(Language, Discourse, Society) Matthew Taunton-Fictions of the City_ Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris-Palgrave Macmillan (2009)

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Fictions of the City Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris

Matthew Taunton

© Matthew Taunton 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-57976-7

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1 Haussmann’s Paris and the immeuble 1.1 Rethinking Haussmannization 1.2 L’Assommoir: The Immeuble before the boulevard 1.3 Life: A User’s Manual: Behind the façades 1.4 Delicatessen, The Tenant and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

7 7 18 25 37

2 The London Suburbs 2.1 The growth of the London suburbs 2.2 H. G. Wells and the probable diffusion of great cities 2.3 Coming Up for Air : Orwell, Suburbia and the housing crisis

49 49 62 82

3 The Parisian Banlieue 3.1 Banlieue and Bidonville: Outside the perimeter 3.2 Les Petits enfants du siècle and the first Grands Ensembles 3.3 Delouvrier, de Gaulle and Godard 3.4 Enférmes Dehors: La Haine

98 98 103 117 130

4 Council Housing in London 4.1 Council housing and the post-war consensus 4.2 Cathy Come Home and the numbers game 4.3 Model homes: Nil By Mouth 4.4 Wonderland : The estate in the city

139 139 144 153 172

Conclusion

183

Bibliography

187

Index

197

v

Acknowledgements This book is the product of three years of doctoral research at the London Consortium supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, without which it would not have been possible and for which I am most grateful. I would like to give particular thanks to my supervisor Colin MacCabe for his frank and always excellent advice and his incisive reading of numerous drafts. Marina Lathouri – who acted as secondary supervisor – also had a significant input, helping me to improve the parts of the book that deal with architecture and urban planning. Sections of this thesis were presented at London Consortium PhD seminars led by Barry Curtis, Aura Satz and Patrick Wright: their comments and suggestions – and those of Consortium students – were of great help as I refined my ideas. Steven Connor has inspired, advised and assisted me at crucial points during the writing of this book. David Trotter and Morag Shiach examined the doctoral thesis upon which this book is based and I am very grateful for their insights which were of much use as I revised the manuscript. I would also like to thank Peter Taunton who commented insightfully on a full draft (twice) and Lucy Scholes who proofread certain sections. Gloria Martin and Kate Taunton were hugely supportive. Finally, special thanks go to Doris Pearce, who made it all fun.

vi

Introduction – Fictions of the City

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the exponential growth of both London and Paris created unprecedented social formations. The attempt to make sense of the complexity of modern urban life – or alternatively to testify to its incomprehensibility – became a key function of fictional narrative. To make an urban fiction is to make assumptions about the nature of the city in question and the ways in which it functions. Often, it will also involve a critical engagement with the structures, institutions and mechanisms that shape the city’s social life. Fictions of the city thus frequently contain projections about the ways in which that city could be improved or perfected, or go to wrack. In this regard novels and films about urban life form a continuum with treatises on urban planning, architectural manifestoes and social reform tracts. The relationship between the real city and the novels and films that use that city as a setting is complex and heavily mediated by other cultural forms. This book investigates representations of urban life that are embedded in a discourse about the interrelation of class, culture and mass housing in the modern metropolis, taking London and Paris as its test cases. Fictions of the City proposes that the home should be placed at the centre of a new understanding of metropolitan life. With this in mind, certain key novels and films that bear on the issue of mass housing are subjected to critical analyses that put them into relation with contemporaneous debates in urban planning, architecture and state housing. Focussing on four key developments, two in London and two in Paris, I develop a comparative approach to the two cities that enables an exploration of their very different geographies of class. These are: Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s, 60s and 70s; the two waves of growth of the London suburbs in the late nineteenth 1

2 Fictions of the City

century and the 1930s; the development of the HLM Grands ensembles in the Parisian banlieue ; and the rise of the council estate in London in the post-war period. By examining fictions of mass housing – from the novels of Zola and H. G. Wells to films like La Haine and Nil By Mouth – this book will demonstrate that housing is one of the key mechanisms by which economic relations are transformed into lived experience and cultural practice. My main argument can be summarised as three interconnected propositions which are expounded, elaborated and tested through analyses of novels and films. The first is that the home is vitally import in shaping urban experience and subjectivity, and that studies of literary and filmic representations of the city have often failed to take this into account. In part, this can be understood as part of a tendency to overstate the importance of the city’s public spaces – its boulevards, plazas and parks – at the cost of a failure to give proper attention to the development of new patterns of urban dwelling and metropolitan domesticity. This has sometimes been motivated by a moral preference for the dynamic and mobile over the fixed and immobile. But whether commentators wish to celebrate the urban wanderer’s ability to ‘move freely and untrammelled over the surface of mundane things’ (Park 1967: 156) or deplore the perceived rootlessness of modern life, the basic analysis remains the same. Urban experience is too often assumed to be characterised by the experience of losing oneself wandering in a crowd: it is indicative that the itinerant figure of the flâneur has come to serve in some quarters as the ultimate symbol of modernity. Yet city dwellers are not usually freewheeling nomads lost in a maze of streets. They are often powerfully attached to certain locations, whether by their own inclinations or by some coercive geographical or economic logic. These locations include offices, libraries, cinemas, pubs and the like, but above all houses and flats. The analyses of novels and films put forward in this book reposition housing as the central term in the political discourse of urbanisation. The second proposition is that class in the urban context is more tied to place than many theories of the city – particularly those which took flânerie to be the defining feature of the metropolis – have allowed. In opposition to theories of urban life that have celebrated (or deplored) the mingling of social classes in the city’s public spaces, I claim that there is a determinate geography of class in the city that shapes and is shaped by the distribution of housing types and tenures. This has been subject to manipulation by governments and planners for a variety of reasons and it is here that the extensive literature around the planning

Introduction: Fictions of the City 3

of the modern city comes into play. Governments have often attempted to apply the ideas of architects and urban planners in the interests of the preservation of social stability. Certain types of mass housing have at various times been considered dangerous and others conducive to social harmony. Whether or not given forms of housing promote a stable family life has often been key to such considerations. Novelists and filmmakers have often used fictional representations of the city to explore such issues: this book investigates areas of overlap in their thinking about urban housing. Some of the texts under discussion – like H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes or Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle – see writers and filmmakers grappling at close quarters with contemporary debates over the future planning of the city and its housing. In other cases – such as Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen or Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth – the engagement with ideas from architecture or town planning is less explicit, but they are nevertheless enriched by viewing their explorations of the conditions of urban domesticity in these terms. The third and final proposition derives in part from the examination of two very different capital cities in London and Paris. Adopting a comparative approach to two cities – rather than focussing on just one or drawing arbitrarily on salient examples from any number of cities – makes easy generalisations about ‘the city’ impossible. This book asserts the geographical specificity of London and Paris, resisting a certain tendency in critical theory that in its eagerness to rail against the international capitalist economy has overstated the extent to which that economy has homogenised cultures and obliterated distinct geographical locations. Thinkers such as Paul Virilio – who hails the ‘death of geography’ in The Information Bomb – would have us believe that developments in communication and transportation have effectively abolished space (Virilio 2000: 9). Marc Augé’s conviction that a previously heterogeneous world has been swallowed up by supermarkets, airport lounges, and travelodges – ‘non-places’ – is one theoretical manifestation of the popular notion that urban life is becoming increasingly homogenised on a global scale (Augé 1995). London and Paris arguably have more in common with each other than with most world cities, yet by comparing representations of mass housing in these cities it can be seen that – the ennui of supermarkets notwithstanding – a high degree of geographical and cultural specificity persists. I contend that fundamental differences exist between the two cities in terms of the relationship between city and country, the relationship between centre and periphery, the distribution of housing types and tenures,


geography of class and characteristic dwelling patterns. Certain accounts of the development of capitalist modernity – Marxist ones in particular – have tended to paper over these differences in the interests of producing a schematic model. Indeed Marx and Engels explicitly rely on an imperfect fusion of the histories of England and France for their theoretical formulations: ‘for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France’ (Marx & Engels 1985: 81). Novelists and filmmakers have often proved to be more sensitive to specifics and it is for this reason that fictions of the city prove to be such a potent resource in addressing these issues. The first chapter deals with Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the nineteenth century, and the lasting prevalence of the Haussmannian immeuble as a standard housing type in Paris. The first section sets Haussmann in his political context as the servant of the Second Empire, and considers a selection of responses to Haussmannisation. It is in the context of Second Empire Paris that the figure of the flâneur first emerges, and the overall emphasis in critical assessments of Haussmannisation has generally been on the streets, squares and boulevards of the Nouveau Paris. I argue that the Haussmannian immeuble has had a more profound effect on urban experience, which – seen in this light – is less fluid and itinerant than theorists such as Simmel and Benjamin had thought. By taking Zola’s L as its focus instead L’Assommoir ’Assommoir as of the street poetry of Baudelaire, the second section demonstrates that the apartment building provides a powerful alternative to the boulevard as a matrix through which to view the political meanings of Haussmannisation. The following section is concerned with Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual , which dissects the immeuble and invites us to rethink the dominant narratives of Haussmannisation in terms of the crucial role played by urban domesticity in shaping the experience of the city. Similarly, in Section 1.3, three films – Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, The Tenant and Delicatessen Delicatessen – are analysed as ways of thinking through the political potentials of the apartment block, again demonstrating that at least some of the fundamental social questions posed by urbanisation are played out in the home, and not in the streets. Chapter Two switches to London, where there was no analogous centrally orchestrated plan to rationalise and restructure the city in the nineteenth century. There did emerge, however, in this period, a kind of typical dwelling that we still recognise today as such: the suburban home. The first section explains the different relation of centre to periphery in London and Paris, drawing on a variety of historical and

Introduction: Fictions of the City 5

literary sources to show how class aspiration in London was directed centrifugally, centrifugally, toward the countryside, countrysi de, and then demonstrating that this went hand in hand – through the growth of suburbia – with the emergence of a geography of class that was fundamentally different to that in Paris. This is put into relation with the emergence of the – initially virulently anti-suburban anti-suburban – Garden City movement and, in Section 2.2, with the planning ideas of H. G. Wells. By making these ideas the context for a reading of certain of his novels, I show how Wells sees the home as having a vital role in sustaining the family, and by extension the stability of society and the prospects for socialism. This required low density, density, suburbans uburban-type type dwellings, and a redistribution of the people across the land. Orwell, whose Coming Up for Air is is the principal focus of Section 2.3, represents the opposite argument that the relentless sprawl of the suburbs – fuelled by Garden City propaganda – was threatening to completely engulf the countryside, as it dissolved the city. A high density, density, urban solution was required: the Englishman was going to have to learn to live in flats. In Chapter Three – which focuses on grands ensembles of state subsidised, HLM housing in the Parisian banlieue built in the post-war post- war period – the difference between the two cities in respect of the relation between centre and periphery becomes still more pronounced. The London suburbs had attracted the English middle classes with their propensity for bucolic fantasy, but in Paris – where the immaculate Haussmannian centre was the ideal – the banlieue was little more than a dumping ground for undesirables. Christiane Rochefort’s novel Les Petits enfants du siècle , the subject of Section 3.2, engages with the first wave of development, exploring the very specific form of alienation and ennui that the author associates with a constellation of modernist architectural ideals and social exclusion. The next part deals with Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle , a quasi-sociological quasi-sociological treatise on the intentions and effects of Paul Delouvrier’s Schéma Directeur which links the emerging urban forms with the authoritarianism of the Gaullist state. Godard follows Bazin in his belief in a cinema that is uniquely capable of laying bare realities, and his use of the new Delouvrian landscape in a tale of prostitution and ennui is powerfully suggestive. La Haine, I argue in Section 3.4, gives us reason to hold Delouvrier’s housing policies responsible for the later social discontent of the banlieue . The placement of social housing far from the amenities and the life of the city – the creation of a geographical matrix that excludes immigrants and the poor from the urban scene – must be seen as a key factor in understanding the very real social problems the film depicts.


The final chapter plots the parallel history of the development of social housing in post-war post-war London. The consensus of the post-war post- war period saw a solution to the housing crisis – and specifically the provision of quality homes for the working class – as crucial to social-democratic social-democratic hopes of creating a more equal Britain. Section 4.2 shows how Ken Loach’s Loach’s Cathy Come Home articulates a critique of the welfare state in its own terms, employing imagery – particularly of the family under threat – that was familiar to the proponents of social housing, and Loach’s film is intended to spur them into further action. The typical London council estate as we now know it – its hard, angular concrete, with a mixture of deck-access deck-access and high-rise high-rise blocks – arose from the adoption of industrial building techniques by local authorities keen to meet the vast demand for new dwellings. The borders of the council estate have now become the frontier of a class divide that is difficult to traverse. In Sections 4.3 and 4.4, I compare two films – Nil By Mouth and Wonderland – – in which council estates form a key part of the mise en scène. Nil By Mouth sees the estate as fundamentally confining, a ghetto which has come to symbolise the decline of the traditional working class and the emergence of a new lumpenproletariat. A more optimistic view is taken by Wonderland , which seeks to reconnect the estate and its inhabitants with the city as a whole. In this reading – which is not without its problems – the situation in London is partially redeemed because unlike in Paris, social housing is distributed throughout the city, and not placed outside it. Overall, these four case studies demonstrate that it is both necessary and fruitful to rethink the issue of class in the urban context with a new focus on the issue of housing. This is to be seen from the dual perspective of planning on the one hand, and the subjective experience of the home on the other, a dialectic that is dramatised in literature and film.

1

Haussmann’s Paris and the immeuble

1.1 Rethinking Haussmannisation Haussmannisation

Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the nineteenth century is a defining moment in the history of the metropolis. In certain ways, it would be possible to trace the history of urban planning back to antiquity, but the manner and scale of Haussmann’s intervention make it the point of origin for a particular conception of modern urban planning. Under the Second Empire, the state made a concerted effort to bring the whole city under its bureaucratic control, and to reshape it in the name of efficiency and modernity. As Françoise Choay puts it, ‘Paris was the object of the first perfected plan for regularization of a city in the industrial age’ (1969: 15). Much has been written about the process of Haussmannisation, and its effects. And a great deal of this has followed the lead of Walter Benjamin’s writings about the flâneur , and focussed upon the creation of the boulevards and the role of the public, or external, spaces of the city. For many, the most significant effect of Haussmann’s renovations on the art and culture of Paris is that they open up a variety of public spaces for walking (Forgione 2005: 664). This chapter takes the immeuble as its object rather than the boulevards, streets and plazas that have preoccupied so many critics. Baron Georges Haussmann was the right hand man and ‘demolition artist’ of Napoleon III, under instruction to cement imperial power in a capital that had generated several revolutions in the preceding century (Horne 2002: 265). The Second Empire is best understood as a return to the heroic, Napoleonic politics of the First Empire, and as the reaction of a resurgent conservative rearguard to the 1848 revolution. Since 1789, Paris had been the site of an extraordinary procession of revolutions, power struggles and class conflicts. Karl Marx realised that 7


an understanding of the failure of the 1848 revolutions was of central importance to his own political project, and in 1852 he set out to describe this failure in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte . For Marx, the most troubling aspect of the 1848 revolution was that the radical and liberal impulses that inspired it were so easily won over to the forces of despotism. Given his reputation as a dictatorial emperor, it is perhaps surprising that Napoleon III is the first ruler of a large state outside America to be elected by universal male suffrage (Hobsbawm 1999: 125). But ‘Louis Napoleon’s election signified that even the democracy of universal suffrage, that institution identified with revolution, was compatible with the maintenance of social order’ (Hobsbawm 1999: 40). Marx and his fellow radicals had to face the fact that one of their major weapons against the despotism of the July monarchy – the idea of universal suffrage – was, barring a huge and unlikely swing in popular opinion, useless. Napoleon III realised that the peasantry could be won over with land reforms, that they vastly outnumbered the industrial proletariat and that they were inherently conservative. He knew that he had nothing to fear from the popular vote and was duly elected on 2 December 1848 with a majority of 5.5 million out of a total 7.4 million votes cast (Hobsbawm 1999: 39). In 1851, he used this mandate, and the allies he had made in the military, to stage his coup d’état . Marx writes: ‘On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away by a cardsharper’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by centuries of struggle’ (1984: 13). Incredibly, Marx argued, the revolution had been hijacked by a man whose political programme was rather to the conservative side of the monarchy he displaced and yet he had managed to do it all in the name of the people. France ‘escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual, and, what is more, beneath the authority of an individual without authority’ (Marx 1984: 106). The lesson of 1848 for Europe’s ruling elites, therefore, was that they ‘had to determine what concessions to the new forces could be made without threatening the social system […] to whose defense they were committed’ (Hobsbawm 1999: 91). Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris – and the resulting transformations in urban housing – must be seen in the context of these concessions. Much of the Second Empire’s power was derived from ‘a compromise with the new capitalist economic forces’ (Van Zanten 1994: 199). Both Haussmann and Napoleon would give speeches outlining the purposes of their grand plan at large-scale inauguration ceremonies on the

Haussmann’s Paris and the immeuble 9

completion of new boulevards (Van Zanten 1994: 207). Napoleon’s addresses were carefully poised, alluding on the one hand to the absolute power of the Empire over the geography of Paris, and on the other hand pointing out that this authoritarian restructuring of Paris was intended to liberalise trade. In a contradiction that is a familiar aspect of the rhetoric of free-market liberalism, liberty – which here means no more than the free market – is guaranteed by an aggressively authoritarian state, whose main function is to prevent society from interfering with the economy. Napoleon III said at the opening of the Boulevard de Sebastopol: The municipal council thus has a multiple task to accomplish: it must first of all insure the financial resources of the nation, [then] support new construction to lodge the sudden increase in population, so that, on the other hand, it must demolish in order to create new streets which permit light and air to penetrate the unhealthy quarters and build great arteries helping the development of the city, linking the center to the extremities. (Quoted Van Zanten 1994: 207) The salient feature of the discourse in which Napoleon and Haussmann explicate the renovations is the medicalizing emphasis on circulation. The various districts of the city are to be linked by a series of boulevards and roads, making the city into a single organism with a system of veins and arteries enabling the free circulation of goods and labour. The new boulevards were referred to as percées – cuts – or even as éventrements – disembowelments or eviscerations – reinforcing the metaphors of pathology by envisioning Haussmann’s boulevards as surgical incisions (Kostof 1992: 266). The key role of Haussmann’s boulevards was to link different zones of the city to form a new unity. This process of interlinking and unification went further in 1860 when the legal limits of the city were extended up to the 1841 Thiers fortifications (Loyer 1988: 104) to establish the twenty arrondissements that remain today, a zone clearly demarcated by the city wall. By annexing built up areas within the wall and bringing them under the same planning logic that governed central Paris Haussmann enlarged the urban zone and ‘stamped a new urban identity on these quasi-rural settlements by purposely obliterating their former structure’ (Kostof 1992: 58). This also emphasised the role of the Thiers fortifications – which marked the administrative limits of the city until the post-1945 restructuring of the Paris region – as an absolute cut off point at the edge of the city. The modern day périphérique follows


the path of these fortifications and continues to demarcate the area of central Paris. The sharp distinction between the city and its surroundings suggested by the city wall is a lasting legacy of Haussmannisation. As Anne Power puts it, Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris ‘set in train a characteristic pattern of French urban development, a well-preserved, attractively planned centre with marginal housing around the edges in poorly planned developments, badly served by the urban infrastructure and lacking a longer-term vision’ (Power 1993: 25). Paris remained a walled city long after London had burst its banks, and as well as acting to the detriment of the housing projects in the banlieue (discussed in Chapter 3) this is a significant factor in Haussmannisation: For the spontaneous urbanization of the industrial era the Old World had two types of cities to offer: the open city, like London, which was free for unlimited expansion, and the closed city, like Paris, bounded by ancient walls. It is not surprising that the most elaborate and precocious plan originated in an enclosed city, where the disorder created by spatial limitation was more shocking and hopeless. (Choay 1969: 15) The growth of Paris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was given its particular character by this spatial limitation of the city. The expanding population had been forced to live within the legal limits of the city, which were demarcated by the wall until 1840. This impacted upon the development of Parisian housing. The available housing was quickly filled up. Houses then began to be subdivided into multiple dwellings; when this new breakup of space became insufficient, upper stories were added to the old buildings. (Sennett 1986: 134) Rather than spreading outwards like London, Paris developed by housing a greater number at greater density in the same area. The Haussmannian immeuble was thus prefigured by this subdivision of houses into multiple dwellings. In poorer areas, the compressed nature of the city made for particularly abject conditions, and the desire to eliminate Paris’s ‘unhealthy quarters’ was a subtext of Haussmann’s plan. Napoleon insists on the need to ‘lodge the sudden increase in population’. This was a subplot, however: Haussmann’s scheme was one in which ‘[p]roblems of


traffic flow were given a priority’ (Choay 1969: 17), and there was no systematic effort to provide alternative dwellings for the urban poor. Insofar as it was concerned with addressing the housing problem, moreover, the plan was inadequate. It was Engels who pointed out, in The Housing Question , that Haussmann’s supposed cure for the awful living conditions of the Parisian poor was in effect simply to relocate the slums rather than to abolish them. Moreover, for Engels, this becomes the pattern for subsequent bourgeois solutions to the housing question: [T]he result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighbourhood. (Engels 1942: 71) While Haussmannisation might appear to do away with the slums, it does so ‘in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question’ (Engels 1942: 70). As slums were destroyed and replaced with wide streets of bourgeois apartments, slum dwellers simply decamped to areas that had not yet been developed, or to the areas beyond the city wall. The fact that Haussmann was himself relatively uninterested in housing, emphasising circulation instead, must in part account for the tendency of subsequent literature on Haussmannisation to focus on the transformations that were enacted on the public spaces of the city: on streets, squares and parks, rather than homes and offices. This is also perhaps partly an effect (and elsewhere a cause) of the popularity of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur , which gained its fullest expression in his work on Baudelaire, as a characteristic ‘type’ of modernity. The flâneur requires the context of the boulevard – as a wide, public and urban space – in order to wander among strangers noticing things and encountering otherness. Baudelaire had flagged his interest in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (Baudelaire 1995: 1–41) and Benjamin proposed a highly influential reading of his poetry with this figure of the urban wanderer at its heart (Benjamin 1973: 35–66; Benjamin 1992). For Benjamin, Baudelaire’s poem ‘À Une passante’ (Baudelaire 1996: 133–4) – in which a chance encounter in a crowded street kindles in the poet ‘a love which only a city dweller experiences’ (Benjamin 1992: 166) – is paradigmatic of urban experience. ‘Far from experiencing


the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element, this very crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates’ (Benjamin 1992: 165–6). Metropolitan life, for Benjamin, is fundamentally defined by the relationship between individual and crowd, and the street is the stage for this encounter. Alongside Baudelaire, the influence of Georg Simmel on Benjamin is pronounced. Simmel’s work was instrumental in developing the vocabulary of urban sociology that Benjamin works with. The concepts of the primacy of the visible, ‘shock’, the importance of fashion and so on, were articulated by Simmel in his essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. For Simmel, metropolitan experience is characterised by an ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’ (1997: 175). Thrown into a vast and swirling crowd, the individual psyche must find a way of coping with ‘the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’ (Simmel 1997: 175). Simmel’s analysis is in many ways very acute and he captures something essential about the city that still applies today. Anyone who has walked down Oxford Street on a Saturday will know what it means to be bombarded with onrushing sensory impressions. But the familiarity of such an experience should not deceive us: Simmel’s account of urban life is focussed on the crowds and the chaos that fill its public spaces. I want to question the idea that these are the loci of the defining subjective experience of urban life. One of the reasons for doing this is that the emphasis on ‘public space’ in readings of the effects of Haussmannisation tends to promote a certain limited spectrum of interpretations as to the political content of the renovations. For example, Marxist critics like Marshall Berman and T. J. Clark have proposed that there is a kind of dialectic at work in Haussmann’s renovations. To be sure, it is argued, Haussmannisation was undertaken in the service of an authoritarian and aggressively procapitalist state, but the important thing is that the modernisation of the city produces the conditions under which the contradictions of capitalism become apparent. Drawing on Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur , and, like Benjamin, on the poetry of Baudelaire, Marshall Berman provides an optimistic analysis of the widening of the boulevards. His account of Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ is instructive. In the poem, the bourgeois narrator and his lover are found sitting in a café on a new boulevard when they see a poor family staring in at the luxury from which they are excluded. The narrator immediately feels sympathy for them, and guilt about his own affluence, but when he


looks to his lover for the same reaction, he is disgusted by her callous reaction when she says: ‘I can’t stand these people with their eyes wide open like entrance gates! Can’t you ask the headwaiter to send them away?’ (Baudelaire 1997: 61). Berman interprets the poem thus: The physical and social transformations that drove the poor out of sight now bring them back directly into everyone’s line of vision. Haussmann, in tearing down the old medieval slums, inadvertently broke down the self-enclosed and hermetically sealed world of traditional urban poverty. The boulevards, blasting great holes through the poorest neighborhoods, enable the poor to walk through the holes and out of their ravaged neighborhoods, to discover for the first time what the rest of their city and the rest of life is like. And as they see, they are seen: the vision, the epiphany, flows both ways. In the midst of the great spaces, under the bright lights, there is no way to look away. The glitter lights up the rubble, and illuminates the lives of the people at whose expense the bright lights shine. (Berman 1982: 153) In Berman’s reading the fact that these bourgeois lovers are forced to react to seeing the poor – whether with sympathy or contempt – contains within it an inherently progressive impulse. The narrator who sympathises with their plight is now ideologically allied to it, and – with the poor also being confronted with the visible luxuries of their historical enemy – the battle lines are drawn. Baudelaire’s lovers, who had been happily enjoying the pleasures of public life on the boulevards, are polarised politically by an inevitable by-product of the very space they are enjoying. ‘Should the barricades go up on the boulevard … ’ Berman writes, ‘the lovers could well find themselves on opposite sides’ (1982: 154). For Berman, the fact that the barricades did go up in 1871 is evidence that the intermixing of social classes in the boulevards generated this surge of egalitarian energy. Yet the causal link is a tenuous one, and it ignores the fact that the commune failed. Furthermore, Berman places too much faith in the idea of a completely fluid public sphere. Certainly, many of the case studies in this book tend to suggest that – while the segregation of classes within a city can exacerbate the problems of the poor – situations where different classes mix, or live in the same area, do not necessarily spark social revolutions.


T. J. Clark’s account of Haussmannisation and the painting of Manet and his circle works with similar assumptions, but arrives at a rather different conclusion. ‘The typical scene – this new painting certainly suggested – was likely to be one in which the classes co existed but did not touch … Class exists, but Haussmann’s spaces allow it to be overlooked’ (Clark 1999: 73). For Clark, the Haussmannian city presents radical opportunities, but modern painting posited a kind of reconciliation between social classes based on the idea that they could coexist in the same spaces while simply ignoring each other. What Clark and Berman share, though, is the conviction that the most fundamental social, cultural and even psychological shifts associated with urbanisation – and with Haussmannisation in particular – take place in the public realm. This leads them to ignore developments in the private, domestic sphere that are arguably more significant, and which should also give us cause to doubt the conclusions that they arrive at with regard to the development of urban class relations. If both Berman and Clark have seen in Haussmann’s boulevards the potential for a kind of liberation – however problematic – then the emphasis on the new exterior spaces of the city, and the lines of sight that they opened up, has also spawned a breed of more pessimistic ruminations, ranging from suspicion to paranoia. Walter Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project : The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in the streets of Paris impossible for all time. […] Widening the streets will make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets will connect the barracks in straight lines with the workers’ districts. (1999: 23) On this account – which has a long heritage – Haussmann’s Paris is designed with the intention of giving the state an insurmountable military advantage over its citizens. The boulevards are widened to prevent the downtrodden urban proletariat and their leaders in the radical section of the bourgeoisie from achieving their political ends. Now, this may well have been part of the plan. After so many years of revolutionary insurrection and political turmoil, stability was the watchword of the new regime and if this was partly to be achieved through a compromise with the forces of democracy and the extension of the franchise, the state also sought to extend and consolidate


its authority through the violent exercise of power. The problem with Benjamin’s observation, however, is that it overstates the efficacy of such a tactic. The idea that the modern state’s involvement in architecture and planning is primarily about disciplining the citizenry perhaps has its roots in the early responses to Haussmannisation, and is still current today. David Van Zanten notes, for example, that Victor Fournel’s Paris Nouveau, Paris Futur (1865) was driven by such fears, imagining ‘an étoile of boulevards spreading from the Hôtel de Ville, panoptically maintaining perfect discipline both in building mass and in social conduct’ (1994: 131). In invoking the Panopticon in this context, Van Zanten is thinking as much of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as of Bentham’s prison. And in more recent years, Foucault has been a key figure for those seeking to articulate a strong version of the thesis that social control is a primary function of architecture. For Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon – a prison carefully designed so that every prisoner is potentially under observation at all times – is both a metaphor and a formula for the architecture of the modern state. It ‘programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms’ (Foucault 1995: 209). As Van Zanten’s allusion suggests, visibility is the crucial concept in linking Bentham and Haussmann. For Foucault – and in this sense his position is the very opposite of the kinds of argument represented here by Berman and Clark – visibility has no positive connotations, but is simply the instrument of state control. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1995: 202–3) Foucault’s work looms large in the study of the politics of urban forms, and it is unsurprising that this aspect of his work has influenced accounts of Haussmannisation. By replacing the narrow lanes of the old city with wide boulevards, the argument goes, Haussmann exposed the citizenry to new forms of surveillance. The feeling of being watched inspires obedience, and the citizen of Paris ‘becomes the principle of his own subjection’.


Attempts to understand the development of the city in the nineteenth century have often relied on ‘a simplified reading of the works of Foucault’ (Prendergast 1992: 10). It is easy to get carried away with the idea that, as Prendergast puts it: Haussmann’s objective was to produce a coherent and stratified identity for modern Paris […], a clearly readable system of boulevards and demarcations with everything in its proper place, essentially a city without surprise. (1992: 10) Foucault seems at times to believe that the various attempts of governments to produce a disciplined society have succeeded, and that we are all in effect living in a vast Panopticon. In ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’ – an interview conducted by Paul Rabinow – he qualifies some of the more deterministic elements of his earlier discussion of the Panopticon, suggesting that architecture cannot in itself act straightforwardly as a force for liberation or repression: ‘it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom’ (1997: 372). In a sympathetic reading of Foucault, Sharon Marcus has provided further mitigation and convincingly argued that cities and buildings should be seen as ‘both social products and conduits for social production’ but never as ‘monolithic agents of social control’ (Marcus 1999: 9). Nevertheless, Discipline and Punish does at least suggest the idea of a disciplinary architecture working in the service of the state and planning as a mechanism of state control. This version of his basic argument – that supposedly liberal societies actually depend on highly developed forms of disciplinarian governance – is only a half-truth, and the danger is that it can be used to justify a rejection of all forms of liberalism on the perverse basis that they are inherently authoritarian. Against this vulgar-Foucauldian paranoia about state power Prendergast sets the fact that during the Second Empire – whatever Haussmann’s authoritarian fantasy – the city in many ways becomes more chaotic. Haussmann presided over ‘the city as a place of increasing illegibility, in which “surprise” seemed to be the order of the day, and in which “identity”, psychic and social, would come to be perceived as uncertain and problematical’ (1992: 10). Prendergast’s objection is thus framed in terms of Paris as a city of spectacle and flânerie: it is the implicit anarchy of the street, the vision of a city governed by aleatory events and chance encounters, that redeems it from the authoritarian fantasies of its rulers.


