Conclusion

The confidence with which Pritchett wields the multiple photographic metaphors used to describe both the strengths and the flaws of modern fiction suggests an intimacy between the two modes – even if only in terms of goals rather than technique – that was ubiquitous and would have been immediately understood by his readers. The equation of the novelist to ‘the new story camera man’ is striking, but by the mid-1930s there was nothing unusual about such a comparison; it was commonly assumed that what modern novelists were producing, especially when they were writing about cities, was equivalent to modern photography. The aim of the present book has been to elucidate what this proximity between fiction and photography meant in practice, beyond the generalised comparisons. On the one hand, if ‘photography’ is mainly a metaphor for a literary mode, then what kind of a literary lineage can be said to have influenced it? And on the other, what were the affinities between the two art forms, and, crucially, what kind of photography can the period’s urban fiction be said to have resembled or imitated?

Staying Home

Rented rooms make unhappy homes. The literature of 1930s London abounds in tales of dull routines set in cheap lodgings, their inhabitants clinging to dreams of a better job, a nicer room and a romance that would put the end to their financial misery as well as their loneliness. For the period’s literary lodgers, London bedsits are always defined in terms of what they lack: space, style and any sense of cosmopolitan freedom. While complaints about the dullness and conformity of the suburbs had become standard by the early 1900s,1 after 1918 the experience of renting in central London no longer provided a cosmopolitan antithesis; central London lodging was perceived to be as grim as suburban life.

Going to the Cinema

Going to the cinema was the single most important pastime in 1930s Britain. Cinemas boasted ‘some eighteen to nineteen million attendances every week’, with ‘nine hundred and three million cinema tickets . . . sold in 1934’. ‘From flea-pits to fairy-palaces’, cinemas were everywhere. The picture-palaces were styled as Grecian temples, Spanish villas, baroque mansions and art deco ocean liners. One patron described the Astoria in Finsbury Park as a Moorish paradise: ‘the air was faintly perfumed . . . overhead one could see what appeared to be a night sky with stars twinkling’. Going to the cinema, then, was not just about seeing films. In recent decades a number of studies have explored the multi-sensory nature of the movie-going experience, especially its tactile, olfactory and aural dimensions. Jeffrey Richards pioneered the empirical, case-based approach to writing the cultural history of interwar cinema-going in his monumental The Age of the Dream Palace (1984), which not only discussed the significance of the films themselves to the 1930s generation, but also drew on his own personal sensory memories of cinemas.

Eating Out

In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Eleanor Pargiter observes a lower-middle-class couple in a restaurant, enjoying their time off after work. Variations of this scene appear in many novels of the 1930s; the restaurants and teashops where London’s lower middle class spent their lunch breaks and evening outings became the settings in which their behaviour, their cultural preferences and even their dreams could be scrutinised. Eleanor concludes after watching the self-conscious couple that their performance is borrowed from the movies and illustrated magazines. This performance consisted of glamour and ‘nonchalance’ – modes incompatible with their working lives, but perfectly fitting in establishments that offered ordinary people atmospheres far removed from their mundane routines. Although Woolf does not identify it as such, the scene probably takes place in a Lyons Corner House – one of the four grand central London teashops that provided their patrons not only with affordable food, but also with a visual spectacle that could rival the glitter of the West End and the glamour of cinemas.

Soho Nights

For the author who had grown tired of the frenetic life of the West End, the teashops and the red-lipped girls, Soho seemed to be the natural refuge. As the West End’s shabbier cousin, tucked away in the narrow streets behind Piccadilly, Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho was often seen as an anomaly, an island of heterogeneity and irregularity in the very heart of the commercialised central London where everything and everyone appeared to be increasingly standardised. By the 1930s Soho had long enjoyed a reputation as London’s most mixed quarter, home to a heady variety of nationalities and professions.

Out on the Town

All roads led to the West End in interwar London. The area of roughly one square mile in the metropolitan Borough of Westminster boasted London’s brightest street lights, the largest concentration of electric advertising, the most lavish restaurants and cinemas, and the biggest crowds. This nocturnal cityscape could rival Paris or New York, and for any writer set on modern London life as her subject matter, it was the place to be. Above all, this was where one went to look at quintessentially modern Londoners – the office workers and suburban commuters, the women and men who laboured in London’s offices and shops by day, and walked the streets of the West End by night.

Introduction

This book is about 1930s writing and photographs of London; in particular, it is about the ways in which the decade’s writers and image-makers represented the spaces of leisure and home that came to define the capital during the decade. Central London in the 1930s boasted an inclusive and exuberant leisure culture that became central to the period’s notions of what it meant to be a Londoner and of how this London identity was shaping modern life. London was by no means the only prominent setting in the 1930s, but it was the one that most closely aligned with some of its most urgent preoccupations – namely class, mass democracy, the changing modes of sociability, and gender.