Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Culture, creativity and entertainment in cities since 1900
Chair: Pat Thane (Centre for Contemporary British History, IHR)
Abstracts
Spectacular urban culture in interwar Liverpool and Manchester
Charlotte Wildman (University of Manchester)
The interwar period has fascinated both historians and the writers, intellectuals and social thinkers who lived through it. Described as ‘the long weekend’, ‘the devil’s decades’ and the ‘roaring twenties’, Britain in the 1920s and thirties has been presented as an era of contradictions, contrasts and disunity. More specifically, influenced by contemporary and autobiographical writings, like those by George Orwell, Walter Greenwood and Helen Forrester, historians have firmly stereotyped Liverpool and Manchester as places of poverty and social deprivation between the wars. This paper will argue, however, that looking at the city, rather than class, moves away from a dichotomous understanding of the period. By developing recent work on urban culture by historians such as Judith Walkowitz and Lynda Nead, it provides a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of culture and social relations.
Liverpool and Manchester were redeveloped significantly between the two world wars, as municipal leaders invested heavily in slum clearance and suburbanisation, expansion in public transport networks, and municipal and commercial architecture. This paper explores the spectacular consumer culture that emerged from this urban redevelopment: during the challenging economic climate, shop owners (led by department stores) in both cities had to broaden their customer base and, to do this, they transformed their shops into populist sites of leisure and pleasure. The new urban infrastructure aided the development of a city centre-based consumer culture and shops in outer areas of the cities did not survive.
My paper uses a broad range of sources, including empirical data, the local press, photographs and archival material from Mass-Observation, to illustrate the emergence of this spectacular urban culture in interwar Liverpool and Manchester. In particular, I suggest that women used the transformed city centres to see and be seen, wearing fashionable dress but not necessarily making actual purchases. This provided a form of shared identity that blurred class divisions: the city centres became stages for the performance of fashionable forms of selfhood, which offered women opportunities for status and respectability.
Creative suburbs
Gisela Mettele (University of Leicester)
It is almost a truism in the modern discourse on urbanity that cities are the most suitable places for culture and creativity. Only the city appears to provide the conditions necessary for the promotion of creative work, inventiveness and innovation. My paper will focus on more uncommon places of culture and creativity and will highlight the periphery as an experimental field of modernity: It will analyse German and American garden suburbs in the first decades of the twentieth century as spaces for new lifestyles, which, for economic or political reasons, had become more difficult or even impossible to realise in the city. In contrast to the city and the village, with their highly structured and regulated public spaces, the urban periphery will be seen as an open ‘realm of opportunity’, which could be assigned new — and one’s own — meanings. In this sense also, suburbia could become a site of emancipation where individuals could reinvent themselves.
Palaces of the public: hotels, urban culture and the resort destinations of Atlantic City and Miami Beach
Robin Bachin (University of Miami)
Hotels have served as important spaces of sociability in American life since their earliest incarnations as temporary lodging houses. Bringing together business travellers as well as pleasure seekers, hotels became stage sets for guests to reinvent themselves and at the same time confirm their own social aspirations. The expanding transportation and commercial networks that prompted the rise of hotels in major American cities also facilitated the development of travel and tourism as quintessential features of modern American culture.
The nexus of travel, tourism and modern urban life gave rise to two of the most popular and dynamic tourist destinations of the early twentieth-century United States – Atlantic City, New Jersey and Miami Beach, Florida. Both places developed as a result of the sun, sand and surf they offered, but they also incorporated many of the physical features of the modern urban landscape into their design. Although they clearly lacked the industrial and commercial bases that characterised American urban centres, both Atlantic City and Miami Beach nonetheless offered the excitement and amusement of metropolitan nightlife and an atmosphere that excited the senses. Moreover, their whimsical and dazzling architecture, displayed pre-eminently in the new seaside hotels, showcased building innovations that grew out of hotel and skyscraper designs in cities across the country. And while both Atlantic City and Miami Beach began as vacation destinations, their promoters utilised the latest trends in advertising and salesmanship to spark land sales and fuel real estate prices, further enhancing their connections to urban commerce. This paper explores how the seaside vacation sites of Atlantic City and Miami Beach became firmly enmeshed in the culture of consumption and urban growth that shaped America in the early twentieth century.