The Panopticon and the flâneur are two major shibboleths in theoretical accounts of the city, and in both cases it can feel that to demur is heresy. Furthermore, the two models are inherently contradictory. If urban modernity is fundamentally ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ (Baudelaire 1995: 12), then it is difficult to square this with the idea of a society that is increasingly ‘penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms’ (Foucault 1995: 209), a rigid and controlling power structure based on the principle of surveillance. The emphasis of the present book on developments in urban housing rather than transformations in public spaces is in part motivated by the desire to find a way out of this impasse. And by reorienting the analysis towards the domestic, the figures of the locataire, the owner-occupier and the council tenant (among others) take on a greater significance than the flâneur . Franco Moretti argues for a view of urbanisation that is strongly opposed to that developed by Benjamin and Simmel. For Moretti, The great novelty of urban life […] does not consist in having thrown the people into the street, but in having raked them up and shut them into offices and houses. It does not consist in having intensified the public dimension, but in having invented the private one – and especially in having transferred the meaning of individual life […] into this new domain. (2005: 127) Moretti does not wish to deny that the kinds of urban street scene described by Simmel in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ are peculiar to the metropolis. It is rather that, in the city – and precisely because of some of the conditions that Simmel describes – the street has been ‘drastically and irreparably devalued […] as a place of social experience ’ (Moretti 2005: 127). For Moretti, Balzac’s novels demonstrate that it is often into the new formations of the urban home – the pension in Père Goriot , for example – that this social experience is displaced. In this context, it seems clear that Benjamin is missing something when he writes, on his first visit to Paris in 1913, that the apartment blocks which frame the boulevards ‘do not seem to be made to be lived in, but are like stone sets for people to walk between’ (Quoted Arendt 1992: 26, see also Benjamin 1966: 56). This is the way a tourist experiences the city – and indeed, with its emphasis on circulation, it bears certain similarities with the way that Haussmann conceived of the Nouveau Paris – but the lives of the inhabitants of Paris bear the imprint of the


typically Parisian, Haussmannian immeuble , more than they are structured by the boulevards. 1.2 L’Assommoir : The Immeuble before the boulevard

Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir is set in the period in which Paris was undergoing its Haussmannian transformation, and in some respects it reflects the conventional account of this process. Take this example, a description from close to the end of the novel when the destitute Gervaise staggers half starved through the streets of Paris as they are torn down around her ears to be rebuilt in the grand Haussmannian style: This district, which was becoming so splendid that she now felt uncomfortable in it, was being opened up to the air in every direction. The Boulevard Magenta which led up from the heart of Paris and the Boulevard Ornano which stretched out into the country had left a hole behind them where the city wall used to stand, marked by a great mass of demolished houses. […] The demolition of the octroi wall had long since widened the outer boulevards, with pavements on the sides and a strip for pedestrians, planted with four rows of small plane trees. It was now a huge crossing leading to the distant horizon, along interminable streets that swarmed with people; everywhere there was chaos from the building operations. But, alongside the tall new houses, many rickety shacks were still standing; between the carved façades there remained blackened gaps where jumbled hovels flaunted their dilapidated windows. Beneath the ever-increasing luxury of Paris the dreadful poverty of the slums forced itself upon the eye, defiling these sites where the new city was being so hastily erected. (Zola 1995: 406–7) Zola endorses the idea that the renovations were opening up lines of sight that increased the visibility of class divisions, though he stops short of the implication in Baudelaire’s ‘Les Yeux des Pauvres’ that such visibility might spark off charitable impulses or political consciousness in the bourgeoisie. As Gervaise recognises, ‘in all this crowd of people, which surely must include some who were well-off, there wasn’t one Christian soul who would guess at her plight and slip ten sous into her hand!’ (Zola 1995: 407). As her fruitless walk continues, hunger drives Gervaise to attempt (unsuccessfully) to prostitute herself. When the moment of charity does arrive and she gets her


long-awaited meal, it is the final humiliation because it is given to her by Goujet, the hardworking and respectable blacksmith with whom she had an unconsummated love affair at a happier time earlier in the novel (Zola 1995: 417–20). Gervaise’s walk is far from an example of flânerie. While the street is an important theme, then, the thrust of Zola’s novel is to confirm Moretti’s thesis that the modern city – and perhaps the process of Haussmannisation in particular – tends to devalue it as a site of social experience. Indeed, Gervaise’s final walk through the city is one of several episodes that seem designed to confirm the basic inhospitability of the streets for the novel’s cast of working-class characters. The day of Gervaise’s marriage to Coupeau is one such. Colette Wilson (2004) has argued that the wedding party’s rain-sodden excursion through the streets of Paris to the Louvre acts as a kind of carnivalesque re-enactment of the history of the 1871 rebellion that led to the Paris Commune (set before this key date, the novel was composed in 1875 and published in 1876–7). Wilson shows the significance of the episode’s specific geographic locations for this history. Nevertheless, if this excursion is ‘an allegory of the Paris Commune’s struggle, and ultimate failure, to re-appropriate urban space on behalf of the Parisian working class’ (Wilson 2004: 343), then it must be emphasised in this context that the urban space that has been lost and stands in need of reclamation, here, is the street. While the trip to the Louvre provides some respite and an opportunity for some social comedy, the impossibility of flânerie (for these working-class characters at least) is emphasised when the gallery closes and the wedding party is again forced out into the rain: It was striking four. There were still two hours to fill before dinner. They decided to go for a little walk to pass the time. The ladies were worn out and would have been glad to sit down, but as no one offered to buy a round of drinks they set off again along the embankment. There, they were caught in another downpour heavy enough to spoil the ladies’ outfits in spite of the umbrellas. (Zola 1995: 76) Here, as on the other occasions when Gervaise leaves her quartier , the street is shown to be an inhospitable place. To ‘go for a little walk to pass the time’ carries none of the highfalutin associations of flânerie : it is merely a necessity occasioned by the party’s general refusal to buy a round, and it ends in a thorough soaking. ‘Zola takes Gervaise and


Coupeau back full circle to Monmartre where they belong, to eke out their miserable existence’ (Wilson 2004: 346), Wilson writes, noting the significance of Monmartre as the traditional locale of the communards. But it is also important that this thwarted attempt to reclaim some stake in the life of the street effectively rebounds the characters into the cramped domestic spaces of the immeuble. The most important apartment block in L’Assommoir , where Gervaise establishes her laundry shop and gradually sinks into destitution, was built before Haussmann’s renovations took place. As such it underlines the important fact that the typical Parisian apartment block to some extent preceded Haussmann: his role could be interpreted as one of standardising this form of housing across the capital. Being set over the period of the renovations, the novel also suggests that they led to the development of a new relationship between immeuble and street. This accords with Sharon Marcus’s principal argument in Apartment Stories: ‘that Paris became interiorized after 1850’, a claim which ‘challenges the received interpretations of Second Empire Paris as a city of spectacle, flânerie , and circulation’ (Marcus 1999: 139). In support of this argument, Marcus produces detailed, contextualised readings of first Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons and then Zola’s Pot-Bouille, which operate as ‘before’ and ‘after’ snapshots of the social life of the Parisian apartment block, with the Haussmannian makeover intervening between these two novels. Before Haussmann, Marcus argues, the façade of the apartment block was frequently imagined as transparent and the rooms inside as effectively continuous with the street. The opening of Père Goriot is a memorable manifestation of this, a descriptive passage that moves almost seamlessly from outside the boarding house, to ‘the innermost layer of its landlady’s clothing, then to the core of her subjective thoughts’ (Marcus 1999: 52). Marcus writes: The new configuration of the interior as a hermetic, concealed, and strictly demarcated place, and the valorization of the involuted domesticity that accompanied that innovation, involved changes in both architectural practice and cultural values. (Marcus 1999: 138) The key result of Haussmannisation, then, is a retreat into the interior as a ‘nostalgic alternative to an alienating modernity’ (Marcus 1999: 139). As a portrait of the life of an apartment block, therefore, Zola’s Pot Bouille is much less outward looking than Balzac’s novels. Instead, we have a hermetically sealed unit, ‘the apartment house as an absolutely


private space, and the sequestration of men, women and children within the home’ (Marcus 1999: 166). L’Assommoir suggests a similar interiorization, but also points to some significant developments in the apartment block that Marcus does not comment upon. I have already pointed out that the characters’ attempts to reclaim a stake in the public spaces of the streets are blocked: instead, their lives are shaped by the confined spaces of the immeuble . But it is not just the emergence of a new relationship between street and home. For the other major change that Haussmannisation effected on the apartment block is the extent to which it effectively reduced the commingling of classes: the opposite to what is argued by Berman and others. L’Assommoir is an interesting case study precisely because it tracks the changes in a single immeuble over the twenty years or so in which Haussmann’s renovations took place. Given that Zola’s immeuble is inhabited largely by the same people over the course of the novel, it would be difficult to argue simply that the range of classes coexisting in it are significantly reduced: it’s a slum at the start of the novel and it’s a slum at the end. Nevertheless, especially when viewed alongside the affluent bourgeois apartment block in Pot Bouille discussed by Marcus, the immeuble in L’Assommoir registers some important shifts in the class geography of Paris. L’Assommoir’s interest on the range of social classes that could coexist within a single building reflects a shifting social reality. As Loyer writes, ‘[p]rior to the nineteenth century, Paris was characterized by a limited surface area, high density, and the multifunctionality of its neighborhoods, which went hand in hand with a close intermingling of the social classes’ (Loyer 1988: 22). But Haussmann’s renovations tended to reduce the mixture of social classes living on each street. Before Haussmann, ‘[d]ifferences in social position could still be seen in the often quite dissimilar buildings on a street, ranging from small stone mansions decorated with wrought-iron elements, sculptures, or moldings to extremely modest little wood-and-plaster houses’ (Loyer 1988: 30). Haussmann’s plan standardised the housing on each street it covered – in the interests of creating the clean lines and attractive vistas of a uniform façade – and so it tended to reduce the social mix within each quartier (Sennett 1986: 134–5). During Haussmann’s renovations, ‘[w] hatever heterogeneity occurred spontaneously in the division of private houses into apartments in the first half of the century was now opposed by an effort to make neighbourhoods homogenous economic units’ (Sennett 1986: 134–5). L’Assommoir demonstrates that the slums formed a part of the same logic. Where Predergast, Berman and Clark see the


modern city as promoting the mixture of classes, a focus on housing instead of public space suggests that the opposite may be true. Franco Moretti’s revealing map of Zola’s Paris novels (Moretti 1998: 90–1) shows that the action of each of these novels – in striking contrast to those of Balzac – is geographically confined to a very small area of Paris. The contrast between the close geographical confinement of Zola’s novels and the more fluid, mobile city that Balzac’s characters inhabit may in part be explicable in terms of the temperamental preferences of the two novelists. But Gervaise’s walk amongst the ‘carved façades’ (Zola 1995: 406) of the Nouveau Paris certainly seems to suggest that the concentration of wealth in the immaculate new boulevards is part of a new geographical logic. Circulation may have been Haussmann’s aspiration, but L’Assommoir concerns ‘the space that catches human beings by their throat, and doesn’t let go’ (Moretti 1998: 90). The increasing homogenisation of the classes living on each street was inevitably reflected on the level of the individual immeuble , a fact which further illuminates some of the events in L’Assommoir . As Sennet writes, the ‘classic image of the early 19th Century Parisian house is of a wealthy family on the first floor, a respectable family on the next floor, and so on, until one reached the servants in the garret’ (Sennett 1986: 134). The vertical arrangement of the medieval ‘row house’ system persisted throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth and tended to promote the intermixing of classes within with artisans and merchants living above their own workspace or shop, alongside more affluent householders (Van Zanten 1994: 129–30). This mixture of classes within the immeuble is thus a familiar feature of depictions of life under the July Monarchy. Balzac comments in Cousin Bette, for example, that ‘[t]he ignorance of one another’s social position in which the tenants of the same house live is something constantly noted’ (2004: 67), and his plots are often structured on this principle. Haussmannian apartment blocks introduced further standardisation as the horizontally orientated single level flat became a standard feature. This change, hinted just before the revolution and made systematic in the building boom of the 1840s, was the product of the economic revolution introducing the wage-rent nexus – the dissolution of private ownership and traditional socially constructed space in the face of the emergence of the efficient quantification of rental cells an its drive for ever greater density. These new speculative blocks grew


up to the limits of the regulatory envelope and produced, in the 1850s, what we recognize today as the immeuble haussmannien . (Van Zanten 1994: 130) The implementation of this ‘regulatory envelope’ was Haussmann’s most significant intervention in terms of actually shaping the immeuble. Seeing the narrow streets and tall buildings of the old Paris as ideal hunting grounds for thieves and vagabonds, he enforced long-ignored building regulations that had been initially introduced in 1783–4 (Sutcliffe 1993: 65–6, 91–2). Loyer describes the effect of the standardisation: When edifices of maximum regulation size finally began to be built, the systematic reproduction of a single size of building generated an astounding unity, which was further strengthened when the city began forcing builders to respect the unity of the block even in compositional detail: floor levels of equal height, a standard projection for balconies and cornices, a standard spacing of solids and voids, and even standard decorative details like pilasters, frames around window and door openings, and pediments. (Loyer 1988: 130) The narrower range of social classes living within a single apartment block can thus in part be accounted for by the architectural features of the Haussmannian immeuble. While this seems to have promoted a certain standardisation among the bourgeois residents, it is important to remember that the bourgeois apartment block – like the one in Pot Bouille for example – also contained servants’ quarters. The extent to which these domestic labourers contributed to the diversity of classes living in a building or a district is debateable since in practice they tended to form a part of a bourgeois household (though this is clearly at issue in Pot-Bouille). But it is significant that, architecturally, the Haussmannian apartment block contained less salubrious apartments. For in the twentieth century as domestic servants are phased out these begin to house less well-off tenants and hence allow an increasing class diversity within the individual immeuble, as is clear in Life: A User’s Manual. Being built before Haussmann’s renovations, the apartment block in L’Assommoir to some extent reproduces the class dynamics of the medieval row house system. It is important to note, however, that it does so within a much narrower range of classes. Shifts in the geography of class in the city alter the texture of the building’s life without any change in the architecture of the building. Nevertheless, class distinction is one


of the key areas in which the building imprints itself onto the lives of its tenants. In a building that effectively operates as a village of 300 inhabitants (Zola 1995: 47) there is a clear social hierarchy that defines the relation of the apartments to one another (especially near the beginning of the novel) and this plays a key role in defining the interrelations between their inhabitants. When Gervaise first visits the building with Coupeau, before their ill-fated marriage, it becomes the object of her aspirations, despite the ‘frowsty smell so typical of places where the poor live’ (Zola 1995: 46). Concluding that ‘it wasn’t nearly as nasty as at the Hôtel Boncœur’ (46–7), where she lived at the beginning of the novel, she ‘was already choosing the window she would have, one over the left-hand corner which had a little window-box planted with scarlet runners, whose stalks were beginning to twine round a framework of string’. This is hardly an aspiration to join the ranks of the haute bour geoisie, then, but it does indicate that important social distinctions operate within the working class, and indeed within a single building. This is confirmed when Gervaise – backed by a loan from Goujet – moves into one of the most prestigious apartments in this run down block and, with much fanfare and fresh paint, opens a laundry. The Lorilleux (Coupeau’s sister and her husband) react with incredulous envy when their sisterin-law adopts ideas above her station: ‘jealousy was driving them crazy’ (133). A decisive step in the Coupeau’s descent into poverty, moreover, is marked by their move from the shop in the ground floor to ‘a garret in the slummy part’ of the building, seeming to reinforce the idea that significant class divisions exist within the immeuble (Zola 1995: 312). Ostensibly, the narrative suggests that Gervaise’s ‘slow decline into depravity’ (Zola 1995: 144) results from her choice of a luxurious lifestyle that is beyond her means. According to this logic, a more upstanding woman would have made the laundry a long-term success and lived comfortably on the proceeds. But Zola, being something of an environmental determinist, is less concerned to examine the ethical choices his characters make than to show how they are ‘ruined by the conditions of sweated toil and poverty in which they live’ (Zola 1995: 3–4). The immeuble constitutes their immediate environment and shapes the trajectories of its inhabitants’ lives. When the Coupeaus leave the failed laundry, the Poissons move in and Virginie converts the shop into a sweet shop, smug in the knowledge that she has now risen above her former boss in the social hierarchy of the immeuble. But Virginie’s sweet shop goes the same way as Gervaise’s laundry. Soon after she moves in Zola offers an ominous augury of Virginie’s fate that explicitly links it to the apartment, noting that ‘she was replacing Gervaise in absolutely


every respect in that apartment’ (Zola 1995: 314). One important constant that explicitly ties the ruination of the two families to their domestic environment is the presence of Lantier in a room that opens onto the courtyard and, via a communicating door, into the heart of the apartment. This room acts as a kind of trapdoor that punctures the intimacy of the family apartment and exposes it to invasion from the semi-public space of the courtyard, becoming symbolic of a dreadful failure of privacy as Coupeau and Poisson are cuckolded in turn by Lantier. The descent into dissipation, poverty and vice is an inevitable consequence of living here: the idea that significant social distinctions divide the tenants is an illusion. If L’Assommoir begins as a dramatisation of the class tensions that exist between the immeuble’s working class tenants, it ends with a sense that there is little to distinguish between these wretched lives. The novel’s lesson, in effect, is that these petty resentments and jealousies that set the building’s residents at each other’s throats are meaningless. Any perception of a social hierarchy within the building is simply a distraction from much more significant class divisions that exist between neighbouring quartiers, many of which were being transformed by Haussmann into a kind of bourgeois paradise. The Haussmannian immeuble itself – architecturally similar to the immeuble in L’Assommoir but arranged in seamless rows – was a by-product of a monumental strategy rather than a deliberate attempt to remould living conditions. As such, it betrays a tendency within Haussman’s plan to eschew any wider social purpose. As Marcus notes, ‘[b]y focussing the pedestrian’s gaze on what lay at the end of the street, perspectival organisation placed the apartments that lined streets in a peripheral space that dissolved on the edge of vision’ (1999: 140). The buildings that frame these impressive perspectival vistas, the places where the people of Paris actually live, dissolve away: like the stage sets in Benjamin’s youthful letter, they are secondary to the main action. It is crucial, though, that Haussmann’s lack of interest in the domestic must not be allowed to blind us to its importance. In this respect, by refocusing our attention on the immeuble, L’Assommoir acts as a powerful corrective. 1.3 Life a User’s Manual: Behind the façades

I have drawn attention to some of the problems with Benjamin’s and Simmel’s accounts of the city as being characterised principally by fluid exchanges, shocks and encounters in public spaces. However, it is also important to credit Benjamin for his work on the interior. While his


emphasis on streets, arcades, public spaces and flânerie has been the most influential aspect of his work on Second Empire Paris, in The Arcades Project he does give an account of the private dwelling. This account is particularly pertinent to Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which attempts to engage with the relation of the interior to the city in a rather different way to Benjamin. A starting point might be Perec’s Species of Spaces, first published as Espèces d’espaces in 1974, around the time that Perec conceived the idea for his most celebrated novel. Species of Spaces is a collection of essays that negotiates the city in a way that chimes in some interesting ways with The Arcades Project . It is constructed as a series of vignettes which approach the issue of space at different levels of scale, starting with the page, then the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment block, and so on to the world, and finally space. This passage from the privacy of individual interiority to the global and the universal – via the forms of the home and the city – is like the opening of Père Goriot in reverse, and can be read as Marcus reads Balzac, as an attempt to knit together the various levels at which urban space is experienced, and show them to be mutually continuous. The section entitled ‘The Street’ is particularly indicative of how Perec’s account of the city differs from any that we find in Benjamin, Simmel and their followers. The parallel alignment of two series of buildings defines what is known as a street. The street is a space bordered, generally on its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what separates houses from each other, and also what enables us to get from one house to another, by going either along or across a street. (Perec 1997: 46) This passage neatly inverts the terms of Benjamin’s characterisation of apartment buildings as stage sets, important only for the way in which they frame the street, the stage on which the most essentially urban experiences are played out. Here, streets are imagined as primarily the means by which one moves between houses, which have for Perec a more fundamental significance. It is instructive to note that the most extensive treatment Benjamin gives to the apartment block is in his consideration of the interior. For Benjamin, the individual retreats into the interior as a defence against the over-stimulation of the street. He writes that ‘the private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions’ (1999: 19). Benjamin interprets the


elaborate interiors that became popular under Louis Philippe and flourished during the Second Empire as being ways of preserving a sense of individuality away from the bustle of the street and the marketplace. Marcus suggests that Benjamin’s construction of ‘the home as a hermetically sealed “interior”, isolated from its surroundings’ (Marcus 1999: 6) fails to capture the important sense in which the urban home is embedded in the city. This is a serious limitation, but Benjamin’s writing about interiors demands attention: To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir. (Benjamin 1999: 216) The withdrawal into the interior has a kind of analgesic or even psychotropic quality for Benjamin, and indeed he explicitly relates it to hashish intoxication (1999: 216). The apartment is viewed in complete isolation, with no concierge, no windows overlooking the street, and no relation to other apartments in the block. It might be considered something of an anomaly that Benjamin, who was so fascinated by the arcades because they blurred the boundaries between public and private, forming a kind of public interior, was not so interested in the staircases, corridors and lobbies of the immeuble , which seem similarly poised between public and private. Perec’s account of the immeuble differs from Benjamin’s and I would argue significantly improves upon it. Unlike Benjamin, Perec does not restrict himself to a purely defensive notion of the ‘interior’, though this remains an important category. He holds the staircase and the landings of the apartment block to be of great importance in articulating the experience of the modern city, and of Paris – where apartments and not single-family houses are the rule – in particular. In Species of Spaces, he argues that such spaces have been underrated in our attempts to give an account of urban experience: We don’t think enough about staircases. Nothing is more beautiful in old houses than the staircases. Nothing is uglier, colder, more hostile, meaner, in today’s apartment buildings. We should learn to live more on staircases. But how? (Perec 1997: 38)


Perec’s suggestion that the staircase is an unduly neglected object of literary depictions of urban life is carried over into Life: A User’s Manual . Here the staircase is a ‘neutral place which belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds’ (Perec 1987: 3). Perec suggests that it is here that one finds the ‘embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing’ (Perec 1987: 3). If – as is often nostalgically asserted – urbanisation has eroded or destroyed the kind of stable communities that are associated with the rural past, then it is here in this semi-public space that one can find the potential for a new ‘communal life’. The landing itself had altered in layout under Haussmann, and the shift from a staircase that served one apartment per floor to two or sometimes three did much to enable horizontal interactions between apartments. While these are not necessarily in the spirit of the kind of ‘communal life’ that Perec imagines, the development undoubtedly had a lasting impact on the social life of the immeuble , a fact that is particularly noticeable in the films discussed in Section 1.3. Loyer explains how Haussmannisation brought about this change. The decisive change came when lots were widened, which […] made it possible to build more than one apartment facing the street on each floor. When that happened, the main staircase provided access to two apartments per floor, on either side of a central axis. Toward the end of the century, façade width increased still more, along with depth of buildings; hallways, storage areas, and lavatories were then inserted in the core of the construction. The adoption of an L-shaped building made it possible to place up to three apartments on a single landing. (1988: 209) Such developments have inevitably been overlooked by theorists who have focussed attention on the effect of Haussmannisation on public spaces, but for Perec they are key. Life: A User’s Manual engages in a nearscientific interrogation of the interrelations between apartments, both on the level of the single immeuble and of the city as a whole. The novel is structured by elaborate formal games typical of Perec’s work. The underlying function of these games can perhaps be explained in terms of a resistance to the essentially Romantic conception of literature as a fundamentally expressive medium. By discarding traditional literary forms in favour of abstract, often


mathematical constraints or rules of his own invention, Perec shifts the focus from the personality and feelings of the artist towards a more purely formal, self-generating theory of literary production. His proximate influence in this is the OuLiPo group (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle; ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’) of which he became a member in 1967, and which attempted in various ways to combine mathematics with literary production, often by attempting to capture the combination of formal constraints and creativity that is embodied in games (Bellos 1993: 359–63). Chess was popular, Nabokov a guiding light. The constraints used in Life: A User’s Manual use the immeuble in an imaginative and engaging way. Perec’s first move is to ‘imagine a Parisian apartment building whose façade has been removed […] so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simultaneously visible’ (Perec 1997: 40). He then imagines the building as a 10x10 chessboard, with each square representing a room. Each square (bar one) is then described in intricate detail, in an order determined by a ‘knight’s tour’, a chess problem which demands that the knight must land once on each square of the chessboard (Bellos 1993: 508). The contents of each chapter is also partly determined by a complicated set of rules and algorithms, which I will not describe in depth here; it is worth noting, though, that the novel was conceived as a ludic engagement with the immeuble channelled through these constraints (Bellos 1993: 596–608). The ‘action’ of the resulting novel thus takes place in a few moments, just before eight o’clock in the evening on the 23 June 1975. The narrative, however, which unfolds backwards from Perec’s description of a static state of affairs, stretches back into the prehistory of the inhabitants of the building, of the immeuble itself, of Paris, and of France. Now, there are several ways in which this approach offers a fresh perspective on the immeuble. Firstly, and crucially, Perec’s original gesture of removing the building’s façade to examine the life inside is hugely important. This was partly inspired by Saul Steinberg’s drawing The Art of Living , which shows the inside of a New York apartment building with its façade removed (Perec 1997: 40–1). On an obvious level, the removal of the façade works against the tendency of Haussmannisation. For one of the key aspects of Haussmannisation is the tendency of the street to take precedence over the individual dwelling, an effect achieved through the use of long, unbroken façades. Starting under Louis-Philippe, but reaching its apogee in Haussmann, the art of the


façade profoundly shaped both the street and the domestic spaces of the New Paris: The new type retained the rigorous horizontal composition that had characterised neoclassical architecture during the Empire. But the compositional principle was systematically applied to entire blocks, and in some cases even to entire neighbourhoods. The urban whole was given more importance than the subtle hierarchy of scale and architectural quality on which the entire classical system had been based. The result was a kind of monotony, stately in its regularity, but so anonymous as to be disconcerting. (Loyer 1988: 136) The primacy of the façade was further emphasised by the systematic use of such stylistic tropes as the cut-off corner – again a pre-Haussmannian invention – whose purpose was ‘to destroy the perception of the building’s characteristic volumetrics by turning its façades into a continuous curtain drawn around the block’ (Loyer 1988: 136). Until the 1840s, façades had been made of plastered wood, then in the 1840s of lightly cut limestone. Under the Second Empire thick, cut stone predominated (Van Zanten 1994: 132) a fact which served to further emphasise uniformity of the Haussmannian façade. For these reasons, the façade frequently acts as a symbol of the homogenisation, standardisation and suppression of individuality that have become associated with Haussmann’s Paris. It seems to be on Honegger’s mind when he writes: Having, as they do, the appearance of walling-in a massive eternity, Haussmann’s urban works are a wholly appropriate representation of the absolute governing principles of the Empire: repression of every individual formation, every organic self-development, ‘fundamental hatred of all individuality’. (Quoted Benjamin 1999: 122) The phrase ‘walling-in’ here figures the façade as a primary weapon in Haussmann’s arsenal, a blank, undifferentiated barrier designed to conceal and to reduce the variegated multiplicity of Parisian life. Perec critically engages with this notion of the façade as a repressive mechanism and a threat to individuality in Life: A User’s Manual. He sets out to peel away the impersonal façade of Haussmannian uniformity and uncover the heterogeneity that it had seemed to threaten. Peta Mitchell


(2004: 1–15) argues that Perec consciously mounts a critique of the legacy of Haussmannisation in the novel. She writes: ‘Perec’s removal of his building’s façade in order to reveal the memories and lives of its inhabitants can be read as an attack on the philosophy that constructed it in the first place’ (Mitchell 2004: 11). Perec’s ideas were formed in the context of the intellectual ferment of the Left Bank in the 1960s: he knew Henri Lefèbvre, and was undoubtedly influenced in certain respects by the Situationist International (Bellos 1993: 280–1). Mitchell thus sees his response to Haussmann as part of the critique mounted by Lefèbvre and others (Mitchell 2004: 2). But if he at times expresses the views of the ultra left (see Bellos 1993: 494) this novel is not, thankfully, conceived as polemic. There is undoubtedly subversion involved in peeling away the Haussmannian façade, but the novel seems driven by empirical curiosity rather than ideology. This is supported by Perec’s interest in the seemingly banal objects of everyday life, part of his quest to ‘write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless’ (Perec 1997: 50). Perec’s aim is to turn an impartial gaze on the objects that make up the everyday lives of his characters, and to reassert their significance in the understanding of those lives. Benjamin argued that ‘[t]he liquidation of the interior took place during the last years of the nineteenth century’ (Benjamin 1999: 20), but Perec seems to want to assert its continued importance. Take, for example, the description of the bathroom of Madame de Beaumont’s apartment where she lives with her granddaughters Béatrice and Anne Breidel (Perec 1987: 175). Perec notes the presence of an unusual dressing gown with ‘a cat silhouette and the symbol designating spades at cards embroidered on its back’. He then describes in some detail two contradictory but equally exotic theories about the dressing gown’s provenance held by Madame de Beaumont’s two granddaughters. He concludes that ‘Madame de Beaumont is unaware of these two explanations; for her part, she has never made the slightest comment on the origin of her dressing gown’ (Perec 1987: 175). This passage is typical of the way the novel functions: whether or not either of these stories is true the point is that – as Benjamin writes – ‘[t]he traces of its [the apartment’s] inhabitant are molded into the interior’ (Benjamin 1999: 20). The dressing gown – a banal enough object in itself – has become a site of contestation, where Madame de Beaumont’s two granddaughters dispute the truth of her earlier life. It thus has a kind of dual relevance, being both an obscure clue to a secret history and at the same time an active crux in the ongoing family life of the apartment.


