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Respectability and race between the suburb and the city: an argument about the making of ‘inner-city’ London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2021
Abstract
This article concentrates on the development of an inner-city imaginary, and a linked suburban imaginary, in the era of post-war reconstruction and post-colonial migration. It argues that these two historical processes – reconstruction and migration – need to be seen as interlinked phenomena, which bound the histories of race and class together. First, it proposes that understanding how the inner city developed and was lived as a structure of feeling requires attending to its meaning both among those who peopled its often-nebulous borders, and among those who escaped it but nonetheless measured their escape by it. Second, it proposes that understanding the popular force of inner city and suburb as imaginative spaces means recognizing how they became crucial landscapes in a revived culture of respectability, which in the second half of the twentieth century became a racialized culture. This was the other migration that defined what the inner city meant.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Urban History , Volume 50 , Special Issue 2: Community, culture, crisis: the inner city in England, c. 1960–1990 , May 2023 , pp. 214 - 231
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.
References
1 V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London, 1967), 29–30.
2 Ibid., 9.
3 For Edward Said, Naipaul's rising popularity as a novelist was to be understood in the context of the resonance that his pessimistic accounts of the post-colonial world had with British and American audiences ‘disenchant[ed] with the third world, and with the decolonization process generally’ (Edward Said in discussion with Conor Cruise O'Brien and John Lukacs, ‘The intellectual in the post-colonial world: response and discussion’, Salmagundi, 70/71 (1986), 80).
4 H. Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London, 1990), 43.
5 H. Wilson and L. Womersley, Change or Decay, Final Report of the Liverpool Inner Area Study (London, 1977), cited in Smith, O. Saumarez, ‘The inner city crisis and the end of urban modernism in 1970s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 582Google Scholar.
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7 There has been a substantial increase in the historical attention given to the ‘inner city’ in recent years. The way in to reading the inner city in these studies remains predominantly governed by the inner-city policy and planning frameworks elaborated for British cities from the late 1960s. See Andrews, A., ‘Multiple deprivation, the inner city, and the fracturing of the welfare state: Glasgow, 1968–78’, Twentieth Century British History, 29 (2018), 605–24CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Kefford, A., ‘Disruption, destruction and the creation of “the inner cities”: the impact of urban renewal on industry, 1945–1980’, Urban History, 44 (2017), 492–515CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, O. Saumarez, ‘Action for cities: the Thatcher government and inner-city policy’, Urban History, 47 (2020), 274–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The inner city crisis’. See also Rhodes, J. and Brown, L., ‘The rise and fall of the “inner city”: race, space and urban policy in postwar England’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (2018), 3243–59Google Scholar.
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9 My argument, in this respect, draws a connection between historical discussions of cultures of respectability, which have focused predominantly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and discussions of the post-war ‘re-racialization’ of England. The historiography on respectability is discussed in more detail in the final section of this article. On ‘re-racialization’, see Schwarz, B., ‘“The only white man in there”: the re-racialisation of England, 1956–1968’, Race & Class, 38 (1996), 65–78Google Scholar; F. Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (London, 2010); Waters, C., ‘“Dark strangers” in our midst: discourses of race and nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997), 207–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; W. Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–1964 (London, 1998).
10 One consequence of the association of the inner city with racial otherness and racial conflict was that it became hard to see the inner city in terms either of its multiculture or its conviviality. If we were to take the word of those who fled the inner city because of racial otherness, this was a space that they left because it ‘went black’. But, of course, the inner city never was a ‘black’ space. The areas designated as ‘inner city’ by planners and policy-makers remained mixed, and in most cases majority white, throughout the twentieth century. They have been, moreover, the forging grounds of on-the-ground cosmopolitanism, something argued convincingly by scholars like Paul Gilroy who grew up in such areas (in Gilroy's case, in Bethnal Green) and lived in the so-called inner city as a ‘creole’ space. See P. Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon, 2004); ‘The 2019 Holberg Conversation with Paul Gilroy’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBntPdPcQes, accessed 9 Oct. 2020. See also L. Back and S. Sinha, Migrant City (Abingdon, 2018); Jackson, E., ‘Bowling together? Practices of belonging and becoming in a London ten-pin bowling league’, Sociology, 54 (2020), 518–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Valluvan, S., ‘Conviviality and multiculture: a postintegration sociology of multi-ethnic interaction’, Young, 24 (2016), 204–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 This sense of encroaching vulgarity is captured well in P. Theroux's Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Britain (London, 1983). Broadstairs was a locale of ‘Villa Toryism’. In towns like this, to borrow Peter Bailey's words, solidly lower-middle-class families ‘staked out identity in an obsessive pursuit of status and respectability within a highly localized suburban milieu – keeping up with the Joneses, keeping away from the Smiths’ (P. Bailey, ‘White collars, gray lives? The lower middle class revisited’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), 275).
12 See R. Glass, ‘Introduction’, in Centre for Urban Studies (ed.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), xv.
