Preliminary Programme

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’. (Show less)

The relative good health of Jewish immigrants to Glasgow in the late Victorian period was a puzzle to many observers and was usually attributed to better diet and personal hygiene. This period coincided with the greatest Jewish immigration to Glasgow and the new arrivals congregated in the Gorbals area where they crowded in slum tenements and were employed in tailoring sweatshops. Glasgow’s health problems at the time were notorious. It was said that health care experts came to the city prepared to be shocked and were rarely disappointed. Tuberculosis was a major killer in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century being responsible for 13% of all deaths in the 1890s. While there was a lower Jewish mortality from tuberculosis in the Gorbals, as there was in other Jewish immigrant areas elsewhere in Europe and in North America, the disease was found to run a more chronic course.

The Jewish community’s voluntary welfare services were seriously stretched to provide financial support for breadwinners unable to work because of tuberculosis and increasing number of widows and orphans that the disease produced. Innovative solutions included health clinics, an active policy of supporting emigration, the provision of sanatorium care and a general improvement in housing and health care with the employment of health visitors.

This paper analyses the effects of tuberculosis in the Jewish immigrant community in Glasgow between 1890 and 1920 using contemporary documentation and setting the response of the Jewish community in the context of the management of the disease in the wider Scottish population and in other Jewish immigrant communities. Census data and health records give a clear account of the health and housing problems in Glasgow and while tuberculosis remained a scourge in the general community in the inter-war years there was evidence of considerable progress in the management of the disease within the Jewish community. (Show less)

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 – 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. (Show less)

In the two decades after 1945 the reconstruction of British towns and cities was a significant component of the wave of post-war planning. The renovation of the urban environment, carried out under the inspiration of a number of celebrated planners and newly established planning departments, affected the city as a whole, from the shopping precinct and road system to the residential housing estate. From new towns to old industrial cities, planning was seen radically to reorganise the configuration, appearance and experience of urban space in Britain.

So much is well known and has been substantially examined by social, architectural and planning historians. A variety of questions have been asked about the scale of modernisation in British cities compared, for example, to cities in Continental Europe; and its scope;effect on city centres as against suburbs and in different types of urban location. A significant theme in much of this research has been the impact of post-war urban planning on populations, particularly those who occupied the new housing estates and tower blocks. And a persistent question has been: what went wrong with the utopian vision of post-war British cities? Why did British urban modernism have such disastrous social and environmental consequences?

Historians have had different responses to these questions, but the questions themselves have continued to dominate and direct debate, obscuring other historical issues. Using the medium-sized industrial cities of Bradford and Leicester as examples, I want to explore a more neglected aspect, the ideas and intellectual milieu which shaped the vision of municipal planners such as F.H. Wardley and Konrad Smigelski. On what was their confidence in urban modernism based and how was it related to other dimensions of modernist thought and practice in post-war Britain? In what ways, if at all, did their vision interlock with the radical changes occurring at this period in cities such as Bradford and Leicester, notably the decline of once dominant textile industries, the decomposition of an established working class, and the entry of new migrant populations from South Asia and the Commonwealth? Behind this lies the larger question of British or English ‘modernity’ – of what such a modernity might be said to comprise, how it was constituted historically, and its fate in the decades around the mid-twentieth century (Show less)