In Perec’s novel, this is typical of the objects that constitute the interior; indeed, it seems built into the formal constraints of the novel itself. Apart from the unconscious trace or clue which the inhabitant leaves in the interior – and also congruent with Benjamin’s description of its the role and function – Perec highlights cases where the inhabitants’ attempts to imprint their personality into the domestic interior constitute conscious acts of self-fashioning. This seems in part to be designed to reveal difference and heterogeneity where the Haussmannian façade had insisted on uniformity and sameness. Madame Moreau’s interior is an extreme example of this, with its glazed display cases full of collectables that assert the absolute uniqueness of her living space (Perec 1987: 98–9). This is reminiscent of Benjamin’s account of Poe as the ‘first physiognomist of the domestic interior’ (1999: 20). Benjamin cites Poe’s essay ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ as an important document for understanding the refinements of the bourgeois interior. Poe abhors the simple ‘display of wealth’ in the that is favoured by the ‘aristocracy of dollars’ in America (Poe 2003: 414). This vulgar tendency, whereby ‘the cost of an article of furniture has at length come to be […] the sole test of its merit’ (Poe 2003: 415), is countered with a complex but understated sense of style that speaks of a refinement that mere money is not supposed to be able to buy. But in reality if one lacks such refinement, it is always possible to pay someone who has it, and Madame Moreau – who has the luxury of being ‘indifferent to money’ (Perec 1987: 97) – pays a designer, Fleury, to create his masterwork in her apartment. Fleury uses the freedom of an unlimited budget to ‘give an unmediated and true image of his gifts, an exemplary demonstration of his theories of interior architecture’ (Perec 1987: 98). Madame de Moreau’s interior is representative of a cultured, Benjaminian resistance to the uniformity of Haussmann’s Paris, but Perec’s novel also imagines more thoroughgoing alterations of the building’s fabric. The most drastic physical change to effect the immeuble is enacted by the television producer Rémi Rorschach, who purchases two apartments from Olivier Gratiolet and converts them into a two-storey duplex apartment opulent enough to be frequently featured in lifestyle magazines (Perec 1987: 48). The decision to convert the single floor apartment of horizontal alignment into a vertical duplex could itself be seen as a reaction against the tendency for Haussmannian apartment blocks to consist entirely of single-floor apartments. If this tendency had originally had the effect of homogenising the range of classes living in the building and the quartier , Rorschach’s renovations serve to


establish him ostentatiously as the richest resident of 11, rue Simon Crubellier. Zola’s L’Assommoir suggested that such differentiations are pure folly, but Perec – while distinctly unsympathetic in his attitude to Rorschach – sees it as folly motivated by a genuine resistance to Haussmannian standardisation. This wholesale transformation of the apartment counters the tendencies of Haussmannisation on another level. The rigorous functional specialisation of rooms within the home – which becomes a standard feature of housing in the twentieth century in both Paris and London – comes into its own under Haussmann: From the Second Empire on, certain rooms like the kitchen, the lavatory and the dressing room/bathroom were fitted out with specialized installations that made it impossible to transform them; moreover, technical constraints like water and gas mains made it impossible to move them. […] In the critical 1870s period, the Haussmann apartment was turned into a completely compartmentalized space. Whereas apartment layout had long allowed the evolution of a tenant’s life-style, the rigid plan of the bourgeois apartment began to dictate how tenants could, and should, live. (Loyer 1988: 220) So the Haussmannian apartment, with its clear demarcations between areas for eating, sleeping, cooking and relaxing, can seem to be an overdetermined space, promoting a certain kind of family life, and dictating its rhythms. These determinations were made in the name of efficiency and convenience, but a remodelling of the interior on this scale speaks of a desire to reassert a more individual and less prescribed mode of life against the rationalised dwelling which came about in the Second Empire. If the functional specialisation of spaces that characterises the Haussmannian immeuble is undermined by the deliberate agency of the inhabitants of 11, Rue Simon-Crubellier, then Perec’s novel is also concerned to show that the functions – and the meanings – of particular rooms are also subject to change as a result of wider historical circumstances. The building’s boiler room, for example, has been used for a variety of purposes, determined by all kinds of contingencies. The room was initially designated a cellar, an indeterminate space whose function is in itself less defined than that of, say, a bedroom or a bathroom. It is therefore a kind of blank canvas, permitting a number of uses. But it nevertheless becomes highly specialised as a space in ways that are not determined by


Haussmannian constraints. During the war, for example, Olivier Gratiolet used the cellar room as a base for his resistance activities: Olivier spent the rest of the war years there, going down to the cellar to listen to Des Français parlent aux Français on the BBC and producing and distributing, with the help of Marthe and François, a news sheet for several resistance groups, a kind of daily letter giving news from London and coded messages. (Perec 1987: 273) Again, the spaces of the immeuble are shown to be malleable not just in function but in terms of their political meaning. Here, the obscurity and isolation of the cellar become assets to be deployed against the occupation. After Paul Hébert’s arrest, the Germans, led by the air-raid warden Berloux, came to search the cellars, but they scarcely glanced at Olivier’s: it was the dustiest and most cluttered of all, the one where it was hardest of all to imagine a “terrorist” hiding. (Perec 1987: 303) It is not that the building or any aspect of the building is in itself politically repressive or liberating. It is rather that inevitably the social, political and economic tensions of the city graft themselves onto the spaces of the immeuble, often in unpredictable ways. This touches on a broader theme of this book that will become more explicit later on, particularly in relation to the way in which class is distributed in urban conditions. The answer that I am proposing to the question of architectural determinism is that social being is not determined by architecture but that the way in which it distributes itself therein will reveal the patterns of underlying schisms in society. The social realities that are revealed need not be the grand ideological struggles – as in the case of the resistance versus the occupation – but on the contrary can often be quite banal. Perec is always awake to the banal. Indeed, the more recent transformation of the cellar’s function into a boiler room is one of the many obscure histories in Life: A User’s Manual that, while dull in itself, turns out to be quite revealing of deeper social forces. The Gratiolet family owned a majority share in the building until the early 1960s, when Olivier Gratiolet sold most of his remaining shares to Rorschach, and they always resisted having central heating installed, considering it to be ‘an unnecessary expense’ (Perec 1987: 74). The declining fortunes of the Gratiolet family – a


complicated story that cannot easily be summarised – see the legacy of Juste Gratiolet, who had been responsible for building the immeuble at 11, Rue Simon-Crubellier in the 1870s (Perec 1987: 470), fall away. The failure of the Upper Boubandjida Mining Co. (Cameroon) – inherited by Ferdinand Gratiolet – to actually extract any tin, and the declining demand for animal fur that cripples a subsequent African investment cause the Gratiolets to gradually sell off apartments until they no longer have majority ownership (Perec 1987: 75–8). The new majority owner, Rorschach, also suffered in his earlier days a financial meltdown caused by an ill-advised colonial adventure (Perec 1987: 45–7). But being a man of a more modern temperament, he converted himself into a successful television producer, and subsequently has no qualms about having central heating installed (Perec 1987: 74). This transformation of the boiler room thus hinges on a much broader socio-economic transition. Indeed, the edging out of the Gratiolets by Rorschach is a telling figuration of a decisive shift in the makeup of the ruling class. A conservative class whose income was dependant on colonial investments, and who were content to heat their apartments ‘by wood- or coal-burning stoves or open fireplaces’ (Perec 1987: 74), is displaced by one made up of brash entrepreneurs who insist on central heating. Having thus explored the how the function of this space was shaped by social and historical dynamics, Perec’s description of its current state calls to mind the maintenance that such facilities, as part of a complex urban division of labour, require. In a tiny place with walls full of meters, manometers and pipes of every calibre, adjacent to the room where the boiler itself is installed, a workman squats, poring over a plan on tracing paper placed on the bare concrete floor. He is wearing leather gloves and a jerkin and seems moderately angry, no doubt because he is obliged to carry out he stipulated terms of a maintenance contract, realises that this year cleaning the boiler is going to take longer than he had anticipated, and knows that therefore his profit will decline proportionately. (Perec 1987: 301) Perec’s interest in the mundane pays off here, enabling him to tell a very complex history of social, economic and political development simply by paying close attention to a boiler room. Again we see that the internal spaces of the immeuble – and not only the domestic interiors to which Benjamin limited his investigations – are invested with an immense significance.


Staircases, landings, boiler rooms: these are for Perec ways of thinking beyond the strict dichotomy of street and interior (enforced by the façade), which goes hand in hand with the idea that the social is always out there on the street, and that here, the home is a niche or a retreat where we come to defend ourselves from the realities outside. And this inflects his portrayal of the interior itself. Perec writes: The inhabitants of a single building live a few inches from each other, they are separated by a mere partition wall, they share the same spaces repeated along each corridor, they perform the same movements at the same times, turning on a tap, flushing the water closet, switching on a light, laying the table, a few dozen simultaneous existences repeated from storey to storey, from building to building, from street to street. (Perec 1987: 3) The repetition that is a result of the rigorous standardisation that Haussmann imposed on city, street and immeuble is not simply the extension of a banal uniformity, Honegger’s ‘repression of every individual formation’ (Quoted Benjamin 1999: 122). Here, repetition prompts the reflection that it is in the domestic realm that the inhabitants of the city unite in concerted action. The apparent isolation of living in mass housing figures as a kind of shared experience, as the mundane operations of daily life are repeated in thousands of kitchens and halls. For all that the building’s inhabitants attempt to ‘entrench themselves in their domestic dwelling space’ and ‘would prefer nothing to emerge from it’ (Perec 1987: 3), the interior itself and the objects collected there by accident or by design look inevitably – inexorably – outwards. Like Perec’s description of the street in Species of Spaces, the treatment of the interior in Life: A User’s Manual inverts the hierarchy of significance which had – in Benjamin – placed outdoor, public spaces above the home. For Benjamin, the role of the home in the city is purely negative, a retreat from what is properly considered to be urban, a repository for threatened individuality. But in Life: A User’s Manual – from Madame de Beaumont’s dressing gown to the building’s boiler – the objects which occupy the spaces inside the building, as well as the spaces themselves, tell stories that range from the intimate to the global in their scope. As such, the home – far from being an escape from the realities of the city – is profoundly embedded in the wider history of Paris, of France, and of the world.


1.4 Delicatessen, The Tenant and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

Perec’s novel showed how a few moments in a Haussmannian immeuble were sewn into the fabric of the city by a vast range of interlocking personal and social histories. Jeunet and Caro’s film Delicatessen operates according to an almost opposite logic, interrogating the social and spatial parameters of the immeuble by placing it in a bizarre but vividly conceived, run down version of the future. The film removes the Haussmannian apartment block from its Parisian moorings to transfer it to a dystopian landscape of dereliction. In this section, I will use Roman Polanski’s The Tenant and Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange – both also set in Haussmannian immeubles – to reflect on the different uses of this characteristic mise en scène which coexist in tension in Delicatessen. The building is in a fairly typical Haussmannian style, with a groundfloor shop run by the landlord, a butcher. The difference is that the titular Delicatessen specialises in human flesh, the flesh of the building’s less fortunate tenants. Like Life: A User’s Manual, the depiction of the immeuble in Delicatessen can be seen to react against the Haussmannian legacy. The most obvious way in which it does this is by breaking – indeed, completely doing away with – the unity of the façade. It was once part of a street, but its address – quoted by the hero of the tale, Louison, upon his arrival – is now a kind of joke: an exterior shot shows the building isolated on a hill, surrounded by rubble and shells of buildings, like a decrepit version of Charlie Kane’s Xanadu. The immeuble, here, is no longer a seamless part of a façade on a street whose visual impact takes precedence over the buildings themselves. This has the effect of removing it from its place in Haussmann’s monumental plan, focussing attention on the social and psychological potentials of the internal space itself. This manifests itself formally as the film dwells on the physical attributes of the building and the ways in which its inhabitants use them. The staircase, the plumbing and the uncomfortable proximity of the neighbours all link the residents so as to suggest a kind of communal life that is always just out of reach. As in Perec’s immeuble, we have here the ‘embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing’ (Perec 1987: 3). And there are other respects in which Perec’s concerns are echoed in Delicatessen. One memorable scene sees several characters in the building simultaneously engaged in different kinds of repetitive rhythmic activity, all in time to a quickening beat. Louison


paints the ceiling, bouncing back and forth on a large piece of elastic; a woman in the stairwell beats the dust out of a rug; Julie practices scales on her cello; the butcher has sex with his girlfriend and a man inflates his bicycle tyre. The activity crescendos until a climax is reached: the bicycle tyre bursts, Julie breaks a string, Louison’s elastic breaks sending him tumbling to the floor, and the butcher orgasms. Just as Perec draws attention to the way in which the inhabitants of a single building ‘perform the same movements at the same times’ (1987: 3), these activities are performed alone but in concert. The editing of the sequence – which cuts from room to room with sounds from each activity persisting nondiegetically – makes it at once suggestive of a potential for togetherness and demonstrative of each resident’s isolation. The life of Parisian apartment dweller is repeated in parallel isolation from floor to floor, from building to building, and from street to street because of Haussmann’s standardisation of the immeuble and the streets themselves. Sean Cubitt writes: In the best known sequence in Delicatessen, the unexpected harmony of music, sex and work in the different rooms of the lodging house become a unified whole. But its claim to a utopian humanity against the backdrop of the inhumanity of the human, its alienation under conditions of eco-collapse, curtail it as an isolated instant. (Cubitt 2002: 21) In Life: A User’s Manual, an excavation of the various internal spaces of the immeuble and the objects within had revealed ways in which the lives of the residents were substantially entwined with each other, and also implicated in the wider history of Paris. In Delicatessen, where Paris as we know it has disappeared, the immeuble itself becomes the site of a struggle between competing visions of urban living. Whether or not, as Cubitt argues, the sequence under discussion should be seen as an isolated incident of common humanity and unified action, it defines a key tension in the film between the cannibalism of the tenants and a resurgence of a ‘utopian humanity’. This latter is personified in the figure of Louison. These competing modes of urban living are played out in the film as different ways of approaching the Haussmannian immeuble. And these have their provenance in French cinema, where it is possible to detect two opposing ways of representing the Parisian lodging house. Delicatessen can be thought of as mediating between them and testing their premises. I will take Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and


Roman Polanski’s The Tenant as representatives of these two contrary styles of representation. In Renoir’s film, the semi-public spaces of the building (a set built in the courtyard of the Billancourt studio (Bazin 1974: 45) and the bustling mixture of domesticity and commerce provide a convivial atmosphere and ultimately the template for a workers’ cooperative in the publishing house upstairs. Set in the Marais when it was still a working-class area (and long before its extensive renovation in the 1960s), the film has been seen as a reflection of the ‘vertical relations of community and kinship characteristic of the Parisian tenement’ (Reader 2000: 289). But as is clear in Zola (and even in Balzac) any ‘relations of community and kinship’ within the immeuble had been viewed with considerable ambivalence for a long time. The point is that in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the largely imaginary ‘communal life’ of the immeuble alluded to by Perec is here brought into being: the film depicts a genuine community brought together as a ‘chance product of urban geography’ (Bazin 1974: 45). While the film has been seen as an expression of Renoir’s commitment to the ideals of the Popular Front, Christopher Faulkner (2000: 37) is right to argue that ‘ Le Crime de Monsieur Lange invented a sort of Popular Front rather different from the actual one that preserved the established community/nation(as)-state’. Indeed, the film’s valorisation of a kind of ‘decentralised socialism of the self-regulated group’ (Faulkner 2000: 38) – a group defined by their tenancy in the same apartment block – is suggestive of a rather different tendency: The film’s recommendation of direct action (through violence), worker control of production and a spontaneous transformation of society through new forms of social organisation from below belongs to an anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist model of change. (Faulkner 2000: 37) By staging a kind of localised political revolution in the apartment block, the film suggests that the Haussmannian immeuble is susceptible to a kind of ‘communal life’ that might be capable of going further than the landing. Indeed, its ‘anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist’ tendency suggests that the immeuble could be the context for the assertion of a political independence from the state bureaucracy of which Haussmann is the avatar. Polanski’s study in urban alienation, The Tenant , supplies a dark antidote to the spirit of social and political optimism that prevails in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Referring to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet ,


Polanski once commented that ‘I liked films which made you feel that you are actually inside an interior, feeling virtually the fourth wall behind you’ (Cousins 2002: 98), and this is used to claustrophobic effect in The Tenant . Polanski plays a man driven to suicide by nosy and intolerant neighbours, and the apartment building itself – supposedly located in the Pigalle district but actually a set built at the Epinay studios (Sandford 2007: 259) – seems responsible for setting the tenants against each other. These are the ancestors of the cannibals who inhabit the apartment block in Delicatessen, and Polanski’s film is deeply pessimistic about the possibility of any positive conception of community existing between people living at such close quarters as Haussmannian immeubles – and many other forms of mass housing – demand that they do. As we will see in Chapter 2, a whole variety of urban planning ideas take this as their premise, and devise methods of redistributing the urban population across the countryside, where they might live in peace. These two films, then, represent two very different takes on the immeuble and in their respective expositions give rise to differing analyses of the social potential of the Haussmannian apartment block. Delicatessen’s use of mise-en-scène has parallels with each of the earlier films, so that it is alive to the alienating aspects of life in the immeuble as well as the potential for more congenial interactions between tenants. Louison’s arrival in the building is a turning point for the residents, who use many of the potentially uniting features of the architecture to facilitate the consumption of their neighbours. The ways in which he inhabits the space suggest more positive forms of social interaction. The staircase, for example, is the site of a conflict between two potential attitudes to life in the apartment block. The first attitude – which holds sway before Louison’s arrival and is analogous to the situation in The Tenant – is best articulated by the old man who lives in the basement among frogs and snails: ‘Every man for himself, and God for all’. Under this motto, the stairway – an example of a semi-public, shared space – becomes the scene of friction, as the butcher rounds up his victims on the staircase at night. Julie explains: ‘it takes place at night in the stairwell. That’s why no one ever goes out’. In the ‘every man for himself’ mentality of the residents the staircase is to be feared as the butcher’s stalking ground, so they end up virtually incarcerated in their rooms. If they do find themselves on the landing or the staircase, particularly at night, they understandably fear for their lives. This sense of the staircase as a place to be feared is evidenced in the opening scene of the film in which a man (the previous tenant of Louison’s room) attempts to escape


the butcher by creeping down the stairs disguised as a piece of rubbish. Looking down into the abyss at the heart of a staircase, the vertical camera angle makes the building seem vertiginous, recalling Gervaise’s vision of the ‘towering void of the stairwell’ (Zola 1995: 53) when she first visits the Lorilleux in L’Assommoir . This particular aspect of Delicatessen’s representation of the staircase has its precedent in The Tenant , where Trelkovsky, played by Polanski, is obliged to sneak up and down the stairs in much the same manner as this rubbish-clad man. When he does meet a neighbour on the stairs, it is invariably in the spirit of confrontation, whether it be the landlord, Monsieur Zy, haranguing him about his supposed profligacy, or any number of distressed cohabitants complaining about the supposedly intolerable noise emanating from his room. Polanski in part based this on his own experience of living in Paris, commenting that ‘I know that atmosphere of the [French] apartment building, with the twin menaces of the concierge on the ground floor and the landlord upstairs’ (Sandford 2007: 259). The stairway of the apartment building consequently becomes a menacing site and in the Tenant it is frequently photographed vertically, from above or below, suggesting the alienating stacking up of apartments, and linking this to the potential dangers of meeting the landlord, the concierge or the other tenants. In The Tenant this is particularly true, and the height of the building is particularly troubling for Trelkovsky, since the previous resident of his room, Simone Choule, committed suicide by jumping from the window into the courtyard below. Trelkovsky assumes, as does the viewer, that she was driven to do this by the same kind of ‘neighbour-trouble’ that he experiences in the building. As his mental state declines, and he begins increasingly to identify with Simone, he frequently looks down from the window to see the glass below, broken by Simone’s fall. Hence The Tenant’s tendency to emphasise the verticality of the building in its photography – often particularly pronounced in the scenes on the steps – alludes to the psychological torture of the film’s two suicides. Indeed, the scene in which the concierge first shows Trelkovsky his room (and tells him of the suicide of the previous tenant) contains some interesting camerawork designed to enhance this sense of vertigo. The camera first dollies towards the window and then, switching to a point of view shot, pans slightly as if to suggest that Trelkovsky is teetering and about to fall (Le Cain 2006: 129). The vertical, in this film, is a horrifying expression of the alienation of mass city living. By contrast, in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the shared spaces of the apartment block – the stairs and particularly the courtyard – are lively


places where gossip is exchanged, sweet nothings are transacted, and the events of the film are discussed and made sense of. Renoir shoots these scenes with a sympathetic eye, and there is none of the sense of vertigo that inhabits Polanski’s immeuble. The space is usually addressed horizontally, often at eye level, and when a shot does show the height of the building, it usually does so to suggest its connectedness with the courtyard below, in direct contrast to The Tenant ’s dissociated cliff face, and the violence of the protagonist’s suicidal passage from window to ground at the end of the film. Take, for example, the scene in The Tenant when Trelkovsky, bloodied and broken-limbed after his first attempt at suicide, throws himself out of the window for the second time after dragging himself up the stairs. Compare this with the scene in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange that occurs just after the formation of the cooperative, when a crowd of workers and residents gather in the courtyard, upon Lange’s initiative, and against the mean-spirited advice of the concierge, to remove the wooden panel that covers the window of an bed-ridden resident on the ground floor. One would struggle to find two scenes more different in tone, and yet they take place in similar sets. In effect, they embody two different ways of addressing the Haussmannian immeuble. Both of these scenes deal with the relation of the windows to the ground, with the ways in which the structure of the immeuble configures social interaction. In both scenes, a large crowd of other residents are gathered in the courtyard. In The Tenant they watch on as a bloodied Trelkovsky throws himself out of the window for the second time, while the concierge complains that the glass – which had only just been repaired since the last tenant committed suicide – has again been broken by an inconsiderate and suicidal resident. In Renoir’s film, needless to say, there is a much more positive relation between the groups of tenants leaning from the windows and those on the ground, as they unite in the common purpose of helping their injured neighbour. The people in the upstairs windows shout down comments and advice and are fully involved in the action. Both types of behaviour are, perhaps, in some sense suggested by the architecture of the immeuble, and yet as the comparison of these two scenes makes clear, neither is determined by the building in any simplistic way: both are possible, both represent fundamentally opposed ways of viewing the apartment block. A sequence on the staircase when Lange has a series of short conversations with five different characters is revealing in terms of linking the horizontal manner in which Renoir shoots the building with the agreeable relationships between its inhabitants. Lange engages in some


friendly banter with a neighbour who likens his sexual appetite to that of a kangaroo; has a quick exchange with a colleague about the financial difficulties of Batala, their boss; asks Estelle to go for a walk with him in the forest; is flirtatiously castigated by Valentine (his future lover) for looking at Estelle’s legs; and finally talks with a representative of one of Batala’s creditors. The communal space of the immeuble is portrayed in the film as a crucial site at which the social fabric of the city is knitted. The way in which Renoir shoots the scene, with a series of interconnected horizontal pans and middle distance shots, emphasises that dialogue is facilitated by the space. The internal staircases and courtyards that are a fundamental part of the city as Haussmann made it are cosy interstices between the private domestic realm and the crowded street. Renoir’s emphasis is very much on the horizontal, the vertical aspect of the staircase always being brought into relation with the landing, which seems to suggest a certain kind of knock-about egalitarianism in the relation of the characters to each other. In the sympathetic medium shot in which Lange and Estelle arrange a liaison – with Lange poking his head through the banisters to address Estelle – Renoir shows how the stairway can facilitate friendly relations between neighbours, bridging the gap between private and public and providing a context for all kinds of different social interactions. The film imagines a close-knit village community in the immeuble, within the city but also separate from it. Lange’s murder of Batala is, as the film’s title suggests, crucial, and it might be thought to throw Renoir’s celebration of the community spirit of the immeuble into question. Yet it is undoubtedly the film’s aim to justify the murder of the evil capitalist in the name of the community. Some critics have questioned the ethics of this justification (O’Shaughnessy 2000: 108; Andrew 1995: 228), and they may have a point. But what interests me here is the way that Lange is vindicated not just in narrative terms but also through Renoir’s use of the distinctive mise en scène of the Haussmannian immeuble. The fact that the crime occurs in the courtyard at the same time as a dinner held in celebration of the cooperative’s success (as Katherine Golsan points out) links it to three other Renoir films of the 30s ( La Chienne, La Bête humaine and La Règle du jeu) in which a murder occurs in jarringly festive circumstances (Golsan 2007: 30). And as Golsan argues, ‘the famous pan around the courtyard of the cooperative during the murder scene takes in the celebration of the group through the sound of their laughter and implies their involvement and consent’ (Golsan 2007: 37). There is an extensive literature on this shot alone, partly no doubt provoked by Bazin’s claim that ‘it is the pure spatial expression of the entire mise en

44 Fictions of the City scène’ (Bazin 1974: 46) but also because the 180º rule in classic cinema

makes 360º panning shots (or 270º in this case) so rare (Reader 2000: 290). Reader, also alluding to the 360º pan in Hawks’s Red River , suggests that such shots tend ‘to evoke a precarious sense of community’ (2000: 290), a tendency that is perhaps disrupted by a similar shot in Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle , discussed, later, in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, Renoir’s panning shot powerfully links the film’s sense of community with the physical space of the courtyard and the immeuble itself. The film’s narrative may require the audience to ‘pull the trigger with Lange’ (Andrew 1995: 228) in order to guarantee the future of the cooperative, but its mise en scène also insists that the immeuble is the cooperative’s fundamental precondition. Now, as I have shown above, Delicatessen uses vertical shots of the staircase, like those in The Tenant , to produce the effect of alienation and to convey the fear that stems from the cannibalistic activities of the building’s residents. But as I have suggested, Louison’s arrival in the building goes against the grain of this representation, and opens it up to some of the possibilities of community which are in evidence in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Indeed, Louison’s behaviour on the staircase and on the communal landing can be read as an attempt to realise the potential of this commonly owned space for more positive social interaction. In one scene on the staircase he entertains the two children who live in the block by blowing smoke filled bubbles. Jeunet and Caro shoot the scene from the middle distance, horizontally, using the shared space as Renoir does to suggest the potential for a communal life that has its roots on the landing. Julie – the daughter of the butcher – is awestruck by Louison’s disregard for the rampant individualism that usually characterises the resident’s interactions on the staircase. Louison’s involvement in a later scene in the same location, when residents attack the postman to try and steal a parcel of food intended for Julie, impresses her still further. ‘I was very moved by your concern’, she tells him. ‘People usually only think of themselves nowadays.’ Lange’s attitude demonstrates that the apartment block can be interpreted, and inhabited, in a very different way. There is perhaps something a little sentimental about this, and in this Delicatessen echoes the humanist anarchism of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. In the film, however, the point is that to somebody who lives with the fear of being cannibalised by the neighbours, sentimental humanism opens up a whole new realm of possibility. Another aspect of the building’s design which features prominently in the film is the elaborate plumbing system, which allows residents to overhear what goes on in other rooms. Now, the sonic qualities of the


immeuble are particularly important in The Tenant – where the fact that

noise is conducted around the building is a major cause of the tenants’ inability to get along – as well as in Delicatessen. This is another aspect of the metropolitan experience that depictions of the spectacular city of flânerie fail to account for. Indeed both Simmel and Benjamin thought that ‘interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterised by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than on that of the ears’ (Simmel, quoted Benjamin 1992: 187). But in the Haussmannian immeuble, and in many forms of mass housing, sound is vitally important to the experience of daily life. Anyone who has lived in a flat will testify to hearing things that might originate with any one of a number of neighbours – some of whom one will never even see – and which can be the source of irritation, curiosity and alarm. Delicatessen (like The Tenant ) is particularly perceptive in dealing with these phenomena. Apart from the scene which I have already described in which the sounds the tenants make serve to emphasise the simultaneity of their lives, Delicatessen also stresses the sonic aspects of apartment life by repeatedly drawing attention to the way that the building’s plumbing conducts sound. One resident cruelly uses the plumbing to simulate supernatural ‘voices’ for the suicidal Aurore, encouraging her to kill herself. This, the reasoning goes, would allow her body to be used for meat. Unaware of her co-resident’s ploy, Aurore is driven insane by these spooky incantations, and – in several scenes heavily laden with black humour – devises intricate and apparently foolproof methods of killing herself, only to be foiled every time. On the other hand, the film also shows the sound-conducting qualities of the plumbing being put to less malevolent use. In the post-apocalyptic world of Delicatessen, a group of vegetarian freedom fighters live in the sewers, dedicated to resisting the oppressive cannibalistic logic that prevails on the surface. In attempting to save Louison from becoming the butcher’s next victim, Julie contacts this underground movement – known as the troglodytes – communicating with them through the plumbing system. The extension and improvement of the sewers was one of the most significant public works undertaken by Haussmann, who conceived them, as Matthew Gandy argues, as a part of the system of circulation, and the imposition of spatial order, that was mirrored above ground in the boulevards (Gandy 1999: 23–4). However: Sewers have consistently been portrayed as focal points for political threats to social and political stability, both real and imagined: during the 1870 siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war, there was


apprehension that the Germans might secretly enter the city through the sewers, and the city authorities actually sealed the Collecteur Général d’Asnières in order to assuage public fears. (Gandy 1999: 36) In Delicatessen, the subversion of the despised troglodytes is widely feared by the cannibalistic society on the surface, and by having them inhabit the sewers, Jeunet and Caro play on this historical terror of the sewer system. In this dystopia, the sewers are the last bastion of resistance. They are also another element of Haussmann’s renovations which are suggestive of inbuilt parallels and connections between the residents of Paris. Similarly, on a local level, the plumbing system in the building links its residents, and while it is possible to use the plumbing in the service of cannibalism, Julie is able to see it as a system of communication through which resistance can be organised. It has been suggested that the troglodytes should be seen as a representation of the resistance, a reading congruent with the film’s evocation of various other elements of ‘the specific iconography of the Vichy regime’ (Hayes 1999: 2000). Indeed, it is instructive to note that this interest in the strategic use of various elements of the architecture of the immeuble by the resistance is one that Delicatessen shares with Life: A User’s Manual. A note of caution must be sounded here, however. For while Perec’s Olivier Gratiolet and the communists of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange are presented as good, intelligent people who stand up against an inhumane system, the troglodytes are rather more ambiguously portrayed. On the one hand, they do seem to present a more humane alternative to the existing system, according to which bags of corn are used as currency to buy human flesh, while a taboo deters anyone from just eating the corn. It is difficult not to applaud these vegetarian troglodytes for eating corn instead of people. Their motto – an absurd catechism which they repeat in conjunction with a coded dance of hand slapping and foot stomping – ends with the words ‘generous, you, you, you and me’, which again – like Lousion – recalls the rather sentimental humanism of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. But where in Renoir’s film it was possible to identify with the characters, and even to forgive Lange’s murder of Batala, in Delicatessen the troglodytes are hard to take seriously. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ‘the troglodyte underground of Delicatessen are ineffectual buffoons, the creatures of a world they know enough to hate but which they have no means to revolutionise’ (Cubitt 2002: 31). Ultimately, Delicatessen places its hope in the power of ingenious and generous individuals – like Louison – to


transform their circumstances, but this is conceived only on the local level of the individual building. At the end of the film, after the butcher has been disposed of, Louison and Julie perform a duet on the roof of the building. Cubitt’s reading of this last shot of the film explicitly places it in the tradition of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange : This closing shot, with its appeal to the romantic trope of the rooftops of Paris, sums up and redirects the film’s echoes of Popular front films like Carné’s Le Jour se lève, Pagnol’s Marius (evoked not least by the Provençal accent of one of the cast) and Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange , with their evocations of community built around the geography of the apartment building and the camaraderie of the courtyard. (Cubitt 2002: 30–1) Indeed, for want of any genuine transformation of this cannibalistic society, the film suggests that the immeuble – with the potential it offers for a self-governing community of tenants – can operate as a shelter from a hostile world. In Cubitt’s terms, the film’s ‘proposition is that happiness is only possible in small things and among small people’ (2002: 30). Delicatessen, like Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, explores the possibility suggested by Perec that despite being the product of a despotic regime and an element in increasingly regimented city, the Haussmannian immeuble provides the conditions for a kind of ‘communal life’. For Perec, this had remained in an embryonic state, and never went further than the landing. The characters of Life: A User’s Manual tend to spend their lives trying to escape the anonymity which the immeuble imposes on them, but in old age passively succumb to a self-imposed incarceration: ‘Bartlebooth no longer ever goes out, he scarcely leaves his study all day’ (Perec 1997: 57). Winckler arrives at the same fate (Perec 1997: 31). These are tragic figures, stuck in a helpless situation, their shared proximity offering only glimpses – at best – of the kind of community that is achieved in both Delicatessen and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange . Yet the novel’s engagement with Haussmannisation provides us with a critical perspective that insistently contextualises the interpretation of domestic space as a function of broader historical processes. Delicatessen, on the other hand, by abstracting the immeuble from history, sees in it the seeds of authentically new social forms, a ‘community built around the geography of the apartment building and the camaraderie of the


courtyard’ (Cubitt 2002: 31). Louison’s final triumph rests on a heroic reinterpretation of the function of the building’s bathroom. And ultimately, in the bleak, cannibalistic future that the film imagines, it is only through such ingenious engagements with the built spaces of the home that a degree of local independence and autonomy can be achieved. Only through the fantasy of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange can the nightmare of The Tenant be dispelled.

