Michael Law - The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London

General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards
Already published

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Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright Michael John Law 2014

The right of Michael John Law to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Distributed in the United States exclusively by
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Distributed in Canada exclusively by
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8919 0

First published 2014

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There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless, there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to individual and collective identities and world views, to stability and change, to social, political and economic activities and programmes.This series aims to provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the purely historical underpinnings of their investigations.The ultimate objective of the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to where we are.This should enable people to be better informed, promote an interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture.

Jeffrey Richards

Michael John Law is a man with a mission to rescue interwar suburbia from the enormous condescension of contemporary intellectuals who made the term suburban a byword for dullness, narrowness and emptiness. Drawing on a rich and varied range of evidence, including statistics, reports, newspaper and magazine journalism, popular fiction, newsreels, documentaries and feature films, he advances the proposition that the London suburbs were in the vanguard of modernity, particularly when it came to travel, transport and technology.

The car is the principal focus of his analysis. Endorsing the verdict of Autocar magazine from 1938 that a car was an indispensable adjunct of middle class life, he charts the growth and pattern of car ownership as suburbanites increasingly used cars for commuting to work and gaining access to leisure. He traces the development of new arterial roads, exploring the debate about the transformative effect this had on the landscape. He examines the culture of speed that grew up with the car and the debate over the introduction of restrictions on motoring as car accidents hit the headlines. He discusses the motorisation of consumption, as the arterial roads attracted the construction of shopping parades, garages and car showrooms, public houses, cinemas and that distinctive interwar phenomenon, the roadhouse, a glamorous combination of restaurant, dance hall, swimming pool and nightclub, which could be reached only by car.