context.Chapter 1 focuses on media representations of “real life villain” Charles Peace (4). Moss maintains that the “fiction” of the burglar narrative had the “capacity to become orthodox in official accounts” (42). Chapter 2 engages with fictional burglars giving rise to a “culture of pleasure” regarding burglary (44). Offering a more fluid perspective on “public attitudes towards crime” than often posited by most historians, Moss highlights the coexistence of both a culture of fear and a culture of pleasure surrounding burglars (65). Chapter 3 engages with the effects of popular and official representations of burglars on conceptualizations of gender. The rise of professional burglars, who were consistently male, was, according to Moss, at least partly “about constraining the pace of [women’s] advancing citizenship” (87). Chapter 4 further emphasizes the gap between the actual experience of burglary and the shifting archetype of the burglary narrative. Representations of the crime and criminal served as a “conduit” for the articulation of issues such as the social composition of the city of London, as well as furthering the “pleasure culture” associated with the offense (108).Chapter 5 engages with the commercial burglary narrative, and the use of marketing to instill a “culture of fear” about burglars. In contrast to popular narratives, insurance providers sought to eradicate the romanticized burglar from the public domain. Moss demonstrates the “agency of commerce in the formulation of cultural, social and political responses to crime and criminals” (131). By considering these responses together, Moss is able to reveal the impact of competing burglar narratives on everyday life. Furthering this strain, Chapter 6 engages with the manifestation of this process in the home, through the prospering of the security technology industry.Finally, Chapters 7 and 8 focus on representations of burglars in postwar London. Chapter 7 highlights that, when faced with profound social change, the fears constructed by the media, the market, and the state in order to mobilize citizens into protecting themselves against burglary contributed to falling public confidence in the police and “changing modes of citizenship” (184). Chapter 8 charts another reinvention of the burglar narrative: By positing burglary within the context of espionage, burglary once more became emblematic of the national conversation in relation to much broader issues, such as gender, communism, and the security of the home.Through offering a history of a single crime, Night Raiders “affords a window into a period of dramatic social change in London and across Britain,” which serves to emphasize continuing narratives relating to gender, class, and wealth in particular (208). Moss’s approach provides a diachronic perspective to a literature that is often synchronic. By considering the changing representations, both through time and across sectors, Moss’s account acknowledges “radically different agendas to which burglary has been put to use” (208). These agendas and the responses to them can help us to understand some of the historical origins of the fear of thieves that persists to this day.

The Chicago School and City Planning

While sociology and urban planning might seem respectively to represent the theory and the practice of knowledge about cities, their relation has usually been distant. British sociology and urban planning were closely related before 1914, but largely because sociology was not a bounded specialty: community investigation methods were common throughout the British reform world, finding particular and successful application via city planning’s focus on housing and industrial location. In the United States, by contrast, sociology early became a clearly-defined academic discipline, and sociological empirical methods, although widely shared, supported only generalized reform demands, because local planning of housing and industry was politically impossible outside industrial communities. Most prewar city planning aimed at middle-class and aesthetic values rather than socially ameliorative community design. Between the wars, British academic sociology continued to develop slowly, and community sociological investigation fell largely to the rapidly developing profession of city planning, whose success and power culminated in the masterful plans for postwar London. In the United States, by contrast, sociology rapidly evolved towards national survey analysis, distancing itself even further from practical application in city planning. In general, then, the theory and practice of knowledge about cities remained separate in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and the United States.

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

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.

