Join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Sean Ketteringham discusses the links between interwar Georgian preservationism and ideas of Imperial decline (thumbnail image (c) London Metropolitan Archives, City of London (Collage: the London Picture Archive, ref 104448)).
Studies of Britain’s imperial decline and its impact on national identity in the metropole have overwhelmingly focussed on the period after 1945. This paper will argue the revival of interest in and preservation of classical and particularly Georgian architecture during the 1930s must form part of how we understand cultural reactions to Britain’s imperial decline.
At the moment the Georgian Group was founded in 1937, the British world-system was already in decline. Cracks in the imperial edifice were evident as American economic power grew and imperial wars in East Asia presaged the arrival of still greater conflict. At home in Britain, the late nineteenth-century idea of a nation beyond borders and an identity predicated on global supremacy became untenable. Within literary discourse, exemplified by the work W.H. Auden and John Betjeman, the situation manifested in a preoccupation with the notion of homelessness initially of an abstract ontological nature – a failed attempt to identify with a national home and history – but eventually made physical by the bombing of homes in British towns and cities from 1940. This paper suggests that the preservation movement was uniquely placed to provide a response to these conditions in the form of a return to idealised imperial national past: the Georgian era. Classical form that was once deployed to marshal colonial subjects was now used to shore up an image of British strength and control, with civic values of restraint and good manners, rapidly slipping into the realm of an imaginary past.
Sean Ketteringham is completing his doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. His thesis investigates the intersection of domestic architecture, nationalism, and the literary popularisation of avant-garde ideas from 1913 to 1945. The project is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the National Trust at 2 Willow Road.
@sean_d_k
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