The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London

320 Pages·2010·5.321 MB·English

by  Richard Hornsey

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UNRULYL IFEI N POSTWARL ONDON
the spiv and the
architect
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the spiv and the
architect
Unruly Life in Postwar London
richard hornsey
university of minnesota press
minneapolis london
•
An earlier version of chapter 1was published as “‘Everything Is Made of Atoms’:
The Reprogramming of Space and Time in Post-War London,” Journal of Historical Geography
34, no. 1(2008):94–117; copyright 2008; reprinted with permission from Elsevier Ltd. An earlier
version of chapter 2was published as “The Queer (Spatial) Economies of The Lavender Hill
Mob,”Journal of British Cinema and Television5, no. 1(2008):38–52; reprinted by permission
of Edinburgh University Press, http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/jbctv. An earlier version
of chapter 3was published as “Francis Bacon at the Photobooth: Facing the Homosexual in
Post-War Britain,” Visual Culture in Britain8, no. 2(2007):83–104; reprinted by permission
of Manchester University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4was published as “The Sexual
Geographies of Reading in Post-War London,” Gender, Place, and Culture9, no. 4(2002);
reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals, and as
“Of Public Libraries and Paperbacks: ‘Deviant’ Masculinities and the Spatial Practices of
Reading in Post-War London,” in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and
Contemporary British Literature,ed. Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene-Harwood
(New York and Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2003),35–54.
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper
acknowledgment has not been included, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher.
Copyright2010by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hornsey, Richard Quentin Donald.
The spiv and the architect : unruly life in postwar London / Richard Hornsey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn978-0-8166-5314-0(hc : alk. paper) — isbn978-0-8166-5315-7(pb : alk. paper)
1. Homosexuality—England—London—History—20th century. 2. Reconstruction
(1939–1951)—England—London. 3. Urban policy—England—London—History—
20th century. 4. London (England)—Social conditions—20th century.
5. London (England)—Social life and customs—20th century. I. Title.
hq76.3.g72l6552010
363.4´90942109045—dc22
2009052922
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for my parents
Brian and Jenny
and in memory of
1908 2008
Dorothy “Baa” Langridge ( – )
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contents
Introduction: Social Modernism and Male Homosexuality
in Postwar London 1
1. Reconstructing Everyday Life in the Atomic Age 39
2. The Perversity of the Zigzag: The Criminality of
Queer Urban Desire 81
3. Trial by Photobooth: The Public Face of the
Homosexual Citizen 117
4. Of Public Libraries and Paperbacks: The Sexual
Geographies of Reading 163
5. Life in the Cybernetic Bedsit: Interior Design and the
Homosexual Self 201
Conclusion: City of Any Dream 247
Acknowledgments 263
Notes 265
Index 293
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introduction
social modernism and male
homosexuality in postwar london
London is there, waiting indifferently for her poets; and so long as she
exists, and they, the challenge of her aloofness to their intention will
remain.
—colin macinnes, “City of Any Dream,” 1962
In the summer of 1954, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the Conservative Home
Secretary, asked John Wolfenden to form a Departmental Committee to
make recommendations on the twin problems of male homosexuality and
female prostitution. During the previous half-decade, both of these phe-
nomena had become popularly perceived as virulent metropolitan threats,
stoked by frequent tabloid exposés and mounting calls for political inter-
vention. One of the new committee’s first actions was to invite various doc-
tors, policemen, youth leaders, and military personnel to submit written
evidence detailing their own experiences of queer men and their thoughts
concerning what could and should be done about them. These documents
can now be read as part of the Home Officefiles in the National Archive in
Kew, where one of the researcher’s pleasures comes from reading Wolfen -
den’s own comments, handwritten in the margins, as he responds to the
various arguments being made.
Among those to submit a report was the journalist Peter Wildeblood,
who had shot to public notoriety in the spring of 1954when he was found
guilty (alongside Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and the landowner Michael
Pitt-Rivers) of conspiring to incite acts of gross indecency and buggery
with a pair of younger airmen. Wildeblood’s statement remains a rare and
val u able attempt by a well-known homosexual to justify his way of life
within an official public forum. His overall presentation situated homo-
sexuality as an unfortunate medical condition, a view derived from both
nineteenth-century sexology and the interwar psychiatry that was becoming
1