2

The London Suburbs

2.1 The growth of the London suburbs

Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris continues to define, to a large extent, the archetypal Parisian abode, which is why it formed the basis for the first chapter of this book. In the history of the London home of the same period, there is no Haussmann figure, no governmental authority whose dictates defined the contours of the urban home. There is still a sense, however, that a ‘typical’ London home emerged in this period, and it is the antitype of the Parisian apartment. It is telling that the urban home in London is, in contrast to that in Paris, suburban: the semi-detached or terraced suburban house, or – further up the social scale – the detached villa. This chapter examines the development of suburbia and suburban housing in relation to the town planning movement and then examines depictions and critiques of suburbia by H. G. Wells and George Orwell. These two writers are shown to have very different attitudes towards the suburbs, which become – in their work – key sites where the relationship between town and country is negotiated. Through these authors, it can be seen that questions about how land is to be inhabited – addressed in a different manner by the Town Planning movement – become central to English Literature and culture, and, for Wells and Orwell at least, such questions take on a vital political importance. Suburbanisation is the result of a long and various trend in building and development. The two main boom periods were the last three decades of the 19th century and then the 1930s. There was no grand plan, and yet, as Helen Meller writes, in reference to the first phase of suburban development: 49


That the growth of cities took place without any conscious planning is probably one of the greatest myths ever perpetrated about Victorian Britain. That is because town planning has been perceived in terms of a government activity controlled by legislation. (Meller 1997: 8) Suburban London was to a large extent planned by a multifarious group of non-professionals, ‘deeply engaged in grappling with the social consequences of rapid growth’ (Meller 1997: 8). As Meller argues, to say that the suburbs were unplanned is a fallacy, and a common one, and this is as true of the 1930s boom as of the earlier, Victorian one. But suburbanisation was not the result of some unilateral governmental decree. There is a typological distinction to be made between a local, pragmatic planning and the centrally administered governmental version practised by Haussmann. Central government was scarcely ever involved in the planning of London in the 19th century. While Haussmann’s great achievement had been to conceptualise Paris as a whole, a single entity, and to regularise it according to that vision, in England ‘the first proposal for comprehensive treatment of the capital was not made until 1909, when John Burns introduced the Town Planning Bill’ (Choay 1969: 17). Instead, nineteenth-century London was subject to a piecemeal process of development and growth. On the housing side, the responsibility for the development and design of new housing was initially left to private investors, and was market-led. Suburbanisation was driven by the invisible hand. Historically, London had resisted the very notion of the plan. After the great fire, Wren’s proposal for the rebuilding of the affected area had St Paul’s Cathedral as the focal point of a large precinct in the neoclassical style, with wide streets and plazas, the overall effect perhaps not too dissimilar to the grander areas of Haussmannian Paris. John Evelyn and Robert Hooke followed suit with their own grandiose efforts (Porter 2000: 109). Wren’s cathedral was built, but the rest of the area destroyed by fire was redeveloped as quickly as possible, and according to no systematic logic, to minimise the financial loss incurred by the affected landowners (Porter 2000: 110). This is partly because of differences in the structure of government that meant that in Britain the state had much less power to reshape the city than in France: French officials, who benefited from the powers of a dictatorial, centralized government, were able to institute many of the changes they associated with England on a far grander scale than anything

The London Suburbs 51

undertaken in London, where a byzantine system of municipal administration made coordinated, wholesale transformations of the urban landscape almost impossible. (Marcus 1999: 136) The English authorities were able to make only small-scale legislative moves that constrained certain types of developments and encouraged others: nothing like the transformation that Haussmann enacted. Differing prevailing concepts of private property in the two countries also played a role. In Paris, since the revolution, private property had been a contractual right defined and conferred by the state, and to an extent open to reinterpretation by the state. It is for this reason that Haussmann was effectively able to annex large areas of privately owned land, demolish cramped alleyways and build smart modern boulevards. In London, by contrast, the right to own land was practically inalienable, or at least less subject to interference from the state. Until 1890, when certain limited powers of compulsory purchase were granted to the LCC, government had precious little control over the planning of privately owned land (Jackson 1973: 52). For these reasons and others, in London planning was dictated more by market forces than by central government. The task now is to attempt to understand why these forces acted centrifugally on London’s inhabitants, and incentivised suburban expansion. The fact that it became affordable to commute to work from relatively distant places was crucial. The development of steam railways, the extension of a network of horse drawn omnibuses, electric tramways, and the London Underground all aided suburban development. It became increasingly practical and affordable for middle- and low-income clerks and office workers – labourers, even – to travel ten miles or more to work. These developments in transport arguably prompted the two major phases of suburbanisation. The first – from around 1860 – was prompted by the extension of steam railways over much of the area in a 15-mile radius of central London (Jackson 1973: 21). In 1864, the Great Eastern Railway accepted an obligation from the government to provide 2d return fares on morning and evening trains between Liverpool Street, Edmonton, and Walthamstow (Jackson 1973: 21). Small measures such as these enabled the authorities to influence the outcomes of urban growth. Cheaper ground rent meant that a modest but relatively spacious home could be rented in the suburbs for less than the cramped and overpriced dwellings nearer the centre. The whole package – rent and fare combined – would often amount to less than the rent alone of a less appealing property in central London (Hall 1996: 51).


The rate of development of new suburbs tailed off during the 15 years before the Great War. By 1914 there was a housing shortage and by the end of the war it was chronic; a conservative estimate suggesting that in Britain there was a housing deficit of 600,000 to 800,000 in the immediate post-war years (Jackson 1973: 34, 91). The 1930s boom in suburban development is associated with the extension of the tube into suburban zones, and as ever the driving force was economic and political. Because of the huge housing deficit, and the threat of social unrest that came with it, ‘[i]n the years immediately following World War I, housing assumed importance as a political issue’ (Jackson 1973: 90). The fact that, in 1918, the franchise was extended to women over thirty might also have contributed to the increasing political importance of domestic and quality-of-life issues. Yet despite the mounting political pressure, the economic conditions for the house-building boom did not come about until the great slump of the 1930s, as Michael Foot explains: It was not until 1933 – some fifteen years after the end of [a] war which left a desperate housing shortage – that private money poured lavishly into house-building. Before that date, high interest rates and building costs and the attraction of other outlets for capital made investment in housing unprofitable. In short, the building boom of the thirties was largely the product of general slump. Labour was plentiful, wages were low, the cost of building materials had dropped, interest rates were depressed. (Foot 1997: 262) Public pressure to provide housing was intense, but it was the profitability of private property speculation that acted as a spur to suburban expansion. Given the availability of cheap land on the outskirts of London (Jackson 1973: 92), and the abject overcrowding that was characteristic of the centre of town, the possibility that the suburbs might soak up the excess population was always there. The tube, then, like the train before it, was an agent of suburban growth, but not its cause. In terms of the 1930s boom, another factor was the huge increase in owner occupation, made possible by even cheaper building processes, and by building societies and banks offering mortgages. In 1914, ten per cent of Britain’s housing stock was owner-occupied, and by 1938 this had risen to 32 per cent (Ball 1983: 2). In the same period, the total housing stock had risen from 7.9 million homes to 11.4 million (Ball 1983: 2). Much of the rise in owner-occupation can be accounted for by new


suburban developments. This trend has continued, with 56 per cent of a total 21.1 million homes being owner-occupied by 1981 (Ball 1983: 2), and – with the sale of council houses under Margaret Thatcher’s right-tobuy policy (the impact of which will be assessed in Chapter 4) – rising to 72 per cent by 2007 (Hanley 2007: 98). In France, although it is now the majority tenure, owner-occupation has for a long time made up a smaller proportion of households than in Britain, rising from 46 per cent at the start of the 1980s to 55 per cent in 2002 (Meron & Courgeau 2004: 61). It is also worth noting for the purposes of this comparison that Paris has a particularly low level of owner-occupation compared to the national average (Meron & Courgeau 2004: 67). National differences aside, what are the advantages of homeownership? And are they real? A full analysis of this question would be another book in itself, but it is important to recognise that the supposed economic advantages of owning a house as opposed to renting from a private landlord or local authority are not a given. It has been argued at various times that owner-occupation ‘is not only failing to meet the basic aspirations of most people for decent, cheap housing but also coming into conflict with the economic interests of most groups in society’ (Ball 1983: 12). Homeownership is not only a tenure, it is an ideological construct, and a major shibboleth in England – less so in France. There is some truth in the cliché: an Englishman’s home is his castle. This subjective investment in homeownership is intertwined with the history of suburbanisation that I have been describing, driving it by fuelling the demand for separate, single family dwellings in the suburbs, and – conversely – being shaped and influenced by the availability and expediency of such dwellings. The rise of the suburban middle classes in London is in sharp contrast to their absence in Paris. Haussmann’s plan had ensured a bourgeois centre and left the areas beyond the Thiers fortifications to degenerate. In London many better-off residents left the slum-ridden centre to homes with gardens that they could own. This difference in the way the geography of class developed in the two cities is of vital importance, and it profoundly shaped the social and political landscapes of the two cities. Before placing the work of H. G. Wells into this context, it is necessary to elaborate on the historical origins of the differences in the relationship between metropolis and countryside in England and France. This relationship is fundamental to an understanding of the liminal spaces at the intersection between town and country, the suburbs. A widely held assumption about the necessary interdependence of rural depopulation, urban growth, and the rise of capital – deriving from


Marx – is problematised by the different geographies of class which prevail in the two cities. The Marxist account of the development of capitalism is based on the fusion of two imperfect models: the economic development of Britain, and the political development of France. Our understanding of capitalist modernity is deeply inflected by this synthesis, but the differences – and particularly those between these two capital cities – are key to our understanding of the development of culture in the two countries. As E. P. Thompson put it, ‘the revolution which did not happen in England was fully as devastating, and in some features more divisive, than that which did happen in France’ (Thompson 1963: 197). Marx’s chapters on the expropriation of the agricultural population (1974: 671–701) describe the process by which serfdom was eliminated, the proletariat was born, and the conditions for capitalistic production were established in England. By the late 14th century, Marx argues, serfdom was practically extinct, and the rural population of England consisted primarily of free peasant proprietors (1974: 671). The countryside was divided up into small farms and common pasture lands and Marx contends that this was the rule in all feudal countries in Europe. However, from the 16th century, the enclosure movement saw landholders starting to ‘assert rights of private property over feudal land’ (Morrison 2006: 14). Economic factors – including the relative profitability of wool production – encouraged landlords to convert arable land, which required peasant families to live and work on it, into pasture. Peasants and agricultural labourers were thus ejected from the land, proceeding with nothing to sell but their labour to the towns and cities: the proletariat was born. Marx’s analysis by no means uncontroversial, but I will not address this here. The point is that is both influential upon and representative of a certain type of response to urbanisation in England. English radicalism – from Cobbett to Cobden and from J. S. Mill to William Morris – encompassed a complex variety of attitudes and assumptions, but a key unifying strand was the belief that the combined effects of the industrial and agricultural revolutions was to wrench peasants, artisans and farm-hands from the land, forcing them into alienating unskilled labour in the crowded cities. Cobbett talks of the ‘beggaring of the parts of the country distant from the vortex of the funds’; this vortex is London, a behemoth bleeding the country white (Cobbett 2001: 36). Moreover, as Cobden and Mill among others complained (Beckett 2000: 694), landownership was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. By the eighteenth century, four hundred families owned a quarter of the land (Williams 1973: 60).


The decline in rural population – both as a percentage of total population and in real terms – continued into the twentieth century, as confirmed by census data. In 1851 the rural population stood at 8.9 million – 49.8 per cent of the total – falling slightly to 8.7 million by 1871, which is 38.2 per cent of the total. It had reached 7.9 million and 21.9 per cent in 1911 (Short 2000: 1235). Suburbanisation in London in some sense draws its momentum from a desire to reverse this process, repopulating the countryside and recapturing the past. It is instructive to compare this with France, where rural depopulation did not happen in the same way, or to the same extent, and the English idea of a middle-class suburbia failed to take root. The population of rural France increased throughout the 19th century and while there were large landowners, the small landowning peasantry continued to own a significant portion of the land. The peasantry comprised 79 per cent of the population at the start of the Restoration and 70 per cent at the end of the Second Empire. This constitutes a net growth of the rural population from 23.4 million to 30.5 million in the years 1815–65 (Moulin 1991: 61). Indeed, the most significant period of rural expropriation did not happen in France until after the Second World War, when the percentage of the population employed in agriculture fell from 35 per cent to 9 per cent in the years 1945 to 1980 (Jones 2004: 504). The relatively slow trickle of rural people to the towns and cities in France can be seen as a factor in the failure of France to industrialise at anything like the rate of England. It was estimated in the early 1830s that the surplus pool of employable labour in England was 1 in 6 of the population, while in France it was 1 in 20 (Hobsbawm 1995b: 152). A large labour pool was indispensable for the development of industrial production. The reasons for France’s retarded economic development are intertwined with its progressive politics. Of primary importance is the fact that large amounts of land – confiscated from émigré aristocrats, the church, or common pasture – were handed to the peasantry during the years following the 1789 revolution. At a fairly reliable approximation, the number of peasant landowners increased over the revolutionary years by over 50 per cent, from four to six and a half million (Hobsbawm 1995b: 154). And, Annie Moulin points out: ‘[t]he Revolution brought about an increase in the number of owner-occupiers and, in an area such as the Paris Basin, actually acted as a brake to the relentless consolidation of land into ever-larger units’ (Moulin 1991: 36). Legal reforms, imposed from above by a revolutionary bourgeoisie, kept the peasantry on the land and slowed the development of capitalism in both its agrarian and its industrial forms. While noting some important caveats,


P. M. Jones concedes ‘[n]o one can doubt the eventual emergence of a class of petty peasant proprietors in France; the mechanisms are well known and only partly attributable to the revolution’ (1991: 129–30). The facts do not conform to the vulgar Marxist idea that political arrangements are mere superstructural expressions of underlying economic realities: economic progress or the lack of it is clearly at times directed by the legal mechanisms of the state. The revolution was also directly responsible for a radical change in the definition of private property, which partly accounts for the different attitudes to property that prevailed in England and France. From 1789 the French revolutionaries had sought to establish that ecclesiastical and feudal property had no validity, while bourgeois property, because based on contract, was sacrosanct (Jones 1991: 100). Seigniorial property was finally abolished, signalling a belated end to feudalism, long after it had ceased to exist in England. In France, then, there was a radical and ideologically driven break with the property relations of feudalism, whereas in England – where agrarian capitalism reached maturity at a much earlier stage – there was a much greater cultural continuity between the old order and the new. As Orwell noticed: After 1832 the old landowning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. (Orwell 2001b: 264) One could carp about Orwell’s choice of the 1832 Reform Bill as the turning point – the bloodless revolution of 1688 might be a the more decisive date. But the fact is that despite the victory of capitalism over feudalism – and therefore, theoretically at least, of bourgeoisie over aristocracy – English culture, in its ideals, aspirations and prejudices, remained largely aristocratic. This basic perception was elaborated into a sociological description of British capitalist development by Tom Nairn in the pages of the New Left Review in the 1960s. The so-called Nairn-Anderson thesis suggested that in contrast to the bourgeois republics of continental Europe, Britain’s bourgeois revolution went unfinished. Fearful of the possible consequences of the kind of bloody revolutions that were going on across the channel, the British bourgeoisie – which felt weaker than its


continental counterparts – approached the aristocracy in the spirit of conciliation, and the aristocracy proved receptive: Not the peasantry but the aristocracy itself survived, in the face of the inevitable political and ideological feebleness of the emergent bourgeoisie, as the governors of the most dynamic capitalist system in the world. And landowning civilization survived with them, as a mode of living, a culture and language, a type of personality and psychology, a whole dominant ethos. (Nairn 1964: 21) There emerged as a consequence of this a ruling elite that was entirely distinct from that of France, an elite based on the fusion of aristocracy and bourgeoisie. In short, ‘the English gentry became a bourgeoisie of his own particular kind’ (Hill 2000, 341). For Nairn, ‘[t]he history of England from the late 18th century onwards is in large measure the story of this fusion, its strains, achievements, and bizarre results’ (Nairn 1964: 20). It was in Nairn’s work that the popular notion of a ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ in Britain received its most convincing theoretical exposition. This theory has been in and out of fashion ever since, with some advocates drawing on it to describe the peculiar fusing of the middle and upper classes in the public school system (that Orwell would have witnessed first hand at Eton) (see Davidoff 1990: 98) and some powerful objections being raised along the way (see Daunton 1989). While critics like Daunton are right to question the idea that the British industrial bourgeoisie were completely supine before their feudal masters, the Nairn-Anderson thesis still carries weight when it comes to the interpretation of fundamental cultural differences between England and France. Questions may be asked of the economic and political foundations of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, and they cannot be answered in full here. I would contend, however, that English literature has behaved as if the thesis were correct, while of course accepting that in the court of economic history such evidence is likely to be deemed inadmissible. From the French side, Georges Lefebvre’s classic analysis in The Coming of the French Revolution (1988: 51–92) suggested that the unwillingness of the aristocracy to compromise with the emergent bourgeoisie was a major factor in the making of the revolution. This can also be seen as one of the reasons why there was such an extensive purge of the aristocracy. Lands belonging to the aristocratic émigrés, to the church and to the crown were declared biens nationaux and auctioned


off; the revolutionary legislature, recognising the peasantry as a large and potentially powerful ally against the forces of counter-revolution, put measures in place to secure them their land. The peasantry became the bolster of the bourgeois state, and ‘the chief prop of all subsequent political régimes which did not threaten to take away their land’ (Hobsbawm 1995b: 154). So in England, large-scale rural expropriation and increasingly large farms were the rule, while in France the opposite was true: the peasantry increasingly came to own their land and the rural population increased. The resulting situation saw class relations map onto the antithesis of town and country in different ways in the two countries. In London and Paris, the contrast in prevailing attitudes towards the peripheral, suburban areas of the city can be explained as a consequence of pre-existing national differences in the geographical distribution of social class. An understanding of class that is sensitive to its spatial extension, and therefore to the way that it maps onto different types of human settlement, should help us to explain such complex issues as the demand for owner-occupied suburban dwellings in London, and the prevalence of nostalgic ideas about a rural past in English Literature. In nineteenth-century England, the landowning aristocracy – who continued to consolidate ever-larger tracts of land – flourished, and, while the bourgeoisie had wrested much political and economic power away from the monarch and the lords, the aristocracy retained its social power. The aspirations of the middle classes did not lead to the houses of parliament, but – as many nineteenth-century English novels attest – to the country estate of some rich gentleman with a daughter of marriageable age. The aspiration of the emerging class of clerks and office workers was to emulate the aristocracy: to own their home (with the garden as a totemic symbol of landownership) and to live in the countryside. But they were also economically dependent on the city for their modest incomes. Suburbia, with its ideal of rus in urbe, superficially made living ‘in the country’ possible for men who spent their days at a desk in the City and allowed them the social distinction of owning their homes. In France, by contrast, the revolution had allowed the bourgeoisie to more or less displace the aristocracy as the locus of social and political power. While they often owned land in the country, the bourgeoisie were an urban class. Rented accommodation in the centre of town was the ideal; landownership was dominated by the peasantry and was therefore unlikely to become an aspiration for the middle classes.


Another factor, based not so much on an aspiration to join the upper echelons of society as on a particular kind of reaction against industrial capitalism, is Romanticism, which tended to shy away from what it saw as the prosaic, merely legal freedoms that could be conferred by the state in search of a deeper communion with Nature. Some Romantics, like Lamb, did prefer the bustle of the city, but the centrifugal impetus of Wordsworth’s The Prelude is more representative. In this poem the kinds of freedom represented by the French Revolution, by London and by Cambridge are considered and rejected and the development of the poet’s mind is achieved in solitude in the Vale of Grasmere (Wordsworth 1979: 448–51). The growth of the English suburbs can thus be seen through the lens of Romanticism. In the English imagination, the current of freedom and liberty flowed away from the cities and into rivulets in the quiet vales of the Lake District, while in France the torrent was headed for Paris, where it disgorged itself into the Seine. Partly because of the reluctance of the English to look to the government – and therefore the capital – for solutions, planning was largely left to the market. Hence, suburbanisation was well underway in London before the discipline of town planning developed. The ideas of the town planning movement were a backlash against the abject state of the nineteenth-century city, but also against the suburbs that had sprung up in response to this. While the slums of old Paris were being flattened, and Haussmann’s plan was being put into action, conditions in London – particularly for the poor – were bad and getting worse. The population was growing at terrifying speed – from around a million in 1800 to 7 million in 1911 (Porter 2000: 249) – and there was no centralised plan to cope with the increased pressure on housing. The market would have to deal with it. And deal with it it didn’t. In the slums, families were pressed together in squalid conditions, and as the city’s population increased, so did the misery of its inhabitants. Poverty was at its nadir, cholera was rife, and housing conditions were in no small part to blame. One terrace of twenty-seven houses, in Church Lane, Westminster, housed no less than 1095 people in 1847; an average of over 40 per house (Porter 2000: 324). When an interventionist planning ideology did emerge, it developed out of a swelling tide of criticism concerning the conditions of the urban poor. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England , Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and Charles Booth’s topographical study of the distribution of poverty in London all formed part of that tide. Philanthropic projects set a precedent for government


action, and the LCC Housing of the Working Classes Committee was formed in 1890. This was made possible by a government act of the same year that empowered the LCC to obtain lands by compulsory purchase with a view to building lodging houses for the working classes (Hall 1996: 30–1). The years 1900–14 saw the LCC provide 17,000 rooms for the poor within the county, and a further 11,000 on the peripheries of the city, which constitutes the first governmental intervention into mass housing in England (Meller 1997: 50). These building programmes and governmental reforms were based on immediate needs and political pressure and had no governing principle. Planning, in the sense of a philosophically grounded and systematic discipline rather than a set of pragmatic and local solutions, really came into being in England in Ebenezer Howard’s only book, originally entitled Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform and published in 1898, and subsequently revised in 1902 under the title Garden Cities of Tomorrow . In this book, Howard demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the forces that define the relation between town and country. He writes with refreshing clarity and conviction, illustrating his ideas with a series of illuminating diagrams. For Howard, the problems of rural depopulation and urban overcrowding are caused by the fact that the attractions of the country are outweighed by those of the city. The question of ‘how to restore the people to the land’ (Howard 1985: 6) is to be addressed by creating a dialectical synthesis of town and country in the concept of the Garden City. Howard’s work can be seen as representative of many of the nineteenth century criticisms of industrialism which saw urbanisation as its defining element, and hence sought to reverse the process. Howard developed a practical scheme designed to put metropolitan man back in touch with rural life, to create small, independent centres that would integrate agricultural and industrial production with housing and parkland. Underlying this vision is the Romantic outlook that would see nature (the countryside) as a corrective to the evils of civilisation (the city). At the head of his opening chapter, he quotes from Blake’s ‘The New Jerusalem’, implying that the building of Garden City will represent the building of the holy city in the verdant pastures of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ (Howard 1985: 13). He also writes that the aim of his book is to effect ‘the spontaneous movement of the people from our crowded cities to the bosom of our kindly mother earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth, and of power’ (Howard 1985: 9). This conceptual synthesis of town and country, however, had been pre-empted on the ground by a rash of developments that had no claim


whatsoever to be a dialectical fusion of town and country, but offered instead a pragmatic compromise between the two. As I have argued, in England, country life was already the ideal for many who reacted against the ills of industrialism, and access to the jobs and amenities available in the city a financial necessity. And the result of this reaction – the compromise that was reached – was suburbia. The fact that Howard has been read as an advocate of suburban development is ironic, although the subsequent development of the idea of the Garden City into the Garden Suburb – by Raymond Unwin and others – is surely responsible for this misconception. For while his work is driven by the same centrifugal forces that drive suburbanisation, he is in fact deeply critical of it. Howard advocated the building of new towns in the countryside – called ‘Garden Cities’ – and proposed an ingenious set of measures to make this economically viable. Each Garden city would have an optimum population of around 30,000. As well as having a large central park in the centre and huge, meadow-like avenues piercing through the residential areas, it was absolutely imperative that the Garden City have a green belt of agricultural land surrounding it that would never be sold for development, being communally owned and ‘administered, not in the supposed interests of the few, but in the real interests of the whole community’ (Howard 1985: 103). Why would the outward expansion of the Garden City be so opposed to the interests of its inhabitants? In Howard’s terms, building suburbs on the outskirts of a city further alienates the centre of the city from the surrounding countryside by increasing the distance between the two. Also, as the sprawl spreads, suburbanites living on the outskirts face an incrementally longer journey to the centre to enjoy the benefits of the city, and to work. Howard planned Garden City so that no resident could ever be more than 240 yards from parkland, and the amenities of town would also be near at hand due to the compact structure of the plan (Howard 1985: 18). The ‘social city’ – a network of interconnected new towns built on Garden City principals – would be just as urban, in its way, as central London, but this urban quality would be evenly distributed over many smaller centres, rather than one large one surrounded by residential suburban sprawl. Howard’s vision was profoundly influential. However, only in the hands of men like Raymond Unwin – who adapted a scheme that was designed to abolish the suburbs into a way of beautifying them – did it attain a more practical dimension that was friendly, and no longer hostile, to the suburbs. H. G. Wells occupied similar ground.


