Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Imagining the city II
Chair: Helen Jones (Goldsmiths’ College, London)
This panel explores aspects of the persistence of the idea of the city in the cultural imagination of the twentieth century. The papers consider and invite comparison of imaginative articulations of the city from the First World War to the mid twentieth-century in a variety of European contexts. Collectively, the papers seek to explore some of the ways in which cities have been imagined, considering some of the metaphorical and psychological motivations for such engagements as well as some of their more pragmatic political implications.
Abstracts
They Came to a City (1944) and wartime British cinema
James Chapman (Leicester)
This paper will explore the place of the 1944 feature film They Came to a City in British film culture, with particular reference to its use of the city as a metaphor for post-war reconstruction and the welfare state. The film, produced by Ealing Studios, was directed by Basil Dearden and scripted, from his own play, by J.B. Priestley. It is an unusual film that does not ‘fit’ the standard history of wartime British film making as a cinema of realism. Consequently it has been marginalised in the historiography, despite some contemporary critics comparing it favourably with Citizen Kane.
The film is an allegorical narrative that explores the reactions of nine people, representing a cross-section of British society, to a city outside time and space. The city itself remains unseen (though archival sources reveal that scenes set in the city were shot but did not make their way into the finished film); all we know about it are the responses of the nine protagonists. It is evident that the city represents the welfare state: a society that provides for its citizens from the cradle to the grave. The film is a rare example of a British wartime narrative that questions the usual ideology of consensus: some characters accept the city and what it represents, while others (characterised as the reactionary elements in British society) reject it.
The paper, based on archival sources, will locate They Came to a City in the contexts of both wartime cinema and the emergence of popular discourses around war aims and the welfare state. It will conclude that the film’s use of allegory and theatricality was ultimately less effective than the more straightforward, if didactic, work of the documentary film movement in promoting post-war urban reconstruction. It will also address the idea of ‘the city’ as a metaphor for social policy in the efforts of British propagandists to project the popular ideology of ‘the people’s war’.
The land the heroes wanted: soldiers’ views of the city in letters from the Western Front
Krista Cowman (Lincoln)
In November 1918, two weeks after the Armistice was signed, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared that the primary task facing the nation was 'to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in'. In the following decade the landscape of urban Britain underwent fundamental alterations as Lloyd George’s original call subtly shifted into his electoral slogan of 'Homes fit for Heroes'. These physical changes symbolised other shifts between the social, political and cultural structures of pre and post-war Britain.
Historical engagement with the post-war urban landscape has tended to place it within a narrative of post-war reconstruction. What is often neglected in such assessments is the key role that imaginings of the home city played in the lives of soldiers during the war. The voluminous correspondence which survives from combatants of all ranks stationed on the Western Front has tended to be read in terms of what it reveals about the experience of combat, trench life or the horror of war, separating the (foreign) front line from the (domestic) home. Much less attention has been paid to other themes although the letters offer a unique insight into the sensibilities of an entire generation of British men during their prolonged, enforced absences from home between 1914 and 1918.
This paper explores some of the ways in which the city figured in writings from the Western Front. It will suggest that as well as imagining the post-war city as a site of reconstruction and social progress, there was a tendency for soldiers to romanticise their pre-war memories of the urban landscape, looking much more for continuity than change. Comparisons with foreign cities encountered in France and Belgium will also be considered, and the extent to which these were shaped by the classed experiences of pre-war life.
Architecture and opportunism: the political dealings of Le Corbusier
Simon Richards (Leicester)
The cities proposed by the paradigmatic Modernist architects of the twentieth century were often so extreme that it is a good thing they remained cities of imagination only. This is not to say, however, that their designers ever abandoned the ambition of seeing them built, and to this end they courted the most powerful political leaders of their day.
In this paper we shall explore the relationship between imagined cities and real politics in relation to the most notorious architect-planner of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier. Focussing on the period 1918 to 1942, we shall look at several versions of his ideal cities as he tweaked and tailored them to try to make them appeal to different political regimes in France, Italy, Russia, the United States and Algeria. Also of interest will be the way his terminology and rhetoric changed during this period to reflect the different ideals of those he courted: mechanistic in tone for the technocrats of the twenties, racist for the fascists of the thirties, capitalist for the Americans and colonialist for the benefit of Vichy.
This is a tale, in short, of the extraordinary political opportunism of one of the twentieth century's most influential urban thinkers.
