Postwar London Research Articles

Los Smithsons en Golden Lane: la simultaneidad de hechos en el fotomontaje como construcción de lo real

El uso innovador de la técnica del fotomontaje en la propuesta de concurso para Golden Lane en 1952 por parte de los Smithsons, como estrategia de celebración de lo ordinario en un East End londinense de posguerra física y psicológicamente destruido, les permitirá descubrir su fuente de inspiración en la realidad “tal cual” es, para convertirla en un nuevo paradigma arquitectónico.

The spiv and the architect: unruly life in postwar London - By Richard Hornsey

The spiv and the architect: unruly life in postwar London - By Richard Hornsey

Review: Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture by Alexander Clement; Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, editors; A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley

Alexander Clement. Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture . Wiltshire, England: The Crowood Press, 2011, 160 pp., 150 color illus. £19.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781847972309 Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, editors. Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, 420 pp., 103 illus. incl. 76 in color. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300166187 Owen Hatherley. A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain . London and New York: Verso Books, 2010, 369 pp., $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781844676514 “For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing the coinage of M. le Corbusier and have created a style—‘Contemporary’—easily recognizable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of ‘modern’ details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti,” Theo Crosby wrote in a 1955 editorial on the New Brutalism.1 For Crosby, “contemporary” functioned as shorthand for a bastardized version of modernism—a modernism that had already been liquidated of its ideals and reduced to nothing more than a style for up-to-date living. As an antidote to such degradation, Crosby positioned New Brutalism as an archaeology of the modern movement that would include a rigorous reevaluation of its key architects—Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in particular—as well as a thorough reexamination of its programs and intents. New Brutalism, for example, would push modernism’s truth-to-materials rhetoric to its limit with its interest in the “as found” just as it would reaffirm the earlier movement’s commitment to housing and the social. Though Alison and Peter Smithson, the figureheads of New Brutalism along with the critic-historian Reyner Banham, first used the phrase in conjunction with their design for a single-family warehouse-like house for Soho, in the following years the term became most closely identified with institutional building, giving rise to schools, council flats, and city halls frequently cast of rough concrete. In an age of postwar reconstruction, Brutalism positioned itself as a new kind of civic language—more vernacular slang than received pronunciation—and in time more and more architects came to speak its language. As the word spread, however, the critical contours of Brutalism often lost their shape, and the term quickly transformed into yet another style. Indeed, Brutalism is often employed today as nothing more than a vague epithet lobbed at vast expanses of postwar institutional building—a …

Sheila Crane. Review of "The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London" by Richard Hornsey.

Sheila Crane. Review of "The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London" by Richard Hornsey.

Revisiting the Bott thesis on kin networks and marriage

Studying families in post-war London, Elizabeth Bott hypothesized that tight-knit kinship networks fostered gender segregated, rather than joint, conjugal role-relationships for husband and wife. Addressing this hypothesis with 2001 International Social Survey Program for 29 countries, this paper considers one aspect of joint role-relationships – whether married women prefer to turn to their husband, as opposed to kin, for household help and emotional support. Women with tight-knit kin who fill multiple functions in their lives are less likely to prefer to rely on husbands. Residential mobility is associated with greater reliance on the spouse, but there is no indication that the importance of kinship is diminished when mobility is controlled.

From Haughty to Nice: How British Fashion Images Changed from the 1950s to the 1960s

Along with rock ‘n’ roll, fashion and its visual representations epitomize 1960s “Swinging London.” The 1950s look of aristocratic, haughty grandeur—where the models looked 30, even if they were 20—gave way to the demotic, nice, young look of the 1960s. The models ride, run, jump, and climb in the 1960s photographs, whereas the top British fashion photographer of the 1950s, John French, required a handful of static poses of his models. Yet, the idea of a radical break in the late 1960s is simplistic and unhelpful as a way of thinking about the history of fashion, photography, the media, and society in postwar Britain. Drawing on oral history interviews with fashion models, photographers, and editors, this article argues that the stars of the Swinging Sixties, such as Bailey, Shrimpton and Twiggy, were able to build on innovations from the late 1950s made by John French and Norman Parkinson, along with their models, and the “Young Idea” section of British Vogue. This article draws on research funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, for Conekin's next book, Pretty Hard Work: A History of Fashion Modelling in PostWar London and Paris .

A curriculum in its place: English teaching in one school 1946–1963

Contrary to what has usually been asserted, the ‘New English’ that became a near‐orthodoxy in the later 1960s and ‘70s had its essential origins in the apparently less promising setting of the later 1950s. Current research into English teaching in three postwar London secondary schools is revealing that in at least one working‐class school in Southwark the pupils’ experience of their urban environment came in a quite new way to constitute the matter for talking and writing in English lessons. The vigorous reconstruction of English that took place in Walworth School was one fruit of the London County Council’s idealistic creation in 1946 of five ‘experimental comprehensive schools’. The article argues for the historic significance of the local and environmental focus of English at Walworth between 1956 and 1963.