2.2

H. G. Wells and the probable diffusion of great cities

In The Sleeper Awakes – published in 1899 as When the Sleeper Wakes , and reissued with mostly minor alterations in 1910 under this new title – H. G. Wells carries out a fictional analysis of a future in which the trend for rural depopulation and urban growth has continued at Victorian rates. In a preface added in 1921, Wells states that: The present volume takes up certain ideas already very much discussed in the concluding years of the last century, the idea of the growth of the towns and the depopulation of the countryside and the degradation of labour through the higher organisation of industrial production. ‘Suppose these forces to go on’, that is the fundamental hypothesis of the story. (Wells 2005b: 7) In its concern with the geographical distribution of the population – its increasing concentration in urban centres – the novel engages with the discourse about rural depopulation and urban growth to which I have drawn attention. Wells was preoccupied with contemporary arguments about the future of the city and was directly influenced by Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement, although he was also critical of them. The Fabian Society – of which Wells was an occasionally reluctant and usually obstreperous member from 1903 to 1908 (Pugh 1984: 82–93, 97–8) – discussed the Garden City movement at meetings, and many of its members were directly involved in the movement (Buder 1990: 82). But the Fabian ‘Old Gang’ – Edward Pease, George Bernard Shaw and Stanley Webb – took a dim view of Howard’s ideas (Buder 1990: 77–8). Shaw ridiculed the Garden City movement and the ideal was dismissed by the Old Gang as utopian and a direct contradiction of the Fabian strategy, devised by Webb, ‘of achieving socialism through municipal ownership within the existing cities’ (Hall & Ward 1998: 30). While the official verdict of Fabian Tract No. 101, entitled The House Famine and How to Relieve It , bore some similarities to the Garden City ideal, it differed in fundamentals. F. Lawson Dodd, the author of the concluding section of the tract, argues that ‘[t]he real difficulty of the question is how to accommodate the poorest classes’ (1900: 43), which runs counter to the admixture of classes and professions that Howard saw as essential to Garden City. Furthermore ‘the solution to the problem lies in the direction of


providing cottages as far away from population centres as possible, and in providing at the same time cheap and rapid means of transit to and from work for those whose business lies at the great centres of industry’ (Dodd 1900: 43). The Fabian approach to the housing question shares with Garden City its centrifugal impulse. But it resisted two of its central tenets: the promotion of class mixture and the mixed land use which would permit the close integration of agriculture, industry and residential accommodation. The Fabian solution essentially aimed to provide suburban dormitories for the working class, where Howard’s Garden City was intrinsically opposed to the suburb. Howard’s most influential disciple Raymond Unwin – author of Fabian Tract No. 109 Cottage Plans and Common Sense and architect of the Hampstead Garden Suburb – is highly influential and follows the Fabian approach in several key respects. Wells criticised the Garden City movement in an article written for the Daily Mail in 1905, but he was a member of the Garden City Association, where he even became an honorific vice president. He also – in an undated postcard – invited Howard to join the Fabian society (Buder 1990: 234). A fiercely independent thinker, Wells inevitably stopped short of a full endorsement of the policies of the various groups of which he was a member. Nevertheless, these groups supplied him with intellectual grist, fuelling his ideas and his enthusiasm for the issues at stake. Wells wrote of Howard’s plan: The scheme had many disadvantages, but it had one great advantage: it was in the compass of a common mind: together with its happy title there was something in that target-like scheme of Mr Howard’s that provoked the shafts of thought from the least enterprising intelligence. Mysteriously, as a result of it people thought about housing who had never thought about anything in their lives before. It came as a great light to many minds; it brought home to them that the way houses and roads and places are distributed on the earth’s surface is within the province of intention and design. Previously they had thought cities ‘growed’ – came anyhow, like the weather, and you made the best of what you got. The manifest artificiality of these circles ended all that for them. (Wells 1905a: 4) Wells’s relationship to both the Fabian Society and the Garden City movement was ambivalent, and it is significant that his notion of


the importance of ‘the home’ became a central point in his disagreements with both groups, in different ways. This fixation on the home is a central, unifying strand of Wells’s political thinking and his fiction. Shortly after the first publication of The Sleeper Awakes, Wells described its logic in the following terms: If in one hundred years the population of London has been multiplied by seven, then in two hundred years – ! And one proceeds to pack the answer in gigantic tenement houses, looming on colossal roofed streets, provide it with moving ways (the only available transit appliances suited to such dense multitudes), and develop its manners and morals in accordance with the laws that will always prevail amidst over-crowded humanity so long as humanity endures. (Wells 1902: 40) Wells’s use of a sleeping protagonist who wakes up in a much changed world follows earlier utopian novels like News From Nowhere (Morris 2003) and Looking Backward (Bellamy 2007). Graham, Wells’s Sleeper, wakes up from a 203 year slumber to find that London has continued to grow at Victorian rates and that its population consequently exceeds thirty-three million (Wells 2005b: 116). The countryside is completely deserted: ‘[t]he city had swallowed up humanity’ (2005b: 128). Moreover, the nineteenth century trend for the consolidation of the land into larger units owned by fewer landowners has arrived at its logical conclusion: the whole world – or half of it in the earlier version of the novel – is owned by one man, by Graham in fact. Although he had not been a particularly rich man when he dozed off, through the effects of compound interest and various other contingencies his fortune has grown to the extent that he owns everything. While he slept a rich elite ruled on his behalf and when he awakes the oppressed masses, who have long hung their hopes on the Sleeper to redeem them, rejoice at the miraculous resurrection of their true master. Wells’s descriptions of the city are instructive, dwelling on its prodigious size and tempering an admiration for the technological feats which make so vast a settlement possible with concerns about its sheer scale. Notably, the city completely lacks suburbs, with an absolute cutoff point marked by an enormous wall-like edifice. Graham has his first real view of the city when he is taken on a flight in an aeroplane


(at the time that Wells was writing, this was still science fiction; aeroplanes first flew 11 years after the first publication of the novel). He writes: [T]he boundary of London was like a wall, like a cliff, a steep fall of three or four hundred feet, a frontage broken only by terraces here and there, a complex decorative façade. That gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of the nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it here but a waste of ruins, variegated and dense with thickets of the heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt, interspersed among levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges of houses. But for the most part the reefs and skerries of ruins, the wreckage of suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads, queer islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and brown, abandoned indeed by the inhabitants years since, but too substantial, it seemed, to be cleared out of the way of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms of the time. The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed amidst the countless cells of crumbling house walls, and broke along the foot of the city wall in a surf of bramble and holly and ivy and teazle and tall grasses. […] The city limits were indeed as sharply defined as in the ancient days when the gates were shut at nightfall and the robber foeman prowled to the very walls. (Wells 2005b: 144) The flight affords Wells’s protagonist a bird’s eye view of London, something that would have been inaccessible to him in 1899, a perspective that is exhilarating and allows him to grasp the city in a wholly new way, just as, for Roland Barthes, the view from the Eiffel Tower ‘gives us the world to read and not only to perceive’ (Barthes 1979: 9). For Wells, the Garden City movement had allowed people to see for the first time ‘the way houses and roads and places are distributed on the earth’s surface is within the province of intention and design’ (Wells 1905a: 4). This new perspective is crucial to Wells’s work, and Graham’s flight is a vivid dramatisation of its effects. Graham is initially so impressed by the technological advances of the new era that that he is blinded to its oppressive politics. But as


he begins to understand the society into which he has been reborn he realises that the 19th century ideals of equality and social justice have been forgotten. Graham says in his inaugural address to the masses that ‘[m]y age was an age of dreams – of beginnings, an age of noble hopes’ (Wells 2005b: 214). For Wells, the erosion of these hopes is a corollary of the ‘manners and morals […] that will al ways prevail amidst over-crowded humanity’ (Wells 1902: 40). If the noble hopes of the nineteenth century cannot survive in the densely populated conditions of the city he describes, for Wells – and this runs contrary to the way that he has often been read (e.g. by Carey 1992: 118–51) – it was under lower-density conditions like the suburb of his own time that they might prosper. In the description of Graham’s flight there is a kind of pathos in the desolate and crumbling suburban villas, ‘too substantial’ to be swept away by the instrumental logic of the new age. The sheer, cliff-like wall that separates the high-density city from the completely depopulated countryside signifies the absence of a medium-density compromise of the type that came into being with the Victorian suburbs. Just as Wells’s views on rural depopulation can be seen to fit into a wider contemporary discourse, his fears about the potential dangers of overcrowding are informed by a fashionable sociological trend that – reacting to the increasingly crowded cities of the late nineteenth century – attempted to describe the psychology of the crowd. Fears about the nature of the masses have a long history, but here they begin to be expressed in the scientific language of psychology. Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules of 1895 – translated in 1896 as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – was a voguish book on the subject and it is likely that Wells had read it by the time he wrote When the Sleeper Wakes . In any case he had certainly done so by 1903, when he recommends it in a footnote in Mankind in the Making as ‘a very suggestive book’ (Wells 1903: 266n). If The Sleeper Awakes was not directly influenced by The Crowd , Wells’s concern that the rational agent of nineteenth-century progress might, under certain conditions, be subsumed into the contagious and irrational jingoism of the crowd certainly chimes with its argument that the crowd is ‘the slave of the impulses which it receives’ (Le Bon 1960: 36). The memorable scene in which the masses, newly reunited with the Sleeper, begin to march, is strongly reminiscent of Le Bon’s book. Graham is supposedly leading the disenfranchised masses against their oppressors, but he knows nothing of the situation and is simply carried along with the mob.


All his impressions were vague save the massive emotion of that trampling song. The multitude were beating time with their feet – marking time, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. (Wells 2005b: 81) Wells’s repetitive use of the word ‘tramp’, which occurs like this many times over the few pages that describe the march of the multitude, conveys the sense of a savage, tribal rhythm in which all individuality and reason are lost. Given the word’s connotation of homelessness and vagrancy, there is also at least the suggestion that the loss of the home has created a rootless society of vagabonds. The lack of a properly defined, private domestic sphere causes these itinerant souls to merge into the group, losing their individual identities in the process. Men and women mingled in the ranks; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. The whole world seemed marching. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; his brain was tramping. (Wells 2005b: 82) Graham is thus utterly absorbed by the crowd; the primitive instinct that bids us march in time prevailing over the independence of thought that is the mark of civilised man. This resurgent barbarism represents the end of the road for Wells’s social hopes and for the Enlightenment itself. For Wells, this herd mentality – and the attendant rise of authoritarian politics – gathers strength from the breakdown of the family, the traditional guarantor of social stability. Wells links this breakdown with the abandonment of the suburb and the kind of domestic sociality that it engenders. The impact of this abandonment is emphasised in the novel through several key episodes that highlight the effects of the disappearance of the home. One such episode occurs when Graham observes the disturbing spectacle of thousands of people eating together in a vast communal dining hall: He discovered only that this continuity of the city, this exclusion of weather, these vast halls and ways, involved the disappearance of the household; that the typical Victorian ‘Home’, the little brick cell containing kitchen and scullery, living rooms and bedrooms had, save for the ruins that diversified the countryside, vanished as surely as the wattle hut. (Wells 2005b: 177)


For Wells, crucial distinctions between outside and inside, public and private have been eroded in this imagined future. The walls and roof of the ‘little brick cell’ that defined and contained the domestic life of the nuclear family have been replaced by the vast walls and the roof of the city itself, expanding the scene of the domestic to the point where it effectively no longer exists. However confining the ‘cell’ that was the suburban home may have been, the fact of its obsolescence creates a dangerous and unpredictable situation by releasing a fluid and unstructured mass of people, who are subject to the kinds of irrational and destructive crowd behaviour that were such a concern for Wells. In The Time Machine , written in 1895, the dystopian future depicted by Wells is also characterised by a new topography in which the suburban home, and consequently the nuclear family, family, has no place. This loss is dramatised as the Time Traveller, whose time machine sits in a laboratory in his Richmond home, accelerates into the future. He watches with some poignancy as ‘the dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me’ (Wells 2005c: 19). The Time Traveller watches the walls of his home shimmer and dissolve away, opening onto the expansive plains of a world in which humanity, thus released from its imprisonment, has evolved into two castes, the savage, primitive labourer ‘Morlocks’ and the childish and cruel ‘Eloi’. Just as in The Sleeper Awakes, the absence of discreet households, and therefore of the stabilising influence of the nuclear family, is a key factor in mankind’s degeneration: Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently, the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. ‘Communism’, said I to myself. (Wells 2005c: 29) When referring to communism, Wells probably has in mind the early utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen who both, as Engels put it, ‘thought that the population should be scattered through the country in groups of sixteen hundred to three thousand persons; each group was to occupy a gigantic palace, with a household run on communal lines, in the centre of their area of land’ (Engels 1947: 356).


Fourier’s elaborately conceived phalanstère was explicitly intended to destroy what he saw as the abject relations of the nuclear family. Fourier’s alternative was the Progressive Household or Nine-group Tribe: a hive of 100 people of the same sex, who are divided into three social classes, and a complex scheme for the distribution of sexual pleasure replaces wedlock, which had been the cornerstone of the bourgeois family (Fourier 1996: 117). These tribes are housed in a larger phalanstère phalanstère in which about two thousand people live (Choay 1969: 97). If the Time Traveller is at first awestruck by the realisation of this utopian fantasy he soon discovers that if this is the communitarian existence that Fourier had envisaged, it has gone horribly wrong. Wells seems to suggest that it is the cellular structure of 19th century society – the fact that its basic unit is the household – that gives it its strength, and grounds its hopes for social progress. The decline of the human race into two genetically distinct clans, both lacking the intelligence and the enterprise of nineteenth-century man, is portrayed as partly a consequence of its abandonment of the home. For Wells, protecting this home is the most important task of town planning and a mandatory demand of socialism. Both The Time Machine and The Sleeper Awakes ask what might happen should the home be taken away. In The Sleeper Awakes , when Graham encounters the communal meal, he at first supposes that mass catering must be simply a timesaving and efficient element of modernisation. The spectacle prompts him to postulate that it was merely the ‘strong barbaric pride, passions and prejudices’ of the Victorians that ‘had necessitated the entire separation of contiguous households’ (Wells 2005b: 177–8). But Graham quickly learns that this separation served a higher purpose. When he realises that without it not only eating but also the raising of infants must be done communally, he begins to understand the gravity of the loss of the suburban home. In The Sleeper Awakes Awakes, babies are incubated in large-scale crèches, made up of small, isolated temperature controlled cells, a ‘nightmare of pink helpless limbs’ (Wells 2005b: 186). The fact that the babies are ‘left alone, without embrace or endearment’ (Wells 2005b: 183) horrifies Graham. For Wells, one of the most fatal corollaries of the loss of the suburban villa is the loss of the close connection with the mother that the Victorian family, in its ideal form at least, guaranteed. As Graham tells one of his new contemporaries: Of course, in our time, a woman was supposed not only to bear children, but to cherish them, to educate them – all the essentials


of moral and mental education a child owed to its mother. Or went without. Quite a number, I admit, went without. Nowadays, clearly, there is no more need for such care than if they were butterflies. I see that! Only there was an ideal – that figure of a grave, patient woman, silently and serenely mistress of a home, mother and maker of men – to love her was a sort of worship. (Wells 2005b: 186–7) The political instability of the world in which the sleeper awakes – the fact that it is the herd instinct and not the rational agent of the Enlightenment that holds all the cards in this densely populated megalopolis – suggests the dangers that Wells associates with treating infants as if they were butterflies. Despite his socialist politics and his dissolute extramarital behaviour, ‘in the matter of nursing Mr Wells Wells is on the side of the Conservatives – he stands firm for “the home”; he is something more than suspicious of the crèche’, as the anonymous reviewer of Mankind in the Making put it in Fabian News (1903: 47). For Wells, the ethical training that goes on in the Victorian household is fundamental to any hopes of social progress. Women – mothers – are seen as the primary agents of this ethical indoctrination, and Wells views women going to work, as they do in The Sleeper Awakes , as a pernicious development that can only prevent them from adequately fulfilling their maternal duties. The full cost of this is made clear in Wells’s description of the babies’ ‘wet nurses’. These appear as the ultimate symbol of a modernity whose technologies intervene to alienate humanity from its nature, ‘a vista of mechanical figures, with arms, shoulders and breasts of astonishingly realistic modelling, articulation and texture, but mere brass tripods below, below, and having in the place of features a flat disc bearing advertisements likely to be of interest to mothers’ (Wells 2005b: 183). These inhuman, robotic nursemaids stand in for the mother in Wells’s vision, catering for the infant’s every need by pumping breast milk on demand. But this is seen as a malign and mechanistic reduction of the function of motherhood. The novel thus stresses the continued importance of Graham’s old-fashioned vision of the mother as ‘mistress of a home’. In two pamphlets that Wells wrote several years later, Socialism and (1906) and Will Socialism Destroy the Home? (1907), he argues the Family (1906) for a version of socialism that is dedicated to preserving the home and the family. In the opening passage of Will Socialism Destroy the Home? , he puts his case in bald terms.


People are told that Socialism will destroy the home, will substitute a sort of stud-farm for that warm and intimate nest of human life, will bring up our children in incubators and crèches, and – institutions generally. It isn’t so. (Wells 1907:1) In fact, many forms of socialism had viewed the family as a prime target for destruction: Fourier’ Fourier ’s phalanstère phalanstère, for example, was explicitly designed to abnegate the family. But Wells argues in the strongest terms for the preservation of the bourgeois household, albeit in a more enlightened form. Certainly, in Socialism and the Family and Will Socialism Destroy the Home, Wells inveighs against new forms of communal life, which he seems to associate with the word ‘communism’ rather than the more moderate-sounding ‘socialism’. Wells argues that in fact it is capitalism that threatens to destroy the home and that it is the role of socialism to preserve it by liberating it from poverty, and also from patriarchy. So far, Socialism goes towards regenerating the family and sustaining the home. But let there be no ambiguity on one point. It will be manifest that while it would reinvigorate and confirm the home, it quite decidedly tends to destroy what was once the most typical form of the family throughout the world – that is to say, the family which is in effect the private property of the father, the patriarchal family. (Wells 1907: 12) Where Wells criticises the existing conditions of the family, therefore, it is important to recognise that he is doing so from the point of view of somebody who wants to perfect it, and indeed to make it the very foundation of socialist society, rather than from the point of view of a socialist (like Fourier) who intends to destroy it. Ironically, perhaps, the family that Wells is so keen to defend from the destructive impulses of capitalism was in fact a recent product of industrial society. The prevailing sense of ‘family’ in the mid eighteenth century, century, for example, referred to a much larger and more public group. In this earlier period, ‘the family was often still conceived as a group of dependants: wife, children, lesser kin, servants and apprentices attached to the household of the masculine head, usually the master/husband/father’ (Davidoff 1990: 71). Davidoff argues that ‘the dualism of our own age which so clearly demarcates family


and privacy from work and public life, is of relatively recent origin’ (1990: 72). But it is this new definition of family – the so called nuclear family – that Wells sees as the bedrock of social stability. This dualism that Davidoff alludes to is on a basic level a suburban one, as Williams suggests in Culture and Society : The attempt to separate material needs, and the ways in which they are to be met, from human purpose and the development of being and relationship, is the suburban separation of ‘work’ and ‘life’ which has been the most common response of all to the difficulties of industrialism. (Williams 1987: 213) Wells’s criticisms of the suburbs are made in the spirit of preserving the family from the incursions of industrialism by enforcing this separation of work and life. As such, they are inherently suburban in outlook. This is particularly pertinent to the reading of Wells’s novels of lower-middle-class life, which are usually characterised as being fiercely opposed to suburbia in principle. John Carey, in The Intellectuals and the Masses, makes what is perhaps the classic case against Wells, linking his hatred of suburbia with his Malthusianism and his eugenicist tendencies (Carey 1992: 118–51). Carey’s account has a grain of truth in it, though it is marred by the over-simplification of categories of high and low culture that is often present in Carey’s work (O’Connor 2006: 49–101). But by placing Wells’s critique of suburbia in the context of his engagement with contemporary discourses of town planning, it is possible to find in it another emphasis. Like Unwin, Wells opted for a departure from Garden City orthodoxy that sought to perfect suburban life rather than to abolish it. Wells’s lower-middle-class protagonists are frustrated by their dull and predictable lives and the novels usually explore some kind of escape from the conformity of suburban family life. Ann Veronica, a novel of 1909, bears directly on the question of the woman’s role in the home, as it tells the story of a young woman who leaves the repressive confines of ‘the wrappered life’ (Wells 2005a: 39) at her father’s house – in the fictional south London suburb of Morningside Park – in search of freedom. ‘One main idea pressed her; she must get away from home, she must assert herself at once or perish’, Wells writes (2005a: 76). In this novel a radically anti-family argument – grounded in the feminism of the suffragettes rather than in Fourierism – is considered and rejected in a way that reflects Wells’s town planning agenda.


Lynne Hapgood has argued that by the time of the writing of Ann Veronica, ‘[v]isions of the future for Wells have moved away from urban planning and the reorganisation of communities to domestic and sexual transformations’ (Hapgood 2005: 212). I would argue, rather, that for Wells as for many town planners the two are inseparably connected. In his thinking, the planning of the built environment plays a vital role in protecting the domestic environment in which the family can thrive. In Socialism and the Family , Wells had painted a grim picture of the disintegration of home life. The old feudal system under which women and children were effectively the property of man could no longer apply: the modern, educated woman could not – and should not – tolerate it for long. And it was turning the man of the house into a monster ‘who no longer effectually rules, no longer, in many cases, either protects or sustains, who all too often is so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexatious power of jealous restriction and interference upon his wife and children’ (Wells 1906: 36). This could stand as an accurate portrait of Ann Veronica’s father, Mr Stanley, whose petty tyranny drives his intelligent and articulate daughter into exile. While Ann Veronica initially views her departure as a matter of practical necessity, in her new life in London, she begins to mix with forward thinking Fabians and suffragettes, and to develop a more ideological resistance to the status quo. Miss Miniver – an unappealingly portrayed feminist – characterises Ann Veronica’s flight as part of a liberating trend: ‘The women are taking it up’, said Miss Miniver; ‘the women and the common people, all pressing forward, all roused’. Ann Veronica listened with her eyes on the fire. ‘Everybody is taking it up’, said Miss Miniver. ‘ You had to come in. You couldn’t help it. Something drew you. Something draws everybody. From suburbs, from country towns – everywhere. I see all the Movements. As far as I can, I belong to them all. I keep my finger on the pulse of things.’ (Wells 2005a: 111) The radicalisation of feminists and socialists is thus linked to a movement from the suburbs and the provinces into central London. In principle Wells has sympathy with the feminist cause but the novel’s mocking treatment of the suffragettes must be seen as an element of his defence of the family.


Central to his idea of the family was ‘that figure of a grave, patient woman, silently and serenely mistress of a home, mother and maker of men’ that is articulated by Graham in The Sleeper Awakes. This was a mould that the early feminists wanted to break: Ann Veronica is an attempt to reclaim this figure from – or, more charitably, for – the feminist movement. Ann Veronica at first avoids the more militant tactics of the suffragette movement, deciding that ‘[s]he could not part with her dignity’ (Wells 2005a: 120). But in the end, her situation becomes so desperate that she does so anyway and ends up spending some time in prison, after storming the Houses of Parliament. In prison, and increasingly in love with Capes – the enlightened man of science turned playwright with whom she eventually elopes – Ann Veronica rethinks her ideas somewhat: A woman wants a proper alliance with a man, a man who is better stuff than herself. She wants that and needs it more than anything else in the world. It may not be just, it may not be fair, but things are so. It isn’t law, nor custom, nor masculine violence settled that. It is just how things happen to be. She wants to be free – she wants to be legally and economically free, so as not to be subject to the wrong man; but only God, who made the world, can alter things to prevent their being slave to the right one. (Wells 2005a: 204) Wells’s critique of marriage is targeted at altering the system to accommodate the desires and aspirations of women, in order that frustration does not lead them to behave in the undignified manner of the suffragettes. Ann Veronica’s capacity for goodness is to an extent frustrated by the flawed society into which she is born, a society that allows women no economic freedom, and therefore compels them to behave inappropriately (in Wells’s view) in the effort to achieve autonomy. In a heated exchange between Ann Veronica and Capes, the stakes of the argument are made clear. Capes says: ‘Women are not in the world in the same sense that men are – fighting individuals in a scramble. I don’t see how they can be. Every home is a little recess, a niche, out of the world, of business and competition, in which women and the future shelter.’ ‘A little pit!’ said Ann Veronica; ‘a little prison!’ ‘It is just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things are.’ (Wells 2005a: 175)


I think that Wells wants to keep both sides of this argument in view. To be sure, Wells criticises the familial status quo. But he does this with a view to improving the lot of women within the home, not, say, by permitting them a role in government or in the workplace. As he put it in 1905: ‘[d]on’t suppose that I propose to remedy the wrongs of mothers by adding a vote to their other duties’ (Wells 1905b: 4). He had no sympathy ‘with the desire some women have to lecture and sit in that stuffy, boring den of false issues – the House of Commons’ (Wells 1905b: 4). The reason for improving women’s lot is to retain the household as a sanctuary for ‘women and the future’, preventing them from being released into the kind of formless crowd depicted in The Sleeper Awakes, where ‘men and women mingled in the ranks’ (Wells 2005b: 82). The question for Wells, then, is how to achieve the legal and economic freedom of women while retaining the home. The proposal he advances in Socialism and the Family is ‘the repudiation of private ownership of women and children, and the payment of mothers’ (Wells 1906: 59). The latter measure had the benefit of ensuring the financial independence of women whilst preventing them from working, avoiding what Wells sees as the ‘monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children in their spare time, as it were, while they “earn their living” by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product’ (1906: 59). This issue of the payment of mothers has been cited as one of the reasons for Wells’s split with the Fabian Society. Firstly, they refused to publish Socialism and the Family , which was intended as a Fabian tract (Wells 1908: 77). They also refused to adopt the idea that mothers should be paid for their domestic duties as one of their tenets – part of the Fabian ‘Basis’ – much to Wells’s consternation (Mackenzie & Mackenzie 1977: 350). Wells’s letter of resignation, published in Fabian News, complained that ‘a scheme which proposes to leave mother and child economically dependent on the father is not to me Socialism at all, but a miserable perversion of Socialism’ (Wells 1908: 77). So for Wells, a perfected version of the Victorian middle-class family (in which economic dependence upon the pater familias has been eliminated) is absolutely integral to socialism. Under prevailing conditions the household can seem like a ‘little prison’, he grants, but the point is to bring it up to date and make it into a genuine ‘refuge’ rather than abandoning it and countenancing the ‘disintegration of all the realities of the family into an epoch of Free Love’, which he condemns as


‘anti-socialist’ (Wells 1906: 52–3). Fourier’s attacks on marital monogamy may well be at issue here. In The Sleeper Awakes, the problem of the independence of women is again explored, and here it has come at the expense of the family unit. As an inhabitant of this nightmare future explains to Graham as they watch the hedonistic moneyed class at a dance: There’s a thousand forms of work for women now. But you had the beginning of the independent working-woman in your days. Most women are independent now. Most of these are married more or less – there are a number of methods of contract – and that gives them more money, and enables them to enjoy themselves. (Wells 2005b, 186) The various ‘methods of contract’ on offer here reduce marriage to a financial transaction, and one that seems designed to fund women in a quest to find pleasure away from the connubial hearth. Similarly, the rather unsatisfactory ending of Ann Veronica is critical of the quest for sexual liberation insofar as it endangers the family. The protagonist ends the novel reconciled to her father and married to Capes, setting out to assume a traditional domestic role under her newfound lover. So Wells’s fiction distances itself from the kind of socialism – of which Fourier is the most representative thinker, but which can also be found in certain feminist positions – that sees an escape from the restraints of the family as an indispensable element of political liberation. In lambasting the small-minded suburban mentality of a Mr Stanley, therefore, he does not wish to raze the suburb, but to push it centrifugally towards its Arcadian apotheosis. In terms of Wells’s town planning ideas, this is expressed as the aspiration to redistribute the inhabitants of the crowded cities as evenly as possible over the countryside. And for Wells, with his profamily agenda, this was explicitly couched in the terms of a universal suburbanisation, which is ultimately very different from the solutions offered by Howard and the Garden City purists. Wells had been deeply troubled by the way in which London was growing, but his initial assumption that the centripetal force exerted by the capital would only be exacerbated by further modernisation left him with the conclusion that the process would go on indefinitely. This is all the more disturbing for Wells because he would prefer to think of the advance of science and technology as a liberating process: in The Sleeper Awakes, technology is the enemy of freedom. Indeed, George Orwell,


although attracted to the novel, and clearly influenced by it in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), wrote of it that ‘it suffers from vast contradictions because of the fact that Wells, as the arch-priest of “progress”, cannot write with any conviction against “progress”’ (Orwell 2001d: 195). For Wells, progress has to be pushed into the service of the family, for if it erodes that institution it cannot be progress at all. Accordingly, only a few years after the initial publication of When the Sleeper Wakes , Wells had substantially modified his views about the probable course of human development. As Ebenezer Howard writes in a footnote to a subsequent edition of Garden Cities of Tomorrow , ‘[I]t is satisfactory to note that Mr H. G. Wells has recently entirely changed his views as to the future growth of London’ (Howard 1985: 115n). Indeed, the vision of the future put forward in Anticipations in some superficial respects resembles the Howardian Garden City ideal. It seems probable that Wells read Howard’s Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (published in 1898) during the gap between the publication of When the Sleeper Wakes and Anticipations . In Chapter 2 of Anticipations, entitled ‘The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities’, Wells addresses in a non-fictional form the same themes that he treated in the earlier novel and rehabilitates technology for the forces of progress. His argument is based on an analysis of modern modes of locomotion and communication, and his general premise is that ‘the general distribution of population in a country must always be directly dependent on transport facilities ’ (Wells 1902: 35). In his description of the growth of the 19th century city, he discusses the role of the railway and the steamship in the following terms: For a time they were purely centripetal forces. They worked simply to increase the general body of trade, to increase, that is, the pressure of population upon the urban centres. As a consequence the social history of the middle and later thirds of the nineteenth century, not simply in England but all over the civilized world, is the history of a gigantic rush of population into the magic radius of – for most people – four miles, to suffer there physical and moral disaster less acute but, finally, far more appalling to the imagination than any famine or pestilence that ever swept the world. (Wells 1902: 44) In The Sleeper Awakes , Wells had described the consequences for humanity if the ‘physical and moral disaster’ of urbanisation were to continue at nineteenth-century rates. In Anticipations , he suggests


that the modern modes of transportation, which at that time were acting centripetally on the population and swelling the urban masses, ‘bring with them […] the distinct promise of a centrifugal application’. The overcrowded populations of the great cities can justly look forward to the time when they ‘will be thrust outward in every direction with an effect of enormous relief’ (Wells 1902: 45). And indeed, he argues that ‘not only will many of these railway-begotten “giant cities” reach their maximum in the coming century, but […] in all probability they […] are destined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amount almost to obliteration, so far, at least, as the blot on the map goes, within a measurable space of years’ (Wells 1902: 39) Howard evidently approved of Wells’s conviction that this urban ‘blot’ was destined to be eradicated. But when we consider the future depicted in Anticipations in the context of the fictional works that I have discussed here, it appears that it is in some respects just as fundamentally incompatible with the main principles of the Garden City ideal as was the densely populated megalopolis of The Sleeper Awakes . The connection between Wells’s centrifugal argument for the redistribution of the urban population and his desire to shelter the family by promoting suburban-type developments points to a key distinction between his vision and that of Howard. Wells’s prediction of a future in which London’s population has diffused seems to regard this as a triumph of the suburb over town and country alike. ‘Indeed’, he writes, ‘it is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year 2000 A.D. may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb’ (Wells 1902: 46). But Howard excoriated the suburb, indeed, in some senses it, more than the city itself, was the target of his critique. In this, Wells’s ideas were close to those of Raymond Unwin. Unwin’s pamphlet of 1912, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City type of development may benefit both owner and occupier proclaimed its indebtedness to Garden Cities of Tomorrow from the outset. But Unwin’s take on the idea undoubtedly ‘offended the Garden City purists’ (Hall & Ward 1998: 41). Unwin’s suburbanisation of the Garden City ideal began several years earlier, when he left Letchworth to become architect of Hampstead Garden Suburb, effectively causing a rift in the movement. Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! is the manifesto of the Unwin faction, dedicated to establishing a means of building suburbs ‘in accordance with the Garden City principles’ (Unwin 1912: 4). The simple fact is that, while the broader


concept of the ‘social city’ could have a huge population – even bigger, perhaps, than London – Howard envisaged each new town having an optimum population of about 30,000, and certainly no more than 50,000 (Howard 1985: 30). He explicitly insisted that the agricultural zone that was to surround Garden City was to remain inviolate; to build on it would be to undermine the renewed connection between agriculture and industry that was Howard’s primary objective. Howard writes: Garden City has, we will suppose, grown until it has reached a population of 32,000. How shall it grow? How shall it provide for the needs of others who will be attracted by its numerous advantages? Shall it build on the zone of agricultural land which is around it, and thus for ever destroy its right to be called a ‘Garden City’? Surely not. This disastrous result would indeed take place if the land around the town were, as is the land around our present cities, owned by private individuals anxious to make a profit out of it. (Howard 1985: 103) The compact nature of Garden City is absolutely essential to its proper functioning: sprawl could only act to alienate the inhabitants of the centre from the country, and those on the periphery from the advantages of town. Garden City is designed to physically overcome what Williams identified as ‘the suburban separation of “work” and “life”’ (1987: 213), by locating them within easy walking distance of each other. Garden City was intended to be self-sufficient: although travel would be possible, one would expect to sleep, eat and work locally. In this respect, Unwin-style developments bore much more relation to existing suburban settlements than to Howard’s utopia. [T]hough Hampstead Garden Suburb had the appearance of a Garden City and some of its community spirit, it was in every respect a pure commuter suburb; with no industry of its own, it was dependent on a newly opened underground station and was effectively separated from London only by Hampstead Heath. (Hall and Ward, 1998: 41) While this type of development fulfilled aesthetic criteria implied by Howard, it completely failed to bring about the kind of wholesale economic and social changes he envisaged. Unwin was a key figure in the public housing programme after the First World War, where he


committed what many in the Garden City movement viewed as the ‘great apostasy’ (Hall 1996: 168). As Peter Hall writes, ‘he had steered the course of English urban development away from garden cities and towards suburban satellites’ (1996: 168). The point was not to abolish the suburbs but to build better ones. Wells’s vision, then, has more in common with the Garden Suburb than with the Garden City. Howard’s scheme, perhaps because it relies less on the futuristic means of transport and communication that Wells envisages, is intended to distribute all forms of land use, and not just housing: the Garden City is not a suburban dormitory for commuters but a complete city in itself, built on a human scale. It is in these terms that Wells explicitly differentiates his approach from that of Howard in his Daily Mail article on Garden Cities: It has been shown pretty conclusively that communities living completely in such postage stamp areas as 4000 acres and less (Garden City has 3818) belong to the time when the simplest and smoothest mode of travel in life was the horse, and common men travelled on foot from the cradle to the grave. There is now no reason whatever why people should live close to the scene of their industrial activities, and no end of reasons why they should not. For these Garden City promoters to sketch out factory sites within a mile of their city centre is an anachronism; so far from being a valuable experiment in realising Utopia, this proximity is one of the particular old-fashioned things that all thorough-going reformers want to get rid of. Almost all modern industrial operations are obnoxious to the home; they rattle and clatter, they bang and roar, they disengage smoke and steam and foul the air, they make mud and refuse and muddle, they absorb and emit sudden rushes and crowds of people, they smell, they hoot, they fill the air with dust and blacks, they beget a teeming tumult of vans, lorries, trucks that crush and damage children. I cannot imagine any sane man voluntarily making a family residence close to a coal mine, cement works, iron foundries, a brewery, or any such belching monster. […] And it seems impossible to get it into the heads of people that, now that proximity is totally unnecessary, it is merely clumsy, cruel stupidity that keeps people living so. One cannot but regret that the Garden City people seem resolved to spend their hundred thousand pounds in the endorsement in this respect of the old condition of things. (Wells 1905a: 4)


Wells takes up the themes of Anticipations , again stressing the importance of modern means of transportation in allowing for much greater distances between work and home. ‘In Utopia’, he writes, ‘every one will do what every one who can afford it does already in this world. You will go and work – like a Titan for a short, strenuous working day – in one place, and then you will fly back to the amenities of home’ (Wells 1905a: 4). The dream of Anticipations that ‘nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter’ (Wells 1902: 46) will act as suburbs to London – that the whole population will effectively be able to live in the countryside while working in the city – is confirmed by Wells’s criticisms of the Garden City movement. The image of the ‘belching monster’ seems to be drawn directly from the descriptions of the pit in Germinal (Zola 1993), and Wells is perhaps unfairly conflating Garden City’s close integration of housing and industry with that of the wretched mining village so vividly evoked in Zola’s novel. Howard undoubtedly had something more bucolic in mind. In any case, instead of the mixed land use that Howard advocated, Wells offers something almost opposite. ‘Why not keep our businesses and factories in the East End of London and move the population out?’ (Wells 1905a: 4), he asks. While Howard proposed interlinked conurbations of a distinctly urban character, but brought back into relation with the countryside and agricultural production, Wells imagines a thin smear of population evenly coating the land, with accelerated transportation permitting people to travel vast distances to work. Wells’s utopia is suburban, the Unwinisation of the countryside, while Howard’s – despite its centrifugal tendency – remains defiantly urban. Wells concludes on a note of disillusionment with the Garden City, referring to progress in Letchworth where building had begun in 1903. First Garden City keeps on its pre-appointed course. Asphalte and mineral-water manufactures are already arranged for, and when I hear the words Garden City now I think of bitumen and nasty fizzy stuff in glass bottles and vans – mineral-water vans! Moreover, I understand they have erected gas works – Victorian, unbeautiful obsolescent structures. My first bright vision of beautiful homes among glowing gardens comes to me no more. (Wells 1905a: 4) It is these ‘beautiful homes among glowing gardens’ that first drew Wells to the movement, primarily because they seemed to offer an ideal


context for the kind of healthy family life he imagined in Mankind in the Making , Socialism and the Family , and elsewhere. The suburban dormitories which Unwin saw as the practical answer to the idealism of Howard’s plans seemed to offer a way of preserving Wells’s ‘bright vision’, far away from the toxic effluence of industrialism. Combined with the centrifugal possibilities of modern transportation technologies, it was ultimately this formula that enabled Wells to articulate a version of socialism that would defend the ‘warm and intimate nest of human life’ (Wells 1907: 1), even as the malign feudal relations of patriarchy were eliminated.