Soho Typescripts: handmade obscene books in post-war London bookshops

ABSTRACT Soho Typescripts were a distinctive type of handmade pornography associated with London’s Soho in the 1950s and 1960s. Thousands were produced, but only a proportion survive today. This article presents the first dedicated study of Soho Typescripts based on examination of 50 typescripts from the British Library, a private collection and recent acquisitions by the Museum of London. The article summarizes their distinguishing characteristics and discusses their circulation within an alternative economy regulated though informal alliances between bookshop owners and police. Retail innovations allowed a widening cross-section of men to purchase illustrated home-produced books from post-war bookshops. Retailers positioned Soho Typescripts within a spatial hierarchy, categorizing them with folk-sexological labels: ‘Fladge’, ‘Straight’, ‘B/W’, ‘Les’ and ‘Fem Dom’. Common themes of typescript fiction included teenage girls, lesbianism, sadomasochism and interracial sex. Soho Typescripts are under-represented in institutional collections. Consequently, the significance and reach of these hand-crafted commercial products may have been underestimated.

Declan J Meagher

Declan J Meagher was a most influential figure in Irish obstetrics and gynaecology during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, making huge contributions to maternal and infant welfare. He was born...

“Fire by Night, Cloud by Day”: Exile and Refuge in Postwar London

AbstractSusan Pennybacker's presidential plenary to the 2017 North American Conference on British Studies in Denver, Colorado, explores the lives of four of the subjects of her book (in progress) of the same title. It identifies the kinds of archival and ethnographic sources that allow new treatments of the exile, émigré, and expatriate communities of London after the close of World War II and of those who contributed in various ways to the ethos of metropolitan political culture in the “late empire” and Cold War era. The essay focuses on the South African Ruth First, the Indian diplomat Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian academician Achin Vanaik, and the South Asian Londoner Suresh Grover, a member of the Monitoring Group, a legal assistance and anti-discrimination organization in the capital. It suggests the importance of scholarship that reckons with known and notable activist persons who led and represented many others in their challenges to global politics from a base in the “mammoth crossroads, the secure and unsafe haven that is London.”

Representing Spaces, Performing Places: le strade di Londra nel romanzo Absolute Beginners (1958) di Colin MacInnes e nella sua versione cinematografica

This paper addresses life in London in the late 1950s portrayed by the musical film Absolute Beginners (1986) directed by Julien Temple and its fictional source, that is Colin MacInnes’ novel of the same name (1958). While the musical film has been criticized for its lack of character development and for its last-minute attack on racism, MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners was a successful novel. It tells the story about youth subcultures in postwar London and in this paper I will examine the way in which the City of London and its transformation is portrayed as a urban space/place where young people create and establish new places and spaces for themselves for their regular encounters. So, London as the setting becomes not just a background element but a driving force in the whole story. By seeking to understand London as a site of local encounter, global exchange, national significance, and social memory this paper aims at providing an analysis of the places and spaces both of the film musical and the novel which characters absorb the audience/reader and show the variety of human experience of the capital as seen through the eyes (and camera lens) of a nameless 18 year-old photographer.

Review: Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech, by Todd Gannon and Reyner Banham

Todd Gannon with Reyner Banham Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017, 254 pp., 15 color and 115 b/w illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781606065303 With Reyner Banham's death in 1988 at age sixty-six, an iconic and complex career in twentieth-century architectural history, theory, and criticism came to an untimely end. Banham's twelve published books and more than seven hundred articles engage a wide array of fields, including pop art, automotive design, and cultural geography. His career-long emphasis on the relationship of engineering to modern architecture and his professional emergence among postwar London's artistic avant-garde made him a unique chronicler of the British high-tech movement, and of such related trends and groups as the New Brutalism and Archigram. His much-anticipated monograph on high-tech architecture, however, remained incomplete and unpublished at his death. In Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech , Todd Gannon takes this lacuna as a point of departure. Gannon's inclusion of Banham's previously unpublished introduction is a welcome addition to the book, as are his explorations of archival material from the Getty Foundation. The gist, however, is his broader reassessment of Banham's long-term engagement with postwar British architecture, of which high tech was a peak, and its relationship to mainstream modernism and postmodernism internationally. Banham seems to be undergoing a slow transformation from major figure within and contributor to a broader field into full-fledged topic of scholarly research. Entries in the literature are numerous, while thorough treatments are few. Nigel Whiteley's 2002 biography Reyner Banham: …