Autophobia: love and hate in the automotive age

From the Model T to the SUV, Autophobia reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new - in fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century now, ever since the automobile was invented. According to Brian Ladd, this love-hate relationship with our cars is the defining quality of the automotive age. And everyone has an opinion about them, from the industry shills, oil barons, and radical libertarians who offer cars blithe paeans and deny their ill effects, to the technophobes, tree huggers, and killjoys who curse cars, ignoring the very real freedoms and benefits they provide us. Focusing in particular on the automotive transformation of our world's cities, and spanning settings as varied as Belle Epoque Paris, Nazi Germany, postwar London, Los Angeles, New York, and the smoggy Shanghai of today, Ladd explores this conundrum, acknowledging adherents and detractors of the automobile alike.

Margery Lila Moncrieff (née Allen)

At school Margery loved botany, but perhaps because she had spent much of her childhood being ill herself—she had frequent episodes of pneumonia confining her to bed for many weeks...

Amongst the Nerves of the World: C.R.W. Nevinson's Visions of Post-war London: 1919–1929

For many, London in the 1920s was all about the Jazz Age and a new cultural wave of Americana. For others, like ex-war artist C.R.W. Nevinson, it was not. From his Hampstead studios he watched in despair at the population conducting an irresponsible dance upon the grave of a once-great civilization during what he knew was only the 'long weekend' between two world wars. Instead, Nevinson's work offered a melancholic vision of a convalescent nation in which a deeply wounded population was unsure how to mourn those who had been killed and nervous about the tastelessness of enjoying itself again. Artists living and working in the capital, wondered how to depict not only the familiar and comforting appearance of London, but more importantly its mood; how to respond to, or cope with, the feeling of disenchantment (a dominant condition of loss), and how to express visually new social fissures, for example, between the nouveau riche (war profiteers) and the nouveau poor (those who had actually fought). After 'The War For Civilization', it was the artist's duty to re-cast the very civilization for which such a heavy price had been paid — but how? The war, it was clear, had driven a wedge between what had gone before, and what had now to be done — there was to be no return to the modernist status quo ante. The standard bearers who had come this far would not necessarily be the same artists who were going to thrive in the peace. Here, indeed, was the dilemma of English society: the flowering of a mass culture, the emergence of the popular political and social myth, and the re-invention of London and Englishness through the conflicting demands of Americana, socialism and Empire. Nevinson's work, through the images discussed in this article, demonstrates both the diversity and the depth of feeling by a 'rebel' artist of the pre-1914 generation, who had come, via the Great War, to this unique and powerful vision of his now unfamiliar home — London.

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.

Palimpsesting: Reading and Writing Lives in H. D.'s 'Murex: War and Postwar London (circa A. D. 1916-1926)'

On the title page of her first prose work, Palimpsest (1926), H. D. defines a palimpsest as ‘a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another’.1 Palimpsests were created from the seventh to fifteenth centuries primarily in the scriptoriums of the great monastic institutions such as Bobbio, Luxeuil, Fleury, Corbie and St Gall.2 Such recycling of vellum arose due to a combination of factors: the scarcity and expense of writing material; the physical deterioration of existing manuscripts from which reusable vellum was then sourced; and the changing historical and cultural factors which rendered some texts obsolete either because the language in which they were written could no longer be read, or because their content was no longer valued. Palimpsests were created by a process of layering whereby the existing text was erased using various chemical methods, and the new text was written over the old one. But the most peculiar and interesting fact about palimpsests is omitted from H. D.’s definition. Palimpsests are of such interest to subsequent generations because although the first writing on the vellum seemed to have been eradicated after treatment, it was often imperfectly erased. Its ghostly trace then reappeared in the following centuries as the iron in the remaining ink reacted with the oxygen in the air producing a reddish brown oxide. This process has been encouraged by the use of chemical reagents and ultraviolet light in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by more advanced imaging technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A palimpsest is thus a surface phenomenon where, in an illusion of layered depth, otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other.

Fashion's Front and Back: 'Rag trade' Cultures and Cultures of Consumption in Post-war London c. 1945–1970

This article considers some of the spatial and industrial structures associated with the making, and retailing of fashionable clothing in the West End of London between 1945 and 1970. Using Erving Goffman's notion of 'presentational behaviour' it examines the relationship between the 'back-region' activities associated with the designing, manufacturing and distribution of clothes and the 'front-region' tasks of displaying and selling them. By isolating three districts associated with various levels of London's fashion system in the 1950s and 60s (Mayfair for Couture, Marylebone for Wholesale and Soho for youth fashions) and identifying aspects of their particular cultures of production, the article offers a corrective model to those histories of post-war fashion and 'Swinging London' that have explained change by focusing exclusively on retail innovation and shifts in cultures of consumption. These developments, it is argued, also grew out of longer industrial histories that have their roots in the streets behind the great shopping thoroughfares of Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street. The physical, structural and symbolic proximity existing between the hidden worlds of the workroom and the office and the more public terrain of the dress shop and the department store is thus foregrounded as a way of enriching our understanding of London's fashion scene at a crucial moment in its formation.