2.3 Coming Up for Air : Orwell, Suburbia and the housing crisis The contrast between Wells’s notion of a horizontally expanding city – tending to decentralise and disperse the population – and the centripetal, self-containing, centralising tendency of Haussmann’s Paris is striking. I argued in Section 2.1 that the divergent trends in urban development in Paris and London can be explicated in terms of the social and political histories of England and France and their contrasting geographies of class. But it should be noted that these histories condition a whole variety of cultural responses: narratives of city life resist and critique trends in urban development as well as reflecting them. Indeed, it is of cardinal importance in this book that literary and filmic representations of mass housing critically and creatively engage with developmental trends in urban domesticity, rather than simply reproducing them. Wells’s work epitomises the centrifugal impetus of London, only becoming critical of the horizontal, suburban expansion of the city because it was not radically centrifugal enough, failing to redistribute the population across the land. In the work of George Orwell the centrifugal direction of the English imagination (and of English urban development) is the object of critique. Like Wells, Orwell emphasised the political importance of housing conditions, but his criticisms of suburbia work in the opposite direction to Wells’s. Orwell realises the importance of developing highdensity urban housing however much it might conflict with the inclinations of the Englishman. Orwell’s belief in the political importance of housing comes to the fore in The Road to Wigan Pier , which details the housing conditions of the working class and the unemployed in the north of England. His notebooks from the trip upon which this book was based reveal how closely he was concerned to understand the conditions in which


the poor live. Some of the descriptions of houses he visited are copied directly into the text, for example: 1. House in Wallgate quarter. Blind back type. One up, one down. Living-room measures 12 ft. by 10 ft., room upstairs the same. Alcove under stairs measuring 5 ft. by 5 ft. and serving as larder, scullery and coal hole. Windows will open. Distance to lavatory 50 yards. Rent 4 s. 9d ., rates 2s. 6d., total 7s. 3d . (Orwell 2001d: 90) And so it goes on: Orwell collected notes like these on more than fifty houses, only a few of which are reproduced in The Road to Wigan Pier . Orwell’s desire to get to grips with the physical dimensions and scale of these dwellings seems driven by a notion of what Karel Teige would later call the ‘minimum dwelling’. Orwell’s logic is brutally simple. There is, in one’s immediate living environment, a rock bottom level of space, light, clean air and so on below which it is beneath human dignity to fall. Working class dwellings often fall woefully short of this level. Socialism must address this fact, and the task of planning is to imagine a way in which this basic minimum can be extended to all. The Road to Wigan Pier attempts to discover the root causes of the foul living conditions of the working class. This manifests itself in Orwell’s understanding of the role of the housing shortage in depressing the living standards of the poor. ‘“Housing shortage” is a phrase that has been bandied about pretty freely since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of more than £10 a week, or even £5 a week for that matter’ (Orwell 2001d: 89). Many of the houses he visits have been condemned, but they remain tenanted since there are no other houses to go to. Orwell’s analysis of the housing question is always profoundly informed by his acute awareness and topographical understanding of the English class system. The protagonists of his novels are delicately poised on the edges of social classes and the urban, suburban and rural contexts between which they move hold complex class associations. The narrator and protagonist of Coming Up for Air , George Bowling, is the son of a failing village shopkeeper turned suburban five-to-ten-pound-a-weeker. Economically, this means that he is immune from the worst effects of the housing shortage – the caravan-colonies described in The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell 2001d: 96) – but in reality, the threat of destitution is only heightened by the illusion that ‘we all imagine we’ve got something to lose’ (Orwell 1990: 11).


‘We’, in this case, are what C. F. G. Masterman calls the Suburbans. Now, it makes little sense in Marxist terms to speak of the suburbans as a class. They are not primarily defined in terms of their income but by their values, aspirations and lifestyles. But Orwell, while feeling a political sympathy with socialists (barring Stalinists and, perhaps worse, vegetarians), often expresses dissatisfaction with their – usually Marxist – analysis of the class system. ‘It is interesting and rather depressing to see such a complex thing as the English class-system expounded by an orthodox Communist’, he wrote, in a review of Alec Brown’s The Fate of the Middle Classes . ‘It is like watching somebody carve a roast duck with a chopper’ (Orwell 1998: 478). Orwell wanted to perform a more delicate dissection of the class system. The principal problem with a Marxist analysis is that it fails to account for the growth of the middle class from the late nineteenth century onwards. In ‘England Your England’, penned in 1940, Orwell argues perceptively that ‘[o]ne of the most important developments in England during the past twenty years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit-bourgeois (small property owners) almost obsolete’ (2001b: 271). The specific national contexts are important here: the English word ‘middle-class’ stands in an uneasy relation to the Anglo-French ‘bourgeois’, which in any case carries connotations that do not exist in Marx’s German bürgerlich (see Williams 1983 45–8). The distance between the bourgeoisie and the middle classes is, one suspects, as wide as the English Channel. The middle class – as opposed to the bourgeoisie – is a distinctly Anglo Saxon phenomenon, and this has everything to do with the fact of suburbanisation. Orwell concludes that ‘[t]he tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do’ (Orwell 2001b: 272). Indeed, in The Communist Manifesto , Marx argues that the trajectory of capitalist society will tend towards an increasingly extreme polarisation of bourgeoisie and proletariat, the one exploiting the other with increasing frankness, with little room for anything in-between. ‘The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product’ (Marx & Engels 1985: 91). This sharply bipolar division of the population into two classes – without the middling sort associated with suburbia – is also, in different ways, the future Wells foresees in The Sleeper Awakes and The Time Machine. Orwell is correct to point out that, in England at least, history has taken a different course.


It could be argued that the origin of the confusion really lies in the fact that the middle class is not a class in any Marxist sense. In 1909, Masterman’s The Condition of England divided the population into three groups – ‘The Conquerors’, ‘The Suburbans’, and ‘The Multitude’ – that do not easily graft onto the classical categories of Marxist class analysis, ‘Aristocracy’, ‘Bourgeoisie’ and ‘Proletariat’ (or ‘Bourgeoisie’, ‘PettyBourgeoisie’ and ‘Proletariat’ for that matter). Masterman defined ‘The Suburbans’ as ‘practically the product of the last half century’, and ‘the peculiar product of England and America: of the nations which have pre-eminently added commerce, business and finance to the work of manufacture and agriculture’ (Masterman 1909: 65). The rise of commerce, business and finance precipitated a sharp increase in the number of office jobs: the clerk is perhaps the most representative suburban type. Masterman goes on to give a rather bleak account of the working life of this newly respectable section of society. Suburbia’s ‘male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters’ (Masterman 1909: 65). This group – who apart from suffering poor working conditions, were often poorly paid – were certainly not bourgeois in the Marxist sense of the term, and yet the term ‘middle-class’ can be applied to them. John Burnett writes: If the middle classes are hard to define, they are equally difficult to count. Membership was never a matter solely of income or occupation, though both of these mattered. It was, as Masterman clearly saw, more a question of style of life, of habits, tastes, values and aspirations which were quite distinct from those of the classes above and below them. (Burnett 1986: 188) Masterman usefully attends to the aspects of the class system that the formal categories of traditional Marxist analysis cannot explain. The emergence of a vast ‘middle class’ that is free from any anchorage in the revolutionary bourgeoisie is, as Orwell seemed to perceive, problematic for Marxism. This middle class is formed and perpetuated by suburbia, both culturally and because the extension of homeownership to the less well off altered their relation to capital, or at least appeared to. The Marxist account of class formation will have to be adapted or discarded in light of this fact. For if class is partly based on geography, the fact of home ownership, and what Masterman calls the ‘vigorous


and even tyrannical convention of manners’ (1909: 64) that prevails in suburbia, then this suggests that it is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be defined solely by abstract economic categories. ‘In reality the most important fact about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money’, Orwell writes. ‘The moneyrelationship on which the Communist rightly insists is interpenetrated by a sort of spurious caste-system’ (Orwell 1998: 478). Class formation is, at least in part, an autonomous process. Indeed, Masterman noticed that, while strenuously maintaining their social superiority to the proletariat, in political terms the Suburbans were very much out in the cold. The Working Classes can organise into unions, subsidise members of parliament and a Labour Party, make themselves both respected and feared. No one fears the Middle Classes, the suburbans; and perhaps for that reason, no one respects them, […] they lack organisation, energy, and ideas. (Masterman 1909: 64) The suburban middle class ‘was not a single social class, but a tier of sub-classes stretching from bare sufficiency to extreme wealth. Yet although there were major differences between top and bottom there were enough things in common to warrant a single label’ (Burnett 1986: 189). Even the poorest of this group who – like George Bowling and the ‘poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers’ (Orwell 1990: 10) of Ellesmere Road – survive on a paltry wage and in constant fear of the workhouse, remain politically conservative and fiercely hostile to socialism. This is because the typical Suburban’s ‘ideals are to the top end of the scale. He is proud when he is identifying his interests with those of Kensington, and indignant when his interests are identified with those of Poplar’ (Masterman 1909: 68). Because of this class aspiration, they fight to maintain the old hierarchy, which has for them only illusory benefits. ‘In feverish hordes’, Masterman writes, ‘the suburbs swarm to the polling booth to vote against a truculent Proletariat’ (1909: 66). Because they identify with the upper and upper middle classes, they behave as if they have vested interests in the status quo. Orwell argued that ‘the aitch-pronouncing section of the population tend to side with their natural enemies and against the working class, even when they grasp the economic side of the question fairly clearly’ (Orwell 1998: 478). Yet for Orwell, despite the fact that they are immune from the hardships associated with the worst kind of proletarian dwellings – as


described in The Road to Wigan Pier – the Suburbans in Coming Up for Air suffer very real social deprivation. The impoverishment of the lower middle class is fundamentally an impoverishment of the spirit. In any case, like Leonard Bast in Forster’s Howards End , the lower middle classes will go to any lengths necessary to avoid being seen to have anything to do with the proletariat, clutching their umbrellas to the grave. They would lay down their lives to defend the interests of the class to which they merely aspire to belong. As George Bowling puts it, ‘[e]very one of those poor downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick dolls’ house that’s called Belle Vue because there’s no view and the bell doesn’t ring – every one of those poor suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from Bolshevism’ (Orwell 1990: 13). Marx and Engels’s view of the petit-bourgeoisie is analogous: ‘[t]hey are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history’. (Marx & Engels 1985: 91). But Marx’s firmly held belief was that this class was doomed to historical insignificance and fated to pass out of existence altogether, clearing the stage for a direct confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The growth of the suburbs and the class formations they promoted put this theory to the sword. Coming Up for Air is typically Orwellian in its sensitivity to the suburban, lower-middle-class milieu that it depicts. Unlike Forster’s Leonard Bast, George Bowling is perfectly aware of the pretensions of his class and is consequently able to stand outside them to a certain extent. The focus of his dour and disillusioned view of modern life, in the first half of the novel at least, is suburbia. Bowling lives on Ellesmere Road, in the fictional suburb of West Bletchley. He describes this milieu in terms that are common to many satirical depictions of suburbia: Do you know the road I live in – Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley? Even if you don’t, you know fifty others exactly like it. You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses – the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to 212 and ours is 191 – as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, The Myrtles, The Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue. At perhaps one house in fifty some anti-social type who’ll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue instead of green. (Orwell 1990: 9)


Concerns about the standardisation of urban life – that result from the growth of the urban population and the consequent genesis of mass housing – are at the forefront of many fictional depictions of suburbia. The introduction of street numbers in 1762 and their subsequent proliferation is a symbolic turning point, marking a supposed break between an organic connection with home symbolised by the English manor house, and the rootlessness of modern life. The transition from Mansfield Park, Bleak House and Howards End to 7 Eccles Street and 191 Ellesmere Road is keenly felt in British fiction. The house names enumerated by Bowling, with their aspirational, rural tone – ‘The Laurels, The Myrtles, The Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue’ – are a futile nod to the rus in urbe ideal: West Bletchley is no more rural than Charing Cross. For Bowling, the repetition of identical units of housing along the whole street and across the whole of suburbia, elicits a rigidly self-policing conformity. The person who paints his door blue is labelled ‘anti-social’ and doomed to plummet from the precarious lower middle classes into the oblivion of unmitigated poverty. By drawing attention to the fact that these suburbs are as uniform as council houses – if not more so – Orwell is suggesting that leaving housing to the market does not necessarily result in variety and choice. That the rural, Romantic ideals that I have linked to suburban development should still form an integral part of West Bletchley may seem an unlikely proposition. Much of George Bowling’s invective on the subject of suburbia is directed precisely against this absurd, destitute grandiloquence. It is a facet of the geographical distribution of class in England that a move to the suburbs represents a step up the social ladder, symbolically at least (Jackson 1973: 168). And as the prestige of homeownership became available to an increasingly broad range of incomes, lower paid clerks were increasingly able to buy into the way of life of the suburban middle classes. Orwell links this aspirational element of the suburban middle class to his early version of the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis (outlined in Section 2.1). He argues that ‘the English ruling class has never developed into a bourgeoisie plain and simple’, and that the ‘ambition to be a country gentleman’ was as a consequence alive and well (Orwell 2001c: 310). This ambition reaches down to the lower middle classes and beyond: Nearly everyone who can afford to sets up as a country gentleman, or at least makes an effort in that direction. The manor-house with


its park and its walled gardens reappears in reduced form in the stockbroker’s week-end cottage, in the suburban villa with its lawn and herbaceous border, perhaps even in the potted nasturtiums on the window-sill of the Bayswater flat. (Orwell 2001c: 310–11) The quixotic tendency of the English to mistake a poky garden and a bit of privet for a vast country estate is the source of much comedy in Coming Up for Air . But George’s description of the gardens on Ellesmere Road is designed to dispel this delusion: Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call the back garden. There’s the same back garden, same privets and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference – where there are no kids there’s no bare patch in the middle. (Orwell 1990: 3) Bowling is under no illusion that his cell-like home with its dirty strip of grass is a ticket to the kind of munificence of which the five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers’ dream of. If Orwell’s Englishman is capable of imagining a tiny garden to be a great estate, he is also all too willing to believe that the heavily mortgaged homeownership he enjoys in the lower-middle-class suburb makes him Lord of the manor. The rise in homeownership was a particular facet of the second major boom in suburban development, in the 1930s, of which West Bletchley is a fictional representative. And Orwell links the middle-class conservatism of the Suburbans to the mythology of home ownership: To begin with, nine-tenths of the people in Ellesmere Road are under the impression that they own their houses. Ellesmere Road, and the whole quarter surrounding it, until you get to the High Street, is part of a huge racket called the Hesperides Estate, the property of the Cheerful Credit Building Society. Building societies are probably the cleverest racket of modern times. My own line, insurance, is a swindle I admit, but it’s an open swindle with the cards on the table. But the beauty of the building-society swindle is that your victims think you’re doing them a kindness. You wallop them, and they lick your hand. (Orwell 1990: 11)


Moreover: As a matter of fact in Ellesmere Road we don’t own our houses, even when we’ve finished paying for them. They’re not freehold, only leasehold. They’re priced at five-fifty, payable over a period of sixteen years, and they’re a class of house which, if you bought them for cash down, would cost round about three-eighty. (Orwell 1990: 11–12) Bowling goes on to describe the devious means by which the Cheerful Credit Building Society and its owner Herbert Crum make their money. Since the companies that build the houses, make the materials and provide the mortgages are owned by the same company, it turns a profit on labour and materials as well as interest on the loan. It is unlikely that any company would perform all of these functions: if we see in Herbert Crum a shadowy premonition of Big Brother and in the Cheerful Credit Building Society the seeds of Ingsoc then it is probably safe to say that Orwell was overstating the malign power of mortgage lending. ‘Merely because of the illusion that we own our houses and have what’s called “a stake in the country”’, George complains, ‘we poor saps in the Hesperides, and in all such places, are turned into Crum’s devoted slaves forever’ (Orwell 1990: 13). Orwell is right, though, to insist that owner-occupation – however strong its appeal in terms of a characteristically English notion of private property – is not a virtue in itself. The Suburbans may not be the slaves of Herbert Crum, but the opposite idea that when they bought their houses they bought their freedom is equally ill founded. As M. J. Daunton writes: The desire to own one’s home was a component of the ideology of the labour aristocracy, a symbol of status, independence and respectability, but there were also serious drawbacks, not only for the working class but also the middle class. The repayment of capital and interest generally exceeded the rent of a similar house; ownership did not necessarily provide the attraction of long-term capital gain which has been an important benefit in the inflationary period since 1945; nor was the reduction in tax liability an important consideration at a time of low levels of direct taxation. (Daunton 1990: 242) The fact that it is now commonly held – certainly in political circles – that owner-occupation is the ideal tenure for all is, then, due in part


to a resilient ideological investment in homeownership, and in part to the capital gains that owner-occupation has conferred on householders in the inflationary economic climate that has generally (until recently) prevailed since 1945. It is easy to see why, in the 1930s, Orwell saw owner-occupation for the lower orders as a swindle. Coming Up for Air questions the key ideological assumptions that fuelled suburban growth and in doing so engages directly with centrifugal critiques of industrialism like Wells’s. In the early parts of the novel, Bowling’s palpable hatred of the suburbs has a Romantic impetus. Like Wells and Howard, he initially seeks an antidote to the suburbs that is driven by precisely the kind of bucolic fantasy that had been integral to the cultural formation of suburbia in the first place. In Coming Up for Air , this nostalgia works on both a temporal and spatial level: George yearns for the small country town in which he spent his youth, Lower Binfield. The main action of the novel sees George taking an illicit trip to his ancestral home, only to find that it has, in effect, been swallowed up by the sprawl of modern civilisation. It is worth noting that the protagonists of both Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen-Eighty-Four also take trips into the countryside in search of escape, desperate bids that offer short-term relief but are eventually thwarted (Orwell 1989a: 136–68, Orwell 1989b: 123–33). The novel’s initial impetus is centrifugal, with Lower Binfield as the Vale of Grasmere, but the outcome of the pilgrimage is profound disillusionment, instead of the communion with nature achieved in The Prelude. One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I’m finished with this notion of trying to get back to the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere. (Orwell 1990: 230) This could be read as the voice of a defeated conscience in a civilisation that has burst its banks. The urban conglomerations of the nineteenth century had eventually proved incapable of containing the growth of the populace, and smothered the planet in their detritus. What is more, war – a recurring theme of the novel – is coming, and fascism will most likely follow it. All we can do is feel regret for the passing of the Golden Age, ‘that never-never land that people are thinking of when they say “before the war”’ (Orwell 1990: 35).


offers no easy answers. There is no sense in which Coming Up for Air offers the Suburbans are about to take their political fate into their own hands: in this limited sense, one can understand (if not endorse) Raymond Williams’s dismissal of Orwell as a pessimist (see Hitchens 1999: 3–22; Williams 1971; Williams 1987: 285–94). However, to suggest an analogy with Animal Farm, the fact that the sheep do not rise up against the pigs does not mean that Orwell has abandoned socialism. Disillusionment is the novel’s subject, not its governing principle. And the focus of its protagonist’s disillusionment is on the planning issues surrounding the housing question, a focus which – as I will show – takes the novel beyond a simple rejection of the ennui and the philistinism of suburban existence. Coming Up for Air is is not merely a jeremiad bemoaning the disintegration of civilisation because it actively engages with the political discourse around housing and urban planning. The principal problem with Lower Binfield, once George has got over the initial shock, is in effect part of the same malaise that has West Bletchley in its grip. ‘It was as though the countryside had been buried by a kind of volcanic eruption from the outer suburbs’, George laments (Orwell 1990: 211). The question is, is this malaise to be understood as the inevitable fate of modernity, or could it, with judicious, sensitive planning, find a political solution? As Masterman enquires, ‘[i]s this to be the type of all civilisations, when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress finds its grave in a universal suburb?’ (Masterman 1909: 69). On the face of it, Orwell’s answer is unequivocal: To begin with, I’d come to Lower Binfield with a question in my mind. What’s ahead of us? Is the game really up? Can we get back to the life we used to live, or is it gone for ever? Well, I’d had my answer. The old life’s finished, and to go about looking for it is just waste of time. There’s no way back to Lower Binfield, you can’t put Jonah back in the whale. (Orwell 1990: 237) There is a note of doom sounded here: the attempt to regain a youthful relation to the countryside has failed; the old way of inhabiting the land is gone forever. The very English utopia of a small-scale, pre-industrial community is an unattainable dream. But there is another sense in which Orwell seems to be suggesting that the attempt to return to the past was a foolish one anyway, a typical case of the petty-bourgeoisie attempting to ‘roll back the wheel of history’ (Marx & Engels 1985: 91).


While blocking the way to a Romantic communion with nature, Orwell suggests that there must be other, perhaps more mundane ways of addressing the blight of Binfield and Bletchley. After all, George is at pains to remind the reader that he is not merely responding to the new with a sentimental nostalgia for the old: You think, I dare say, that if it had given me a jolt to find Lower Binfield swollen into a kind of Dagenham, it was merely because I don’t like to see the earth getting fuller and country turning into town. But it isn’t that at all. I don’t mind towns growing, so long as they grow and don’t merely spread like gravy over a tablecloth. (Orwell 1990: 222) For Orwell, then, it is not the increase in population that is the problem in itself, but the way it has been managed. Farming responsibility for planning out to greedy corporations like the Cheerful Credit Building Society, and letting low density suburban gravy swamp the countryside, is the government’s fault. Orwell is receptive, in principle, to the town planning movement. But, as with socialism, this receptiveness is not without reservation, indeed, he suspects the Garden City movement of many of the same pathological tendencies: vegetarianism, sandal-wearing, and homosexuality. Orwell was unfortunately prejudiced in this regard. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell Orwell associates these aspects of socialism – or rather of socialists – with the Garden City: ‘If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!’ (2001d: 209–10). In Coming Up for Air , the Garden City movement comes in for further satirical treatment when George visits Upper Binfield – with the intention of going fishing in the pool at Binfield House – only to find that it has been turned into ‘the Woodland City’ by some utopian planner. An effete resident explains the development to George in the following terms: ‘[T]he Upper Binfield Estate is something rather special in the way of building estates, you know. Quite a little world of its own. All designed by young Edward Watkin, the architect. You’ve heard of him, of course. We live in the midst of Nature up here. No connection with the town down there–’ – he waved his hand in the direction of Lower Binfield – ‘the dark satanic mills – tee-hee!’ (Orwell 1990: 226–7)


The fact that Blake’s poem again resurfaces here is a demonstration of just how important its view of the relation between town and country is to the national psyche. But Orwell implies that this use of the poem is corrupt, putting it into the mouth of someone who also regularly says ‘tee-hee!’ Indeed, Orwell rather labours the point that the residents of this ‘Woodland City’ do not ‘live in the midst of nature’, any more than do the five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers of West Bletchley. When arriving in Upper Binfield, he describes it as ‘houses, houses, houses. One might as well have been in the outer suburbs. All the woods that used to grow beyond the pool, and grew so thick that they were like a kind of tropical jungle, had been shaved flat’ (Orwell 1990: 225). In identifying the Garden City as an outcrop of the suburb, and not as its antithesis, Orwell clearly positions himself against it, at the same time as opposing the market-led, Cheerful Credit style of planning. So where can Orwell be positioned in relation to the existing discourses? In Coming Up for Air , the market-led suburbanisation of London appears as a fungal growth threatening to choke the countryside, selling bogus dreams of a green and pleasant land to the lower middle class. Moreover, Moreover, in Orwell’s eyes the main face of the town planning movement – the Garden City ideal – lent this process legitimacy and encouraged sprawl. Orwell believed that the housing shortage had to be addressed on the national level, with a planned strategy of home building. Already, in The Road to Wigan Pier , Orwell had a strong idea of what kind of homes should be built. Slum clearance means diffusion of the population. When you rebuild on a large scale, what you do in effect is to scoop out the centre of the town and re-distribute it on the outskirts. This is all very well in a way; you have got the people out of fetid alleys into places where they have room to breathe; but from the point of view of the people themselves, what you have done is to pick them up and an d dump them down five miles from their work. The simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another. But the northern working people do not take kindly to flats; even where flats exist they are contemptuously named ‘tenements’. Almost everyone will tell you that he ‘wants a house of his own’, and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more ‘their own’ than a flat situated in mid-air. (Orwell 2001d: 102) This argument was certainly current at the time, with advocates of a high-density solution to the housing crisis coming from a variety of


camps. For one thing, architectural modernism – which influenced the housing developments considered in the second half of this book – had taken off, on the continent at least. Indeed, Orwell’s rhetoric has at times an element of Corbusian rapture, as in this extract from one of his wartime ‘As I Please’ articles: Rebuild London in big blocks of flats, and there could be light and air for everybody, and room for green spaces, allotments, playgrounds. People could live out of the noise of the traffic, children would not grow up in a world of bricks and dustbins, and historic buildings like St. Paul’s would be visible again instead of being swamped by seas of yellow brick. (Orwell 2001a: 282) But I would argue that Orwell’s advocacy of a high-density strategy for addressing the housing crisis does not constitute an adherence to the tenets of continental modernism, which would seem austere and overly intellectual from his perspective. Orwell advocated high-density developments not out of some highbrow paternalism or a utopian modernism, but out of a genuine sensitivity to the housing needs of poor. Although Orwell shares some concerns with Wells, the contrasts in analyses and proposed solutions are telling. Orwell’s essay of 1941, ‘Wells, Hitler, and the World State’, is the most substantial expression of his political differences with Wells, written at a time when England was in mortal danger, and Wells was refusing to recognise it. Orwell attributes to Wells Wells a kind of irascible common sense and a commitment to the idea that progress and rationalism will win out in the end that remains doggedly undaunted despite the advance of the fascist hordes. According to this logic, Hitler is ‘not worth taking seriously’ (Orwell 1994: 190): what sane man would back a regime like the Third Reich? Wells, Orwell argues, is ‘too sane to understand the modern world’ (1994: 193), and willing to disregard the facts in order to preserve his view of history as ‘a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man’ (1994: 191). While this critique was triggered by the weakness of Wells’s response to the war, it also indicates a more general point of difference between the two authors that feeds into their divergent analyses of suburban malaise. Wells saw the utopian future as a process of dispersing mankind evenly over the surface of the planet. But this dispersal was to be accompanied by the formation of a cosmopolitan World State. Orwell’s response is ‘[w]hat is the use of pointing out that a world state is


desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing’ (1994: 189). Orwell sees Wells as hopelessly utopian, juxtaposing an ideal state of affairs with the present and simply expecting society to have the good sense to adjust itself to the Wellsian prescription. As Terry Eagleton has argued, Orwell’s brand of socialism: insists on the continuities between the class-bound present and the socialist future rather than on some apocalyptic break between them. […] The socialist future is not just a nebulous utopian ideal, but is in some sense immanent in the present, and would not be valid if it was not. (Eagleton 2003) In this respect, Eagleton notes, Orwell is ‘ironically enough, not at all far from Marx’. While Wells puts all his faith in cosmopolitics, Orwell would seek to direct us back towards politics proper, which is unthinkable without the polis. So while Wells’s critique of suburbia is centrifugal, seeking to ‘restore the people to the land’ and put faith in some cosmopolitical solution to the social ills of capitalism, Orwell’s is defiantly centripetal. For him, socialism is ‘an urban creed’ (Orwell 2001d: 185), and so the suburban reaction to industrialism is a red herring. Flats were the solution to the housing crisis, not suburban semis with gardens. In recent years, some have sought to defend suburbia against its critics, with Carey’s account of Wells in The Intellectuals and the Masses being a representative example (1992: 118–51). According to this argument, criticisms of suburbia are inherently snobbish, the reaction of a privileged cultural elite to a supposedly philistine mass culture. Architectural critics have written approvingly of suburbia’s populism, and sung the praises of the unknown builders who bravely erected semi-detached dwellings despite censure from the snobbish architectural establishment and other intellectuals (see Oliver, Davis & Bentley 1981). Needless to say, the real target of these attacks is architectural modernism. Orwell’s take on the issue is proof that critiques of suburban expansion need not be mired in the elitism of utopian modernist architecture, or disregard the needs of ordinary people. The challenge is to find ways of building at high densities that are comfortable, convenient and homely, not to blandly insist that the suburban semi suits us well enough. It may well do, but to accommodate the world at suburban densities would be a social and environmental catastrophe.