13 See E. Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004), ch. 5. As Raymond Williams wrote of these post-colonial retirements: ‘The birds and trees and rivers of England; the natives speaking, more or less, one's own language: these were the terms of many imagined and actual settlements. The country, now, was the place to retire to’ (R. Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1975), 405).
14 Times News Team, The Black Man in Search of Power: A Survey of Black Revolution across the World (London, 1968), 127.
15 M. Young and P. Willmott, The Symmetrical Family (1973; Harmondsworth, 1975), 41.
16 J. White, London in the 20th Century: A City and Its People (London, 2008), 59–60.
17 Ibid., 73.
18 Young and Willmott, Symmetrical Family, 42.
19 S. Inwood, A History of London (New York, 1998), 852.
20 Young and Willmott, Symmetrical Family, 59; R. Glass, assisted by H. Pollins, Newcomers: The West Indians in London (London, 1960), 38; J. Drake, ‘From “colour blind” to “colour bar”: residential separation in Brixton and Notting Hill, 1948–75’, in L. Black (ed.), Consensus or Coercion? The State, the People and Social Cohesion in Post-War Britain (London, 2001), 84.
21 M. Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester, 1998), 50.
22 See S. Humphries and J. Taylor, The Making of Modern London, 1945–1985 (London, 1986), 81–92; Clapson, Invincible, 49–50; White, London, 73.
23 North London Press, 8 May 1959, quoted in E. Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots (London, 1988), 23.
24 Glass, assisted by Pollins, Newcomers, 24.
25 J. Egginton, They Seek a Living (London, 1957), 65–6. See also W.W. Daniel, Racial Discrimination in England: A Penguin Special Based on the P.E.P. Report (Harmondsworth, 1968), 59–65.
26 See, for example, the wrangling over the redevelopment of Brixton's Somerleyton Road and Geneva Road, long recognized as ‘slum’ streets but not redeveloped until the 1970s. See E. Burney, Housing on Trial: A Study of Immigrants and Local Government (London, 1967), 137–45; ‘Councils split over immigrant housing’, Observer, 5 Dec. 1965, 12.
27 See Immigration to Assimilation? (London, 1963), 8, The National Archives, London (TNA), MEPO 2/9854.
28 Quoted in J. Lawrence, Me? Me? Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England (Oxford, 2019), 117.
29 Ibid., 269 n. 71.
30 Z. Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’ Relations in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 1992), 77–8.
31 ‘White backlash in Leyton?’, Magnet, 1, 13 Feb. 1965, 1.
32 R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 202.
33 M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth, 1957).
34 Young and Willmott, Symmetrical Family, 42.
35 Ibid., 60 n. 1.
36 Cited in Institute of Race Relations Newsletter, Nov.–Dec. 1968, 431.
37 See Todd, S., ‘Affluence, class and Crown Street: reinvestigating the post-war working class’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), 501–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Savage, ‘Working-class identities in the 1960s: revisiting the affluent worker’, Sociology, 39 (2005), 929–46; J. Lawrence, ‘Class, “affluence” and the study of everyday life in Britain, c. 1930–1964’, Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013), 273–99; Lawrence, J., the, ‘Inventing “traditional working-class”: a re-analysis of interview notes from Young and Wilmott's Family and Kinship in East London’, Historical Journal, 59 (2016), 567–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Lawrence, ‘Social-science encounters and the negotiation of difference in early 1960s England’, History Workshop Journal, 77 (2014), 215–39; Lawrence, Me? Me? Me?.
38 Ibid., 64.
39 Ibid., 115–16.
40 See Lawrence, ‘Social-science encounters’, 228.
41 Quoted in Lawrence, Me? Me? Me?, 64.
42 See J. Davis, ‘Containing racism? The London experience, 1957–1968’, in R.D.G. Kelley and S. Tuck (eds.), The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights, and Riots in Britain and the United States (Basingstoke, 2015), 138–40. See also Whipple, A., the, ‘Revisiting “Rivers of Blood” controversy: letters to Enoch Powell’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 717–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Young and Willmott, Symmetrical Family, 20.
44 Ibid., 58.
45 See Milner Holland papers, TNA, HLG 39. See also Davis, J., ‘Rents and race in 1960s London: new light on Rachmanism’, Twentieth Century British History, 12 (2001), 69–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Milner Holland Committee raised the issue of the failures of the London County Council's plans to regenerate London and fix the housing problem, but like the Profumo Scandal that prompted it, it revealed at the same time a London population fixated on race, played out here in the issue of sharing lodgings across racial difference.
46 See Times News Team, Black Man, 130.
47 K. Markandaya, The Nowhere Man (London, 1973), 92.
48 S. Brooke, ‘Revisiting Southam Street: class, generation, gender, and race in the photography of Roger Mayne’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), 473–5.
49 See, for example, L. MacKay, Respectability and the London Poor, 1780–1870: The Value of Virtue (London, 2013); E. Roberts, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford, 1984); A. Marwick, British Society since 1945, 4th edn (London, 2003), 25.