Swinging Boutiques and the Modern Store: Designing Shops for Post-war London

This article explores the cultures of the post-war West End through the design of its retail buildings and shopping streets, considering the designs themselves in addition to the publishing and debates surrounding them in the professional architectural and popular presses. It looks at how the rethinking of the physical fabric and the spaces of the West End's central shopping area was a crucial part of the re-imagining of London's identity by planners and architects in the decades following World War II. It is argued that this new geographical focus of metropolitan planning opened a fresh chapter in the historically problematic relationship between architecture, particularly architectural modernism, and fleeting, feminised consumer cultures. Whilst taking account of continued traditional strands within metropolitan shop design, this research points to the development of two distinct and novel approaches to retail architecture by the 1960s. In the first, the store was conceived as an integral part of the comprehensively developed centre, set amid a rationally planned urban landscape of efficient road grids, pedestrian decks and towering modern office blocks. This was architecture-as-planning, which prioritised spatial concerns and negated the surface. In the second, the shop was an independent element, espousing an ephemeral, even provisional, architecture of surface. This form was epitomised by the fashionable boutiques of 'swinging' London which camped out in the lower storeys of old buildings within London's historic street patterns. These shops were supremely 'of the moment', yet also very much in tune with the West End's well established fashionable consumption cultures.

Peter V.Hobbs (1936–2005)

Peter Hobbs, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, died of pancreatic cancer on 25 July 2005.Born in 1936, Hobbs experienced what he described as “a wild, adventurous youth on the streets of postwar London.” He engaged in competitive swimming and at age 13 held the title of Junior Boxing Champion of the County of Surrey.

Palimpsestic Promenades: Memorial Environments and the Urban Consumption of Space in Post-1918 London

The author focuses upon four major war memorials located in Westminster Abbey to highlight the presence of new and modern sexual cultures evolving in post war London. These modern ways if looking at sculpture were informed by shifts in attitudes towards both male and female sexuality and were open to alternative interpretations than that officially sanctioned by the British state.

The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-war London

This article examines the way in which the spaces, practices and pleasures of reading books became inscribed within a heteronormative geographical imaginary in Britain after the end of the Second World War. The active state provision of cultural welfare positioned London's public branch libraries as key loci of knowledge and information, with their own attendant logics of reading, spatiality and time. However the growing visibility of paperbacks across the city during the 1950s rendered these logics increasingly problematic, until the threatened Penguin publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover finally pushed them into crisis. As seen from an analysis of the ensuing trial, the dominant understanding of the relationships between reading, knowledge and space was only preserved by reformulating them within a profoundly heteronormative geography. The second part of this article examines the extent to which the practices of queer men challenged this construction, in particular focusing on the defacement of public library books by Kenneth Halliwell and his lover, John (later 'Joe') Orton. It concludes by questioning the limits of Frank Mort's recently proposed analytical framework for pursuing historical geographical research.

Style and Subversion: Postwar Poses and the Neo–Edwardian Suit in Mid–Twentieth–Century Britain

This essay examines the emergence of the Neo–Edwardian look in postwar London. It traces a network of styles which took their meanings from the immediate environment and from broader social, economic and cultural trends, and suggests that the arising connections between place, class and gender identities provided an important precedent for the reinvention of London as a centre of fashion innovation in the 1960s. Utilising contemporary sociological accounts and the content of trade periodicals, this reading challenges some of the more reactionary interpretations of Neo–Edwardianism which have dominated the established literature and refocuses the attention of the fashion historian on the sartorial activities of young men.

Immigration, Postwar London, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Sam Selvon's Fiction

Like Sam Selvon's thrice-recurring African Caribbean character Moses Aloetta, I will begin in Waterloo station, first London destination of Caribbean migrants whose Atlantic-traversing ships had just docked in Southampton. In 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, Moses initially appears while on his way to meet friend of friend at of the boat-train, point of arrival and departure where Moses experiences a feeling of homesickness that he never felt in nine-ten years he in this country (9). The narrator explains that attracts Caribbean-born Londoners because there they see familiar faces, ... watch their countrymen coming off train, and sometimes they might spot somebody they know (10). With this opening scene, Selvon introduces readers to nondescript public space that was fast becoming Caribbean gathering site and that was serving in 1950s as smaller-scale, British equivalent of New York's Ellis Island. The desolate station of Waterloo, one of London Underground's and British Rail's many stops, would without Selvon's novel remain an unremarked and uncelebrated point of contact between migrants and their destination city (17).1 This first glimpse of Moses winding his way through city streets leading to Waterloo illustrates Selvon's strategic use of mundane situations and sites in London. By depicting actual

The Archer: Eric Aumonier’s icon of urban travel and of the pre- and post-war London Underground

The <i>Archer:</i> Eric Aumonier’s icon of urban travel and of the pre- and post-war London Underground