Orwell recognised, moreover, that solving the housing question could not be done in isolation: it would require a profound, and even revolutionary restructuring of society as a whole. [A]ny large, concerted effort at rehousing, has powerful vested interests working against it. The building societies, and the brick and cement trades, are directly involved, and the whole principle of private ownership in land is threatened. How could you rebuild London, for instance, on a sane plan without disregarding property rights? (Orwell 2001a: 281) Anti-utopian, and yet boldly suggesting that even the dire housing conditions of the working class could be improved through politics, Orwell is a good antidote to Wells, and the centrifugal town planning I associated him with. His is an example that we would do well to remember as we turn to the Parisian banlieue . Here, instead of a slow migration of the middle classes into affluent suburbs with rural pretensions, another powerful, centralised re-planning of the Paris area dumped the poor in modernist grands ensembles. If Orwell warns against the dangers of leaving housing to the market, then the example of post-war Paris suggests some of the pitfalls involved in leaving it to the state.

3 The Parisian Banlieue

3.1 Banlieue and Bidonville: Outside the perimeter The relation of centre to periphery in Paris is utterly different – in some ways opposite – to that in London. Haussmann’s plan had been to connect the areas of central Paris to one another, but the limits of the city were absolute: beyond the Thiers fortifications lay an unformatted zone neglected by developers and out of the sight of the bourgeoisie. Etymologically, banlieue derives from ban, which refers to the zone of jurisdiction of the city (Grand Robert ). As such, it has the same root as banissement , although there is some dispute over how much can be made of this (Vincindeau 2005: 17, 37n). In modern parlance, nevertheless, the word sounds the note of banishment, and this negative connotation has a long history. In The Painting of Modern Life , T. J. Clark (1999: 25–30) writes eloquently about the nineteenth-century banlieue, an expanse of neglected scrubland and mud dotted with industrial installations and sparsely populated by wandering beggars and perhaps the occasional bohemian painter in search of dereliction. Clark discusses Van Gogh’s La Banlieue parisienne (1886), a painting of a partially developed area of scrubland where some vaguely depicted figures wander purposelessly. These figures and the striking image of a lamppost stranded in a landscape that is neither urban nor rural convey a deep sense of unease at the status of this border territory between town and country. There is no sense, as there was in London, of an aspiration to found a middle-class utopia here, by creating some utopian synthesis of town and country: ‘there is no town in van Gogh’s picture, and no country’ (Clark 1999: 30). No, the banlieue is imagined as a decrepit wasteland, neglected by both the traditional processes of agriculture and the urban promise of a new, capitalist prosperity. Clark points out 98

The Parisian Banlieue 99

that Haussmann was largely held responsible for the chaos at the fringes of the rigidly ordered centre that he had devised. Van Gogh would seem to be in agreement. In 1886, sixteen years after the culmination of Haussmann’s tenure, an isolated lamppost in a landscape of dereliction suggests that the project had failed, or at least left vast reaches of land languishing in disuse. At best, and this is not a prospect that van Gogh relishes, the factories visible on the horizon at the right of the picture will come to dominate the terrain, giving the banlieue the feel of an outof-town industrial estate. That the areas outside the city wall should become associated with the cheap, the poor, and the drearily proletarian is not surprising. Actually, the kind of middle class suburbia that developed in London, described in the last chapter, represents a more fundamental reversal: medieval London, like most cities in the middle ages, had its wealth and commerce based in the centre with poor settlements outside the walls. While in general American cities have tended to follow London in having inner-city slums (interspersed with rich districts) and affluent suburbs, Paris can be seen to have largely kept the structure of the medieval city, with its deprived masses huddled outside a ring wall. It was not until 1919, in the optimism of the immediate post war period, that it was decided that Paris was unlikely to be invaded again, and its fortifications were dismantled with a view to developing dilapidated land in the banlieue (Wakeman 2004: 119). Since then, the wall has been replaced by a ring road – the périphérique – which continues to delineate a sharp boundary between the Haussmannian city and the sprawling wasteland beyond. The périphérique – which by 1972 carried 170,000 vehicles a day – ‘had replaced the old fortifications with a kind of permeable wall of traffic that, for the Parisian inhabiting and working within the charmed “inner circle”, made the banlieues seem some formless magma, a desert of 10 million inhabitants and gray, undifferentiated constructions, a circular purgatory with Paris – paradise – in the middle’ (Ross 1996: 54). So this structure has been retained. From the very beginning of the process of industrialisation in the nineteenth century, practically all of Paris’s heavy industry – and also many of the labourers it required – was located outside the wall. The tendency for this boundary to accrue class connotations was emphasised by the Parisian system of taxation, whereby tax was levied on goods as they crossed the wall. The banlieues therefore became the locus of nineteenth-century duty-free shopping, and the urban poor flocked to markets beyond the perimeter to pick up cheap goods.


The growing trend for making one’s home outside the boundaries of the old city was therefore largely determined by the cheaper cost of living, both in terms of the inevitably cheaper ground rent, and the taxfree goods that were available. To move to the banlieue was not a class aspiration – as was the case with the more genteel of London’s suburbs – but a financial pressure that the city’s poor were barely able to resist. In general, the prosperous sectors of Parisian society chose to live in the central city, and although a few upper class enclaves were developed outside Paris, the large-scale settlement of the suburbs was primarily a working class affair. (Evenson 1979: 220) Increasingly large and ramshackle working-class neighbourhoods, often built by their residents with whatever discarded material was to hand, sprang up in the zones beyond the wall. By the 1920s, most of the Parisian working class had decamped to suburbs in the Département de la Seine, making this the largest working class settlement in France (Stovall 1989: 438). Some of these, the bidonvilles – so called because housing was often constructed from oil drums ( bidons) – were no better than shantytowns. The census for 1954 – a crucial year in the development of French housing policy – showed that 160,000 families in the Paris region alone were living in ‘unconventional’ dwellings (Power 1993: 43). In the mid 1960s, the official figure for the number of people living in bidonvilles was 75,000, but in reality it is likely that there were at least three times as many (Hargreaves 1995: 69). To be sure, there were slum areas within the city walls. But as the municipal authorities cleared them, in a continuation of Haussmannisation, they relocated elsewhere, generally beyond the perimeter. The horrific state of the bidonvilles began to attract the attention of the municipal authorities in the 1920s. As one senator put it: When one admires passionately the severe and grand lines of the architectural beauty of Paris, the spectacle of incoherence, anarchy, and ugliness presented by the greater part of the Parisian suburbs cannot but afflict us. Yes, the Parisian suburbs are the great stain of ugliness on the beautiful face of France. (Quoted Evenson 1979: 230) While this widely felt distaste for the suburbs often carried with it an implicit celebration of central Paris and metropolitan life in general,


there were those in France who sought a centrifugal solution to the housing crisis in the English manner. Foremost among these Garden City enthusisats was Henri Sellier, the socialist mayor of Suresnes who then went on to direct the HBM ( Habitations Habitations à Bon Marché , or affordable housing) office of the Département de la Seine, and subsequently held an important position in the Popular Front government (Evenson (Ev enson 1979: 222). Sellier was among the first to put pressure on the state to make housing provision for the poor, and eventually played an instrumental role in the planning of cités jardins in the banlieue . These were small-scale developments intended to cater for low and middleincome families. Influenced by the Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howard, the English New Towns, and also to an extent the London suburbs, the rhetoric surrounding the early cités jardins had a romantic Anglo-Saxon flavour. The Département de la Seine built sixteen cités jardins during the inter-war years. Drancy, Drancy, Plessis-Robinson, ChâtenayMalabry, and Suresnes were among the new developments (Evenson 1979: 222–3). The early cités jardins came complete with elegantly winding lanes and cottages on the Unwin model, indeed, Sellier visited Unwin in 1919 and ‘used Unwin’s text as a kind of bible’ (Hall & Ward 1998: 88). The rhetoric and the name – cité jardin – derive from English models, but these developments, and especially those that followed them, are better understood in terms of the French planning context. Large Habitation à Loyer Moderé ) began to be built in scale modernist HLMs ( Habitation the Parisian suburbs, which were the successors in the social housing sector to the HBMs that had been built near the periphery from 1914 (Jones 2004: 454). While architectural modernism had taken only faltering steps in Britain in the first half of the century, in France its most powerful advocate, Le Corbusier, was elaborating a utopian urbanism that is in a sense the statist opposite of Ebenezer Howard’s dream of decentralisation. In 1925, Le Corbusier produced the Plan Voisin Voisin, a utopian scheme to enable the installation of frighteningly vast skyscrapers connected by raised roads and surrounded by recreational parks. A utopia not all that different from the London that appears as a nightmare in The Sleeper Awakes . The paradox that is at the centre of Corbusier’s work is, as Peter Hall puts it, that ‘we must decongest the centres of our cities by increasing their density’ (Hall 1996: 207). The Plan Voisin never looked likely to be taken up by the authorities – it entailed the levelling of the entire Rive Droite – and indeed, it would be a mistake to read the history of social housing in France as a test run of Corbusier’s plans. The failings


of the banlieue are not Corbusier’s failings. But Corbusier’s thoroughly centripetal urbanism provides both a context for and a critique of the ensembles as the principal form of social emergence of peripheral grands ensembles housing in the post-war period. Perhaps the most important aspect of Corbusier’s work for this book is the emphasis he places on the social and political ambitions of modernist architecture. These buildings were not intended merely to beautify the city, but fundamentally to reshape society, stabilising volatile class relations, and protecting the family from the vortex of modernity. Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may attain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided. (Le Corbusier 1946b: 268–9) The displacement of ultimately political ends into the realm of architecture, with good design averting the threat of revolution, is fundamental to the Corbusian approach. And it finds an obvious application in the Parisian banlieue. For while in London, with its suburban mentality, a centrally decreed green belt protects suburban areas from becoming too far divorced from the rural, in Paris they speak only of the ceinture rouge, the red belt. The association of the areas outside the city wall with far-left politics goes back to the 1920s, and perhaps beyond (Stovall 1989: 437). Founded in 1920, the militant and electorally successful French Communist Party (PCF) found its core vote in the banlieue. Again, the contrast with the staunchly conservative ‘Suburbans’ in Masterman’s analysis of English society is palpable. Paris felt under siege from a ring of impromptu settlements that were quite beyond its jurisdiction, and indeed were frequently governed by the PCF. In 1936, 53 per cent of the general council of the Département de la l a Seine – then completely separate from Paris in administrative terms – was socialist or communist (Wakeman 2004: 120). In the years after the liberation, the PCF was extraordinarily powerful on a national level, forming part of the post-war coalition government until 1947 (Jones 2004: 494). The determination of the first banlieusards to destroy bourgeois society rarely seemed in doubt. It was under the influence of Corbusian modernism that architecture became the technology that the state used against the threat of revolution.


Given that it was also much cheaper for the authorities to build multiple-unit dwellings, it is unsurprising that Corbusier’s arguments also began to be used in the service of municipal parsimony. Evidently, the levelling of the Rive Droite as Corbusier had proposed was unconscionable. It was Henri Sellier who suggested that Corbusier’s theories could be adapted for the banlieue . ‘Why not take what is good in his idea,’ he argued, ‘and apply it to the vast terrain, still empty, in the suburbs?’ (Quoted Evenson 1979: 226). An improbable admixture of the utopian proposals of Ebenezer Howard and those of Le Corbusier was to be the basis of the French plan. 3.2 Les Petits enfants du siècle and the first

Grands Ensembles

The French housing crisis became more acute as a result of the war: 58,700 residential buildings – 250,000 dwellings – were destroyed, and the baby boom that followed it created a huge demand for housing in the following decades (Fourcaut 2004: 202). Furthermore, as the effects of mechanisation upon agriculture began rather belatedly to be felt, a wave of rural expropriation sent peasants flocking to the capital, in the exode rural (Vincendeau 2000: 312). In 1945, 35 per cent of the French population were employed in agriculture, and by 1980, the figure was only 9 per cent (Jones 2004: 504). As the popular saying went, ‘Tous les quatre minutes, un provincial débarquet à Paris pour trouver un emploi’ (Fourcaut: 2004: 202). (Every four minutes a peasant arrives in Paris looking for work.) Yet from the liberation until 1954, the year when post-war housing development really began in Paris, a mere 55,000 dwellings were built, despite a population increase of 620,000. In the period 1954–62, while the population increased by a further million, a further 550,000 dwellings were built in the Paris region. Over 85 per cent of these new residential developments were in the banlieue (Bastié 1964: 58). Much the same pattern – of HLM developments outside of the centre of towns – can be observed across France (Cornu 1977: 62). Why then was the state so slow to act, given the severity of the crise du logement ? After all, it had gained powers to provide cheap housing in 1914, when the HBM office was set up (Jones 2004: 454). Between the wars, HBM organisations had built ‘seven-storey sets of buildings, solid rather than spectacular in appearance’, in a ring close to the periphery (Jones 2004: 455). But in the immediate post-war period, after the trauma of the Vichy regime, the state was in a kind of paralysis. On the one hand, infighting between the politicians and bureaucrats


of the national government and the three separate Départements that made up the Paris region made it very difficult to get anything done. The decisive action made possible by the authoritarian structure of the Second Empire was not, for the moment, possible. Progress was held back by bureaucratic tangle. Claudius-Petit, the post-war Minister for Reconstruction, wanted to put a stop to urban growth by instituting a green belt and was thus a barrier to any new building (Jones 2004: 504). The communists were duty bound to resist anything proposed by a Gaullist minister, and vice-versa. The communists had a point when they argued that most Gaullist plans sought ‘to deport the working class from the capital and reserve Paris for the privileged’ in what they saw as ‘a continuation of the social exile launched by Haussmann’ (Wakeman 2004: 142). While the left were outraged at the present condition of workers’ housing, they were also critical of the kinds of solutions that the state was able to propose. As Colin Jones puts it: The scandal of [the] so called bidonvilles […] stimulated left-wing parties into calls for action. Yet the Left simultaneously tended to oppose major urban developments, which they feared (with real justification in the long term) could lead to the relocation of Parisian workers in poor housing in the banlieue. (Jones 2004: 504–5) This ambivalence – which has in a sense always plagued left-wing reactions to housing problems – led to a kind of inertia among those most desperate for change. On the other hand, there was a vague consensus among conservatives that the market could, should, and would meet the demand for dwellings. By a logic that is as old as capital itself, a rise in demand forces prices up and thereby stimulates a rise in supply as capitalists attempt to maximise profits. The equilibrium of supply and demand is re-established, and hopefully everyone is suitably housed. As Marcel Cornu points out, this logic is flawed. The salaries that the majority of workers receive in return for their labour do not enable them to acquire a new dwelling, whether for rent or purchase, at market value. (Cornu 1977: 65–6, my translation) Why would private capital invest in building housing whose residents would not be able to pay the market price? As events unfolded,


mounting pressure on the government forced decisive action. The sheer visibility of the homeless, the dilapidated slum settlements that were growing in the banlieue , and indeed the disease ridden îlots insalubres that perforated central Paris, elicited a wave of mass sympathy and anger to which the government responded. The figure of the clochard – the tramp – had been the focus of much sentimental attention in the first half of the century. In the Parisian setting, Renoir’s Boudou sauvé des eaux had given the cinema one of its most memorable clochards. When, in the cold winter of 1953–4, clochards began to turn up on the Parisian streets dead of cold and often frozen solid, it is not surprising that the explosion of popular outrage reached even the more affluent sectors of society. The newspapers began to castigate the government, and the image of one woman, found frozen to death on the Boulevard de Sebastapol clutching an eviction notice in her hand, proved particularly resonant (Fourcaut 2004: 203–4). Abbé Pierre became the figurehead of the campaign, and his ‘Communauté des Chiffoniers-bâtisseurs d’Emmaüs’ began to build – illegally, but with mass public support – shelters for the homeless, as well as agitating for governmental action (Fourcaut 2004: 203). In a speech made in 1954, Abbé Pierre made his position clear. When three quarters of a nation’s inhabitants are comfortably housed and they take not the slightest interest in the rest who have no roof over their heads, then that country is a country of savages, not a country of civilised people. It certainly cannot be called a Christian country.… [I]f we were able to unite in the face of this problem and show our elected representatives – the people in authority – what we really want, if we were able to get together and order them about, they would do whatever we want them to do if only to get themselves re-elected. They would obey us, and that is what democracy means. (Pierre 1956: 27) By this point, as the Abbé predicted, the political pressure on the government to intervene was irresistible. The barriers to construction were coming down. Claudius-Petit, an obstruction to any new building, left his post as Minister for Reconstruction in 1953 (Jones 2004: 506). The economy was also finally beginning to pick up and it has been argued that in 1954 the exchequer was for the first time since the liberation in a financial position to act, since French involvement in the war in Indo-China ended that year releasing funds for


public expenditure (Duquesne 1966: 30). In any case, on 22 January 1954, the Ministère de la Reconstruction et du Logement launched an emergency building programme. Under the name of cités d’urgence, mass housing developments of unprecedented cheapness were to be built in the Paris region, to be ready in time for the following winter (Fourcaut 2004: 204). It was now, during this first wave of post-war building in the residential sector, that the grand ensemble – ‘a project containing from 8000 to 10,000 dwelling units and a population of 30,000 to 40,000’ (Evenson 1979: 238) – entered the scene. Sarcelles, conceived by Jacques-Henri Labourdette and begun in 1954 (Fourcaut 2004: 199), is the largest, most iconic of the grands ensembles and in many ways it is typical. Sarcelles was a rural village before building commenced, with a population of about 8000 (Duquesne 1966: 15–17). In 1956 the first new apartments were made available to rent (Duquesne 1966: 96). By 1965, 155 residential blocks had been built in seven groups, comprising 8306 dwellings. The population had grown to 36,500 (Duquesne 1966: 23). And yet Sarcelles was not so much the application of a strong utopian vision, as a practical and financially viable response to mounting political pressure: Sarcelles was born of a conjunction of this new political situation and predefined local circumstances: the availability of land, at moderate prices, not too far from Paris. The initial plan was for 850 dwellings. So it was not a case of a ‘ grand ensemble’. (Duquesne 1966: 31, my translation) In the years following 1954, however, the grand ensemble became the policy not only for Sarcelles but across the Parisian banlieue, and indeed in France as a whole. Sarcelles became a popular bugbear in the media, and the focus for a kind of pop-psychology: It bred, in the view of the media (who got very excited about the issue), a new kind of social and psychological malaise dubbed ‘Sarcellitis’, characterised by juvenile delinquency, bored housewives, nervous breakdowns and a rocketing suicide rate. (Jones 2004: 517) While this reaction was sensationalist, and typical of the news media’s thirst for new trends and cod-sociological categories, it did represent a widespread concern in France about the possible


outcomes of the government’s housing strategy. By 1962, 137 grands ensembles of more than a thousand dwellings had been built in France, and 51 of those were in the Parisian banlieue, comprising 100,000 new flats (Fourcaut 2004: 207–8). It is in this climate that Rochefort’s Les Petits enfants du siècle and Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle were produced. Christiane Rochefort’s novel Les Petits enfants du siècle – translated as Josyane and the Welfare – was one of the first fictional works to take as its subject the radically new world that had been created by the advent of the grand ensemble . It is no exaggeration to say that this represents an entirely new urban form, and indeed Marcel Cornu argues that it is the advent of the grand ensemble that marks the transition from city (‘la Grande Ville’) to metropolis (‘Métropole’) (Cornu 1977: 60). Rochefort uses a child narrator – Josyane – coming of age in this new environment to examine its effects on a new generation. The fact that, by 1969, about one person in six in the Paris region lived in a grand ensemble – a completely unprecedented form of housing – suggests that Rochefort may have a point in making this the defining element of a generation. Josyane, who lives in a comparatively small development, describes Sarcelles as she arrives there for the first time in these terms: You get to Sarcelles by a bridge and then suddenly, from high ground, you see it - the lot. Oh la! And I’d thought I lived among blocks. Now these were blocks if you like! This was something like a Cité, a City of the Future! Kilometre after kilometre after kilometre of nothing but blocks of flats. Identical. In straight lines. White. More blocks. Flats, blocks of flats, blocks, blocks, blocks, blocks, blocks, blocks, blocks, blocks. Blocks, blocks. And sky; and immensity. Sun. Sun in every building, passing through, coming out to the other side. And green spaces, but enormous, superb, like carpets, and each one with a notice saying, Respect and Make Others Respect Your Lawns and Trees. They seemed to have more effect than the notices at our place, probably because the people, like the architecture, were more advanced. (Rochefort 1963: 108) I would like to draw out two strands from this passage which have resonances throughout the novel and deal with them in turn. Firstly, this passage shares with many of the descriptions of urban life that I have already examined the kind of vertigo in the face of urban life that


Simmel described. And secondly, as the Corbusian phrase ‘City of the Future!’ suggests, the novel seeks to deal with the legacy of architectural modernism. To pick up the first point, there is an element of this description that fits in with many of the critical responses to urban housing that I have already examined. The fear of standardisation, the awareness of living among strangers, these are timeless urban themes. The repetition of ‘blocks’, emphasises the monotony of these units of housing and Rochefort stresses that they are ‘[i]dentical. In straight lines’. The question is, is this simply a recapitulation of the accusation J. J. Honnegger made against Haussmann: ‘repression of every individual formation’? (Benjamin 1999: 122). Is this typologically different from the standardisation of the London suburbs which Orwell had described so critically? Marcel Cornu sees the problems posed by the grand ensemble as fundamentally different: indeed for him, the grand ensemble heralds a radically new phase of urban modernity. Cornu’s argument is that the grands ensembles of the Parisian banlieue are the first public manifestations of the Métropole, and that they effectively signal the end of anything that might be called ville. His description of this phenomenon is as evocative as Rochefort’s: In the mid fifties, strange new urban forms appeared. Apartment buildings became longer and longer or higher and higher, and were assembled in blocks that were not integrated into existing cities. These blocks outwardly differentiated themselves from the existing cities and sometimes almost systematically isolated themselves from them. They seemed to comprise a city apart. Above all, they did not resemble that which we are accustomed to call the city. And their architecture, too, was so disconcerting! We called them ‘grands ensembles ’. (Cornu 1977: 60, my translation) Cornu’s description of the grands ensembles evokes a wholly new terrain, and a wholly new kind of habitation fundamentally at odds with the urban life of the earlier period. Such wholesale changes – the scale of the projects, the repetitive architectural forms, and the separation from the city – must have a considerable effect on the quotidian existence of those who populate the banlieue . If Baudelaire had defined the alienation of the Haussmannian city, then the new metropolis had a different set of pathologies, and Sarcellitis was top of the list.


Les Petits enfants du siècle is rather interestingly poised in this respect.

On the one hand, Rochefort uses familiar devices that are common to many of the representations of urban life that I have already discussed in this book. The alienation of strangers on a bus or a train who do not acknowledge each other is a property that Rochefort’s banlieue shares with Simmel’s city: The bus stops just opposite the Cité and the people coming back from their work pile out of it, about the time I’m off to do the shopping; its always more or less the same faces that I see, bound to be; I recognize them. Everyone recognizes everyone, but don’t show it; you just say to yourself, Hallo, I’m late, or dead on time, according to which bus-load you see getting off. (Rochefort 1963: 31) While in a sense this is a stock metropolitan image, in some respects it differs from the models of urban life elaborated by Baudelaire and Simmel. In Baudelaire, however alienating the experience of the crowd may be, the stranger, the passante , holds an exotic intrigue. Ennui has cultish charm in his work. The chance encounter always holds the possibility of a profound engagement or a sexual liaison and his poems often turn around epiphanaic moments of connection. Simmel, too, is interested in the exotic ways in which people differentiate themselves from the crowd, through fashion or whatever other means. In Rochefort’s description, strangers are clockwork automatons: predictable, reliable and dull. The life of ‘ métro, boulot, dodo’ (métro-work-bed) – as it was labelled in a slogan of May 1968 (Jones 2004: 524) – amounted to a kind of conformism gone mad, a mass movement based on the drear tenets of office culture and the emptiness of unemployment. Rochefort’s banlieue does not have the powerfully charged interest of the Baudelarian city, but neither does it have the ideological prop, characteristic of the London suburbs, of a renewed connection with nature. We are not dealing with a utopian synthesis of town and country, or even a compromise between the two. The huge towers, the vast landscapes of concrete, are at once more urban than the city itself and completely lacking in the kinds of sociality that the old city and its myriad attractions engender. Paris has been surrounded by an unimaginably large ring of dormitories and indifference. Rochefort’s assessment of the psychological cost of such a housing strategy is summed up in Josyane’s strikingly dispassionate attitude.


They made me do a drawing. I drew a tree. ‘You like the country?’ I said I didn’t know, on the whole I thought not. ‘You prefer the town?’ To tell the truth I thought that no, I didn’t prefer the town either. (Rochefort 1963: 82–3) Josyane’s indifference is indicative of the status of the banlieue : stranded in the no man’s land between town and country, leaving its residents cut adrift from the civic life of the city and without any of the traditional compensations of rural idiocy. As in Coming Up for Air , the protagonist of Les Petits enfants du siècle makes a journey into the countryside, only in this case it takes the form of a parentally enforced holiday (Rochefort 1963: 43–67). And this vacuous vacation is every bit as depressing as George Bowling’s journey. Josyane’s parents conduct a series of dull conversations with other escaping banlieusards on the subject of cars and other consumer goods. Their hotel is rather less comfortable than their cramped quarters in the grand ensemble. In Orwell’s case, the countryside disappoints because Bowling’s romantic investment in the village life of his youth is punctured by the encroachment of suburbia. Josyane has no such investment, merely a muted curiosity: ‘I was all ready to become a nature lover. But no’ (Rochefort 1963: 51). In Rochefort’s novel it is a symptom of Sarcellitis – the fact that horizons have been limited by the crass consumerism of welfare culture – that prevents the banlieusards from achieving any productive engagement with either nature or each other. Indeed, a comparison bewteen Les Petits enfants du siècle with Coming Up for Air highlights the differences between the French banlieue and the English suburb. While the English suburb is defined by a mock-rural, vernacular architecture and an aspiration to aristocratic landownership, the banlieue , through its modernist styling, offers a bourgeois fantasy of urbanity. The rural associations of the semi-detached cottage with its privet hedge and its garden offered solace to the English suburbanite, who felt beset by the hurly burly of London life. In France, where the sophistication of urban bourgeois culture is idealised, the symbolism of the banlieue trades in allusions to the excitement of the metropolis and the suggestion in its futuristic architecture that this is the true locus of modernity. The banlieue purports to offer all the frisson of the city at a knock down price. While Orwell’s protagonist is utterly disillusioned about the supposed rural content of his suburban hutch, Josyane is to some extent enraptured by the banlieue .


That’s what I call architecture! And how beautiful! I’d never seen so much glass. I was dazzled by it as well as being giddy from turning first left, first right, first left, first right, first left. I’d been in the rue Paul-Valéry, I’d taken the rue Mallarmé, turned into Victor Hugo, coasted down Paul-Claudel and found myself back in Valéry, and I couldn’t get out of it. (Rochefort 1963: 109) Josyane’s initial impression of wonder gives way to confusion as she becomes lost in the labyrinth of identical buildings and streets. Orwell had satirised the London suburbs for their rural pretensions, with houses called ‘The Laurels, The Myrtles, The Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue’ (Orwell 1990: 9). Rather than borrowing the aristocratic robes of the country estate, the street names in the banlieue suggest a contrary aspiration to the elite, sophisticated and distinctly urban culture of the bourgeoisie. ‘Paul-Valèry’ and ‘Mallarmé’ are real streets in Sarcelles, and street names like these are common in the banlieue. There is something unnerving about these huge white blocks, like cruise ships that have dropped anchor in the environs of a great city, and plastered the names of its luminaries on their hulls in a vain attempt to ape its culture. The passengers need not travel to the city because, in the backs of their minds, they believe they are already there. Les Petits enfants du siècle also emphasises the importance of the welfare state in an understanding of the role of the post-war development of state housing. For Rochefort, that the working class cannot afford housing and that it simultaneously has entered into the market for domestic consumables is no paradox. Part of her critique of welfare culture is that, by bringing the family under the umbrella of the welfare state, it replaces natural relationships with financial ones. In the opening sentence of the novel, Josyane states that ‘My parents got me on the Family Allowance, one long, loafing morning to the tune of Je t’aime Tu m’aimes played sweet’ (Rochefort 1963: 5). Indeed, in the novel, welfare payments are seen to act as a material inducement to breed, as is made clear in the reaction of Josyane’s parents to her mother’s latest pregnancy: He and she were well pleased. We were seven already; might as well be eight, a nice round number. It meant they could keep up the instalments on the car. Not for anything in the world would they have been willing to give it up, especially as the Mauvins had just bought a newer model and already had a mixer and a hair-cord carpet.