50 F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 (Oxford, 2018), 26.
51 M. Chamberlain, Growing Up in Lambeth (London, 1989), 8.
52 C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Women (London, 1986).
53 Chamberlain, Lambeth, 6. For a re-periodization through the ‘mid-century’, see B. Jones, The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (Manchester, 2012). For the importance of respectability in 1950s streets, see D. Chapman, The Home and Social Status (London, 1955), 159–60.
54 J. Maizels, ‘The West Indian comes to Willesden’ (1959), London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), ACC/1888/115.
55 Shop window card in Soho offering rooms to let, cited in ‘Words of the month’, Bronze, 1 (1954), 22.
56 A.G. Bennett, Because They Know Not (London, 1959).
57 Glass, assisted by Pollins, Newcomers, 110. Emphasis added.
58 K. Little, Colour and Commonsense (London, 1958), 23.
59 A. Baron, The Lowlife (London, 1963), 85–6.
60 Flame in the Streets, dir. by Roy Ward Baker (Rank Organisation Film Productions Ltd, 1961).
61 Glass, assisted by Pollins, Newcomers, 56.
62 E. Ross, ‘“Not the sort that would sit on the doorstep”: respectability in pre-World War I London neighborhoods’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 27 (1985), 39–59; J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–1950 (Basingstoke, 1995).
63 See A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street Children in London, 1870–1914 (London, 1996), 70; Jones, Working Class, 132.
64 See J. Davies, ‘Jennings’ Buildings and the Royal Borough: the construction of the underclass in mid-Victorian England’, in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones (eds.), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London, 1989), 11–39; Bailey, P., ‘“Will the real Bill Banks please stand up?” Towards a role analysis of mid-Victorian working-class respectability’, Journal of Social History, 12 (1979), 336–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross, ‘“Not the sort that would sit on the doorstep”’.
65 See S. Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (London, 1963), 51.
66 M. Savage and A. Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 (London, 1994), 57–72; Lawrence, J., ‘The British sense of class’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35 (2000), 307–18Google Scholar, at 316.
67 Lambeth public relations officer to Lambeth town clerk, ‘Race relations in the borough’, 15 Feb. 1961, Lambeth Archives, London, MBL/TC/R/205A.
68 White, London, 6.
69 ‘Race relations in Britain: a summary of press news and comment’, Institute of Race Relations, Dec. 1959, 3, LMA, ACC/1888/120.
70 See S. Malik, Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television (London, 2002), 41–3.
71 Mrs P.R., letter to the editor, People, 20 Jan. 1963, 12.
72 M. Holland, Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London (London, 1965), 6. More widely, see Davis, ‘Rents’.
73 ‘Immigrants surveyed’, South London Press, 9 Dec. 1968, 9.
74 ‘North Kensington I’ (1959–63), Donald Chesworth papers, Queen Mary University of London, PP2/49. In the Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey's boarding-house novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement (London, 1960), the landlady operates a ‘Gestapo system’. Nothing can be kept secret.
75 B. Modisane, ‘Sorry, no coloureds’, Twentieth Century, Spring 1962, 92–8.
76 Lord Kitchener, ‘My landlady’ (Melodisc, 1952), reproduced in London Is the Place for Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950–1956 (Honest Jon Records, 2002).
77 ‘Selbourne-Rd. is dubious about those newcomers’, South London Press, 29 Jul. 1958, 3.
78 Bennett, Because, 84.
79 Edwyn Price, letter to the editor, South London Press, 22 Sep. 1961, 12.
80 ‘Somerleyton Road begins to wake up around 2a.m.’, South London Press, 15 Aug. 1961, 4.
81 B. Stubbs, letter to the editor, Islington Gazette, 10 Mar. 1961, 8. ‘The Victorians would blush if they were able to walk through Islington any weekend evening’, wrote one Islington resident in response to Stubbs’ letter (J. Yule, letter to the editor, Islington Gazette, 30 Mar. 1961, 6). Post-Victorianism of this kind, as Frank Mort has argued, had popular purchase in the post-war city. It served here as a means for this letter writer to cast himself, by allusion to his Victorian forebears, as the last line of defence in the collapse of a formerly normative moral culture. As Mort says of post-war London's post-Victorianism, it ‘evoked images from the Victorian city, or more precisely what was perceived to be Victorian in the 1950s, which was in reality an eclectic pastiche of images and experiences drawn from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century past’ (Capital Affairs, 9).
82 Frank Seton, letter to the editor, Islington Gazette, 17 Mar. 1961, 8.
83 As Sarah Thieme reveals in her article in this Special Issue, the Archbishop's Commission on Urban Priority Areas decided to redefine large suburban post-war housing estates as ‘inner-city’ areas in its 1985 study of urban deprivation.
84 Young and Willmott, Symmetrical Family, 6–7.