‘And here’s my fridge on the way’, Paulette Mauvin said, patting her pregnancy in the Co-op, among the other old mums. No fridge for us; it would have meant triplets at least. The mother gave her rival, who had five weeks’ start of her, a nasty look. ‘And it’ll be a washing machine next!’ (Rochefort 1963: 72) As we saw with H. G. Wells in Chapter 2, Rochefort expresses a concern that the culture of the new urban scene that she describes causes problems to the family. But while Wells’s attitude to women’s liberation was ambivalent, Rochefort was a radical utopian feminist. Wells saw the family unit as the glue that holds society together, while for Rochefort it was one of its most oppressive aspects. Wells had fretted that the continued growth of the metropolis might erode the institution of the bourgeois family, while Rochefort worried that the newly built banlieue were destined to propagate it in ever more degraded forms. She is extremely critical of the institution of marriage, arguing elsewhere that ‘Marriage and love have nothing to do with each other’ (Rochefort 1961: 188). The economic realities of the welfare state as Rochefort describes it make childbirth an opportunity for increasing one’s income. Children therefore begin to stand in for domestic consumables, and the conceit of a proud pregnant woman lovingly patting her belly in expectation of a new fridge is a keen parody of the soullessness of the new consumer society. Les petits enfants du siècle is a feminist attempt to chart the impact of the grand ensemble on women, and its emphasis is on the strange emptiness of life there. The adult women in the novel chatter away in a banal and futile way, fencing with each other over petty jealousies and resentments. Their reproductive function has been reduced to a financial calculus. It would be possible to read the novel as a Malthusian attack on the reproductive excesses of the working class, but I doubt that this was what Rochefort had in mind. The core of Rochefort’s analysis is to be found not in her denunciation of the chattering mothers, but in the arc of Josyane’s development. Josyane is, from her teenage perspective, able to see the follies of her parents’ world. She is seduced by a much older man named Guido, and has a sexual awakening when he goes down on her. After this point, she attaches her romantic hopes of escape to Guido, who then disappears, leaving her to a series of empty sexual encounters with the young boys of the Cité . At the end of the novel, Josyane falls in love, falls pregnant, and falls into a life that is a carbon copy of her parents’: married, living on welfare in the banlieue . It is not


that Josyane has found happiness, but that her will has been broken. As Rochefort put it in an interview: She is crushed by society, or, should I say more specifically, by a certain way of life created by the form of the house, the way of feeding people, the way of living inside the house, the economic links with the world. There are no other links but commercial for these people. Josyane was a person, she was somebody, but she was trapped by love. (Hirsch, Green & Higgins 1979: 118–119) For Rochefort, the grand ensemble is an environment that is conducive to a degraded existence in which women get a particularly raw deal. One of the major symptoms of Sarcellitis is that it reinforces a moralistic bourgeois conception of married love that is ultimately as cold and functional as the concrete slabs themselves. Les Petits enfants du siècle makes no concrete proposals for a housing strategy to counter the propagation of the grand ensemble. But given the stridency of her critique of monogamy, it seems probable that Rochefort is imagining something as utopian as Fourier’s phalanstères, an argument supported by her later utopian fiction (see Rochefort 2004). Rochefort is at her best when she is writing critically about existing conditions, and her engagement with the pretensions of modernist architecture – the second point raised above – is a good example of this. Les Petits enfants du siècle mounts a powerful and cogent feminist critique of the kind of architectural modernism promoted by Le Corbusier. Corbusier, like some of his peers, was keen to reduce the burden on housewives through architectural innovation. In Modulor 2, he quotes from an article published in Le Point about his Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles – which in some respects represents a prototype for the kind of mass housing found in the grands ensembles. The article states that ‘The Unité at Marseilles made it possible to create 26 communal services so as to free the housewife from domestic drudgery and to further the bringing up of children’ (Le Corbusier 1958: 162). Corbusian modernism is thus in some ways amenable to the feminist project (see Samuel 2004). However, there can be no question that the radical restructuring of society that he proposed was to be done in such a way as to preserve the nuclear family as its basic unit. He writes: [T]he man of today […] finds himself, to his surprise, living in an old and hostile environment. This framework is his lodging; his


town, his street, his house or his flat rise up against him useless, hinder him from following the same path in his leisure that he pursues in his work, hinder him from following in his leisure the organic development of his existence, which is to create a family and to live, like every animal on earth and like men of all ages, an organized family life. In this way society is helping forward the destruction of the family, while she sees with terror that this will be her ruin. (Le Corbusier 1946b: 268) In a sense, Corbusier is pursuing similar ends to H. G. Wells, but where Wells saw the suburban home as the guarantor of the family, Corbusier believes that it can only survive in an ultra-modern home environment, complete with extensive communal facilities. Other modernists – such as Karel Teige – went further, advocating the communalisation of many functions of the family in the manner that would have worried Wells. Teige writes: Merely including common laundry and bath by no means makes for proletarian or socialist housing. Much more important is to liberate women from kitchen work and relieve them from the supervision of children by establishing common dining facilities and children’s homes. (Quoted Hanley 2007: 86) Although Rochefort may have found some sympathy with this, there is little doubt that Corbusier’s ‘organized family life’ – the more mainstream objective of modernism, and certainly the one the state adopted – is anathema to Rochefort. One aspect of the critique levelled in Les Petits enfants du siècle against Corbusian modernism originates in her radical rejection of the family. The argument is that while Corbusier had aimed to ameliorate the living conditions of women, he had done so with a view to maintaining them in their condition of subjection. For Rochefort, the nod to a modernist ideology in which efficiency brings equality and justice adds insult to injury. The shops were all grouped together in the centre of each rectangle of flats, so that each housewife had the same number of steps to take when going to buy her packet of macaroni; so they even had justice here. (Rochefort 1963: 109)


This nightmare vision of a women’s liberation which mistakes easily obtainable macaroni for freedom and condemns women to a life of ferrying consumer goods from supermarket to kitchen is a telling realisation of the conformity that is an implicit assumption of Corbusian modernism. Rochefort suggests that what the modernist architecture of the grand ensemble offers the housewife in the guise of convenience, equality and even justice is actually a coercive and prescriptive regime that denies her autonomy. Rochefort’s description of Sarcelles parodies the aspirations of modernist architecture and hints at its sinister side: A bit to one side were some lovely chalets glazed all round; you sat in there and everybody could see you sitting reading. Another one, with a sort of rustic furniture like the country, said on it House of Youth and Culture; you could see the Youth inside, boys and girls. You could see them laughing and playing, in broad daylight. Here, there obviously couldn’t be any wrong-doing; a kid playing truant would have been picked up at once, the only one of his agegroup outdoors at the wrong time of day; a thief would have been spotted from kilometres away, with his swag. If a chap was dirty, everybody would send him to wash himself. (Rochefort 1963: 109) All these things are in a sense implicit in Corbusier’s vision, and are abhorrent to Rochefort. The culture of surveillance that she describes, where normative restraints on behaviour are enforced by the feeling that one is being watched, does not allow for much freedom of expression. The emphasis on surveillance and attendant fears about the allpowerful state are familiar responses to urban planning, as discussed in Chapter 1. They have some of the same problems as the vulgarFoucauldian architectural-determinism that is a common response to Haussmannisation. There are nevertheless some useful aspects Rochefort’s approach. One does not have to desire the end of the family to agree with her that the grands ensembles are over-determined and prescriptive, particularly in terms of the gender roles they foster. The inequalities and injustices that women have suffered cannot be addressed with a purely architectural solution that ignores underlying social circumstances, and indeed is dedicated to preserving the status quo. It is just that Rochefort’s solution – while it is more radical – is, practically, no better. Engels was probably right to note that ‘[t]he legal inequality of the two


partners [man and wife] bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of the woman’ (Engels 1986: 104). By making the state of contemporary marriage the focus of her critique, Rochefort addresses a symptom of the economic subordination of woman, and not its cause. The novel is at its most perceptive in its engagement with centralised planning decisions about housing and land use. The banlieue – in this respect like the English suburb – constitutes a large and spatially separate zone given over to housing alone. This functional zoning of the city is in part a Corbusian heritage. His plans for the radiant city invariably involved a zoning of places of work, commercial districts, and residential areas, as in his plan for La Ville Radieuse (see Hall 1996: 208). This was a contrast to the mixed land use present in Haussmannian Paris which he saw as chaotic, inefficient and disorderly. To his credit, Corbusier never suggested shifting all the working class housing into suburban areas. On the contrary, his plans were always directed towards building an integrated city; the kind of high-density developments he envisaged enabled the specialised zones to be close together, and the city and its functioning was imagined as a coherent unity, however unlikely it was to turn out that way. Sarcelles and the other banlieues of this period shared with Corbusier’s vision the intention to create zones for working, sleeping and shopping, but in terms of giving these zones a strong connection to each other and a shared urban identity, they were a failure. One can see in Les Petits enfants du siècle the potentially damaging consequences of building large zones, spatially separated from the city, which are designed to act primarily as dormitories. Cornu had noticed that that the grands ensembles were not integrated into existing cities, and moreover that their structure and appearance seemed to be designed deliberately to isolate them from those cities. When these zones become inhabited primarily by working class and unemployed families relying on the state for welfare payments, and increasingly addicted to the accumulation of consumer durables, the problem becomes worse. While one can object to the monotony and philistinism of the life of the commuter, it is surely nothing compared to the fate of the unemployed who are stranded all day long in an environment designed only for sleeping in. For the characters of Les Petits enfants du siècle barely seem to recognise the existence of central Paris; their lives are spent stalking aimlessly among the high-rises of the banlieue. As much as Orwell might want to look down on the London suburbs, they can at least be said to be functioning commuter dormitories.


The banlieues, as Rochefort depicts them, have gone terribly wrong, dormitories haunted by unemployed and insomniac ghosts, cut adrift from the civic life of the city. 3.3

Delouvrier, de Gaulle and Godard

Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle is in a way the successor to Les Petits enfants du siècle. Rochefort herself went as far as to suggest that the film is a kind of unauthorised adaptation of her novel, and certainly views it as being in the same spirit: I once saw an adaptation of Les Petits enfants du siècle , which brought it up to date: Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle . It was not based on my book, but it posed more or less the same questions. (Rochefort 1970: 55, my translation) These questions partly turn on the way that a crisis in modern sexuality is linked to consumerism (Green, Higgins & Hirsch 1979: 440): Godard’s film tells the story of a housewife, Juliette Janson, who lives in a grand ensemble and has turned to prostitution to fund her desire for consumer durables. The final shot of 2 ou 3 choses succinctly encapsulates its attempt to mediate between private, domestic consumerism and public, state housing. The shot begins as a close up of a kitsch and stylised postcard of a happy couple, which is placed on a lawn along with a packet of Hollywood chewing gum, a popular French brand. The camera then zooms out to reveal that this postcard is located within a mini landscape of domestic consumables, stacked up to resemble a grand ensemble. This shot brings the subjective, personal realm of sex into relation with the conditions of the grand ensemble, and is also suggestive of the role which consumerism and even American culture play in this dynamic. Hollywood chewing gum, like Rue Paul-Valéry, suggests a particular aspiration: chewing it, one hopes that it might release some of Bogart’s surly charm or a hint of Grace Kelly’s beauty. This is a world governed by the rhetoric of advertising, and what is being sold is not just use values, but – through the film industry in particular – happiness and fulfilment. The desire to achieve the inane contentment of the couple depicted on the postcard – and Godard implies a mocking comparison with the bored relationship of Juliette and her husband Robert in the film – the sense that when one drives down Rue PaulValèry, one is a step closer to the intellectual sophistication of Parisian


café culture; the idea that the chewer of gum might, with patience, metamorphose into a glamorous film star, these are all subjective components of the banlieue. By making a microcosm of a grand ensemble out of boxes of consumer goods, Godard suggests that such housing is planned so as to manipulate these subjective factors. Through planning, the state elicits complicity by channelling the forces of consumerism, using the techniques of advertising to provide imaginary consolations to the poor and the bored. Anna Karina’s character says in Made in USA that ‘advertising is a form of fascism’, but – like many similar analogies – this is an oversimplification that is blind to the specific character of fascism. Statements like this – and one can find them everywhere in Godard’s work – are merely symptomatic of Godard’s naïve ultra-leftism, the least appealing aspect of his work. To restate this maxim in a slightly more palatable form, we might say that in Godard’s film, instead of the fascist paraphernalia of jackboots and swastikas, the democracies of the capitalist world elicit complicity through billboards, TV commercials and new and ever more effective types of soap. While Godard may wish to imply a moral equivalence between the two, this is not a necessary corollary of his basic position. For Godard, capitalist accumulation and state hegemony are established and protected though cinema, urban planning, and consumerism. There is an extent to which such arguments can be dismissed as paranoid, but the political climate in France during the 1960s did tend to lend them a semblance of validity. Things had changed since Rochefort’s novel. A general sense of dissatisfaction with the planning process was now a focussed resistance to the policy ideas of one man: Paul Delouvrier. The fact that he was sponsored by the authoritarian president Charles de Gaulle hardly endeared him to Godard. Delouvrier’s importance in 2 ou 3 choses is announced in the opening sequence of the film where Godard whispers the following text over images of construction in the banlieue : On August 19th an act was published concerning the governmental organisation of the Paris region. Two days later, Paul Delouvrier was appointed Prefect of the Paris region which, according to the official communiqué, now became a new and distinct administrative unit. Godard has written of the film that it is ‘not a story, but hopefully a document to a degree where I think Paul Delouvrier should have commissioned the film’ (Godard 1986: 239). In this respect, 2 or 3 choses


represents the first step Godard took towards making what he would refer to as his ‘research’ films (Sterritt 1998: 104). ‘ Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle is much more ambitious (than Made in USA), both on the documentary level, since it is about the replanning of the Parisian area, and on the level of pure research, since it is a film in which I am continually asking myself what I am doing. There is, of course, the pretext of life itself – and sometimes prostitution – in the new housing complexes. But the real purpose of the film is to observe a huge mutation’ (Godard 1986: 238). The political context for this mutation is important for any reading of Godard’s film. Charles de Gaulle had come to power in 1958 after the collapse of the fourth republic, and with a putsch in Algiers threatening to send the country into civil war. As a condition for his return to politics, he demanded extensive powers, believing himself to be the destiny of France, the powerful monarch it had lacked during the dark days of the occupation. The new constitution of the Fifth Republic, which de Gaulle helped to draft, was ‘highly presidentialist’ (Jones 2004: 502). De Gaulle’s political stance is well described by Herbert Lüthy as an ‘ideological indifference, which springs not from opportunism but from unqualified nationalism’ (Lüthy 1965: 565). He resisted fascism, communism, and the formation of a European union only insofar as they represented a threat to French sovereignty. He was the absolute master of charismatic authority, recognising that the leader must, in de Gaulle’s own words, ‘possess something indefinable, mysterious … remain impenetrable to his subordinates, and in this way keep them in suspense’ (quoted Lüthy 1965: 561). His policies, Lüthy wrote, ‘have only one common and consistent thread: to “maintain his status”, his and France’s, the two being synonymous, “as long as God lends him life”’ (1965: 568). The result was ‘an authoritarian Gaullist state which treated its citizens with a level of contempt that was unparalleled in any other Western democracy’ (MacCabe 2003: 201). On 17 October 1961, when Algerians organised a peaceful demonstration in Paris against a curfew on all Muslims (designed to prevent terrorist violence by Algerian nationalists) de Gaulle’s police reacted with sickening violence. Around 200 Algerians were beaten to death by the police, and their bodies were dumped in the Seine (Jones 2004: 502). The state tried to cover up for its actions and only officially acknowledged the massacre in 2001, but de Gaulle’s regime was hated by the left and by the swelling Maghrebi population. Like Napoleon III, de Gaulle saw the re-planning of Paris as an urgent political requirement, and he needed a strong-willed official


to do it: Delouvrier was to be his Haussmann. And like Haussmann, Delouvrier remodelled Paris on a huge scale. As Hall and Ward write, ‘just as the city of Paris to this day is essentially Haussmann’s creation, so the structure of the wider region is Delouvrier’s’ (Hall & Ward 1998: 96). Godard was alive to the importance of what Delouvrier was doing, and suspected him of sinister motives. This was in part a reflex reaction but it was not entirely ungrounded. It is possible to argue that Delouvrier consciously intended to enforce the lasting power of the right through his housing strategy. He records, many years later, that Haussmann’s plan had failed in that it had allowed Paris to fall into the hands of the left from 1870 to 1918 (Chenu & Delouvrier 1994: 232). He seemed determined that this time, the plan would ensure the hegemony of the right for years to come. Delouvrier had cut his teeth as an officer in the Algerian war, and was appointed Délegué Général for the District of the Paris Region in 1961. At this time, the region comprised three separate administrative units: Seine, Seine et Oise and Seine et Marne (Savitch 1988: 100). Having to deal with the entrenched forces of three local governmental authorities gave Delouvrier little room for manoeuvre (Savitch 1988: 100). His initial brief was to implement an existing scheme known as the P.A.D.O.G. (Plan d’Amenagement et d’Organisation Général de la Région Parisienne). The emphasis of this plan had been to redress the imbalance which had been identified in 1947 by Jean-François Gravier in the widely read and hugely influential Paris et le desert français (Gravier 1947). Gravier’s thesis was that France was suffering from the excessive concentration of its industry and commerce in the capital. The P.A.D.O.G., then, sought ‘to transfer people and industry out of Paris and its environs’ (Savitch 1988: 101). It was fundamentally distinct from the process of suburbanisation in London, which was market-led and offered a reconnection with the land as well as the putative self-determination and independence conferred by home-ownership. Delouvrier’s scheme was a bureaucratic programme imposed from above, and rental from HLM organisations was the normal tenancy. Delouvrier soon realised that even if the P.A.D.O.G. could be implemented, it was inadequate. What was needed was a new plan, on a huge scale. Over the next four years, Delouvrier was engaged in an extraordinarily ambitious project which, more than a plan, comprised a detailed quantitative sociological analysis of the Paris region. Running to six volumes, the Schéma Directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris is a comprehensive analysis of the geographic and demographic pressures acting on Paris in the 1960s.


The central argument made by Delouvrier and his aides was that the Parisian population must be expected to continue to grow, and while the proposals put forward in P.A.D.O.G. had been based on the assumption of a stable population, the Schéma Directeur – or Master Plan – must aim to accommodate population growth that could, it was calculated, bring the region’s population to 16 million by the year 2000 (Chenu & Delouvrier 1994: 234). P.A.D.O.G. limited the area available for building housing to 1200 km 2, not enough space for the 70,000 new dwellings it prescribed (Chenu & Delouvrier 1994: 239). In any case – given that Delouvrier had predicted a population increase of at least 5 million – this figure of 70,000 was laughable: the Schéma Directeur made provision for the building of 100,000 new dwellings a year (Chenu & Delouvrier 1994: 240). Now the question became one of where to put these new apartments and how to link them to central Paris. Sarcelles and the other grands ensembles of the inner banlieue provided one possible model. In reality, there was little land left in such easy striking distance of Paris, and given that – at that time – it comprised 5000 dwellings, one would have to build Sarcelles twenty times over every year to keep up with Delouvrier’s ambitious target. Any fool with a map of Paris could see that this would not be possible. Delouvrier had also studied the English new towns, built on Garden City principles, and rejected them after deciding that they were alienated from London because they had been built too far from the city. His solution was to build eight ‘villes nouvelles’ at around 25 to 30 km of central Paris, connected by an extensive rail network – the RER – and new roads. Three of the villes nouvelles were eventually scrapped, leaving Évry, Melun-Sénart, Cergy-Pontoise, Saint-Quentin and Marne-la-Valée, agglomerations with populations between 100,000 and 200,000 (Jones 2004: 508). Delouvrier made his intentions clear. ‘Rather than a reimplantation of the urban root in the remote countryside, French new towns would be extensions of the urban core, built only 30 kilometres away and connected to the city’s centre by a bundle of public transportation and autoroutes’ (Savitch 1988: 102). It is important to recognise, however, that for Delouvrier this was anything but an extension of the banlieues . Indeed, the villes nouvelles were explicitly conceived as ‘anti-banlieues’ (Chenu & Delouvrier 1994: 257). ‘We invented the new towns to stop the anarchic development of the banlieues and the increase in the formation of mutilated citizens’ (Chenu & Delouvrier 1994: 257, my translation). The argument that more distant satellites


should be built as an antidote to suburban growth had its origin in Howard, but as Hall and Ward write: very consistently, mainland Europe either failed to understand Howard’s argument, or wilfully misinterpreted it. From the earliest days of the movement down to the 1960s and 1970s, whether in France or Germany or Scandinavia, garden cities and satellite towns have meant new developments which are physical extensions of existing metropolitan agglomerations, with either minimal physical separation or none at all, and with associated investment in urban transit systems to increase accessibility and reduce transit times for commuters. (Hall & Ward 1998: 98–9) For these reasons, the villes nouvelles built by Delouvrier – who anathemised the banlieue – had many of the properties of the existing banlieue in exaggerated form. The way in which Godard photographs the HLMs in 2 ou 3 choses tends to reinforce this point by emphasising their inhuman scale, and questioning the possibility of any positive relations between inhabitants. The apartments are claustrophobic, and the exterior spaces are merely interstitial wastelands, without any of the interrelation with the rooms of the immeuble that is so crucial in Le Crime de monsieur Lange . When we are first introduced to Juliette, played by Marina Vlady, we see her in close up, isolated in the foreground against the background of a large, looming HLM. Here, Godard uses perspective to emphasise the difficulty of forming a relation between the individual and such a vast hive. This question of scale – the relation of the human body to the built environment – had been a central concern for Le Corbusier, especially in the planning of his mass housing units. His concept of ‘the Modulor’ – a system of scale that intended mathematically to calculate the dimensions appropriate for human dwelling – had been elaborated in the years running up to the Unité d’habitation. Corbusier illustrated at length the ways in which the proportions of the human form were to form the basis for a new system of measurement, which is used in the design of the building (Le Corbusier 1946a: 171). Everything about the Unité is intended to extend these basic analogies with the human body, so that the relation of the individual to the building was complex and personal. In a speech made on the occasion of the opening of Unité , Corbusier said of the building: ‘Made for men, it is made to the human scale’ (Le Corbusier 1946a: 194); despite its prodigious size – it was intended to house


1600 (Hughes 1991: 188) – inhabitants of the building would, through these geometrical relationships, perceive themselves as an integral part of the whole. Embedded into the concrete near the entrance to the Unité at Marseilles is the familiar Corbusian image of the dimensions of man, as if to reinforce this rational and mathematical relationship between inhabitant and hive, individual and society. But Godard sees Delouvrier’s developments as failing fundamentally to overcome the problem of scale. Godard uses depth of field to weigh Juliette against these huge edifices in order to show how the dimensions of the human body, and indeed of social life, are not catered for by these buildings. Juliette is an insect struggling futilely against the intractable forces of an inhumane economy. Godard had explored these themes before, particularly in the dystopian Alphaville (1965). In this futuristic romance the mise en scène is often drawn from the banlieue and the film shares with 2 ou 3 choses an interest in how urban form can be used by the state to control its citizens. Alphaville, a Paris of the future, has become completely separated from its surroundings as if to vindicate Gravier’s thesis in Paris et le desert français . Lemmy Caution, the film’s hero, is a spy from the outlands, who sets about uncovering Alphaville’s political and administrative structure. This structure is perhaps best described by an inebriated associate of Caution, who says that ‘[t]heir ideal here in Alphaville is technocracy, like that of termites or ants’. The whole city is ruled by a computer called Alpha 60, whose distorted voice punctuates the film with various barked announcements, and analyses of technocratic society. One such voiceover states that: The essence of the so called capitalist world, and the communist world, is not an evil volition to subject their people by the power of indoctrination, or the power of finance, but simply the natural ambition of any organization to plan all its actions. As in 2 ou 3 choses, these didactic sociological observations form a dialogue with the diegesis, exploring in the juxtaposition of the objective voice of authority and the experience of its protagonists, the relation between state and individual. The narrative implies that the state’s ambition to plan all its actions in advance can be achieved only by the annihilation of individual freedom. In some respects, Alphaville seeks to problematise the notion that social ills should be blamed on the corrupt individuals that make up the government. The sinister figure of Professor von Braun – whose


photograph appears on practically every wall in Alphaville – is the chief technocrat who relays the computer’s orders. This seems to be an allusion to the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who worked for the Nazis during the Second World War and then for the Americans during the Cold one (see Ward 2006). The allusion is appropriate: von Braun is often taken as a symbol of a man without opinions, judgement or conscience, only technical expertise, capable of simply slotting into any pre-existing bureaucratic structure. In Alphaville, he is the representative of a rationalist bureaucracy that he not only did not invent, but that he does not presume to understand. Like Eichmann, he is merely following orders, abdicating his conscience to the higher principle of bureaucracy (see Arendt 2006). His lord and master, the supercomputer Alpha 60, is depicted simply as a huge office block, as if this architectural manifestation of modern bureaucracy had risen up against its masters and itself taken control. The tension between von Braun and Alpha 60 as images of rule is at the heart of the film’s politics. In the classic Weberian account of bureaucracy, the post comes to be more important than the person in it, so that even those at the top of the administrative structure are ultimately replaceable. ‘[O]nce an office has been set up, a new incumbent will always be appointed if a vacancy occurs’ (Weber 1968: 974). By its nature, then, bureaucracy entails a depersonalisation of power, as the individual submits to the official logic. Obedience to this logic is instilled by a variety of mechanisms in Alphaville. We witness, for example, come people convicted of behaving illogically being executed – surreally – in a swimming pool. Particularly interesting in the present context is the way in which the HLM is itself used as a disciplinary mechanism in the film. While the camera sweeps up a tall housing block, the voiceover describes the function of the building: ‘If an individual showed hope of reclamation he was sent to an HLM – une Hôpital de la Longue Maladie – where mechanical and propagandistic treatments soon cured him’. The HLM is thus characterised as a kind of fascist psychiatric ward, like a cross between the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty Four (Orwell 1989b: 237–311) and Dr Benway’s ward in Naked Lunch (Burroughs 2001: 30–50). Any sign of dissent, anything defined by the computer as illogical behaviour, anything that might prevent the patient’s assimilation into a rationalist bureaucracy, is viewed as mental illness. Like the building that represents Alpha 60, the HLM is a monolith which is intended to subsume all forms of individuality. The HLM, therefore, recast as the ‘Hôpital de la Longue Maladie’ (Hospital for Chronic Illness), is an instrument used by the state to neutralise those who would stand in the


way of its technocratic ends. The rhetoric of illness and cure is familiar in urban planning. Haussmann used it and it was also common element in the discourse of architectural modernism. This allusion seems designed to interrogate the aspiration to social control that was implicit in Corbusian modernism: the phrase ‘Architecture or Revolution’, seen in the light of Alphaville, suggests that from the point of view of the state the function of modernist architecture is to suppress – or to cure – revolutionary tendencies. Delouvrier wanted to be sure that the banlieue never again became fertile ground for a resurgence of the left. The object of Godard’s political critique is a modern formula combining Hollywood cinema, consumer goods and clean modernist housing and geared towards creating passive and contented subjects. The danger here, for the Godard of 2 ou 3 choses, is that this passivity and contentment is of a kind that tends to debar the subject from the active, political life of the city. Arguments about the modern erosion of the pubic sphere – notably those made by Arendt (1958), Habermas (1989) and Sennett (1986) – are not without their problems, not least because they tend to idealise some earlier paragon of participative democracy, be it the agora of ancient Athens or the coffee houses of Enlightenment Europe. Godard’s film nevertheless thinks in these terms, casting Delouvrier’s transformation of Paris as an attack on the polis and on the public sphere. This is convincing because the Schéma Directeur was dedicated to transferring a large section of the population out of central Paris. Delouvrier’s stated aim was to build developments close enough to the centre to be incorporated into its daily life, and conceived as ‘extensions of the urban core’ (Savitch 1988: 102), but 2 ou 3 choses suggests that this was never likely. As I pointed out in Section 3.1, the class associations of the areas beyond the city wall marked them out as the dumping ground for undesirables, and Godard feared that Delouvrier was building a vast ghetto. Arendt notes: The word polis originally connoted something like a ‘ring-wall’, and it seems the Latin urbs also expressed the notion of a ‘circle’ and was derived from the same root as orbis. We find the same connotation in our word ‘town’, which originally, like the German Zaun, meant a surrounding fence. (Arendt 1958: 64n) The physical makeup of the polis and its legal apparatus are conceived as enclosing walls, ‘without which there might have been


an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty ), but not a city, a political community’ (Arendt 1958: 63–4). Whether or not a ‘political community’ – such as Arendt sees in the polis of antiquity, and Sennet and Habermas in the public sphere of the Enlightenment – ever existed in a pure form is a moot point. The extent to which these historical models can provide a way forward for modern politics and urban planning is also debatable. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the growth of the city into the metropolis has in some sense made public political expression more difficult, and for Godard’s film, Delouvrier’s scheme served only to exacerbate the problem. The isolation of the inhabitants of the villes nouvelles from the centre of Paris is thus both a physical separation and a metaphorical exclusion from civic life. The distance that Delouvrier put between the city and its working class is a surmountable barrier, but 2 ou 3 choses demonstrates that practically, it is prohibitive. In a café scene, a woman turns to the camera and says: ‘I live in the big block near the Autoroute du Sud. I come to Paris twice a month. You know: the big blue and white buildings’. This is a minor interlude, but it is important because it shows that, for Godard, Delouvrier’s intention to integrate the villes nouvelles, the banlieue and the Haussmannian city into a large but coherent region parisienne has failed, just as, for Rochefort, Sarcelles and the banlieue had failed to become parts of Paris. 2 ou 3 choses presents this radically new world as a tissue of reassuring banality which conceals from its inhabitants the social, political and economic relations that pertain on the national and the global level. In both 2 ou 3 choses and Alphaville, the word la conscience is an important symbol of what has been lost. This is an interesting word in itself from the English perspective, because it can mean both ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’. In the context of Godard’s films, this dual signification allows it to encompass both a bourgeois morality of liberal concern, and a Marxist notion of objective class-consciousness. La conscience, in both senses, is exactly what is missing from the world symbolised by the grand ensemble , the technocratic nightmare that (Godard believes) Delouvrier and de Gaulle imposed upon Paris. In Alphaville, where proscribed words are excised from the dictionary on a daily basis, ‘ conscience’ is a long-forgotten concept. Natasha – played by Karina – reads from a copy of Paul Eluard’s La Capitale de la douleur which Caution has given her, saying that there are some words underlined. Coming across the word conscience, Natasha is confused, saying ‘[t]hese are words I don’t understand … conscience…’. Caution is an emissary from an older, political world, which sees the moral consciousness of its citizens as vital to its


functioning, not as an obstruction to the technocratic ambition of the state ‘to plan all its actions’. The population of Alphaville have been reduced to the status of cogs in a bureaucratic machine of their own creation, automatons with no moral autonomy. Conscience has become a radical idea. In 2 ou 3 choses, the word occurs at a central point in the film, the scene where a long voiceover from Godard accompanies a shot of a cup of coffee. The voiceover speaks of a radical uncoupling of subjectivity from objectivity, with the subject isolated and unable to act. At the conclusion of this section, Godard states that ‘[i]f things come into focus again, this can only be through the rebirth of conscience’. As Godard speaks these words, the previously out-of-focus cup of coffee comes into focus, and a Beethoven string quartet begins to play. The fact that the spoken text’s ‘les choses redeviennent nettes’ coincides with the focussing of the camera stresses the role of the cinema in this awakening of conscience and consciousness. Moreover, ‘the “apparition de la conscience” is, in one sense, an aesthetic prescription, or at least begins from one: seeing things sharply or, more precisely, taking sharp pictures’ (Guzzetti 1981: 145). Godard sees cinema’s unique capacity to capture reality as being vital to the reawakening of la conscience. For Godard, the full extent of cinema’s aesthetic and political promise was not being fulfilled: it had the power to reveal hidden realities, but in the hands of the Hollywood studios it had become the opium of the masses. 2 ou 3 choses is an exploratory attempt to revitalise a Bazinian form of cinematic realism, in order to capture the visual impact of Delouvrier’s plan, whilst also placing it under sociological scrutiny. A striking 360˚ panning shot of Juliette in the courtyard of the grand ensemble towards the end of the film is indicative, another rare instance of the breaking of the 180˚ rule to go alongside that in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, discussed in Section 1.3. On the one hand, the shot seems to be communicating Juliet’s alienation, again using depth of field to suggest a problem of scale and marking her separation from the other inhabitants by placing two Arab children in a window far above her. But as in Renoir’s film – and to some extent contrary to the logic of the diegesis – the seamless pan works against this reading, refusing to fragment reality by montage, insisting on the unity of subject and environment. Juliette’s words in this scene support this interpretation: ‘I was the world and the world was me’. If the lens is invested with the power to reveal reality, the villes nouvelles and the banlieue are seen as a kind of palliative, isolating their inhabitants from any engagement with politics, providing instead a


host of consumer products and mass-cultural distractions. The role of the Vietnam War in the film is particularly telling in this respect. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that this is the political reality that for Godard is excluded by the new housing projects and the culture of consumerism with which they are allied. The awakening of moral consciousness that Godard argues for must in part relate to the housing crisis and social inequalities at home, but also to the violence and destruction that were being visited on the third world through the peripheral struggles of the Cold War. The exact relationship between Delouvrier’s re-planning of the Paris region and the Vietnam War is not easy to determine but Godard clearly believes it to be an important one. In a preface to a publication of the script of 2 ou 3 choses , he wrote: While the Americans pursue an immoral and unjust war in Vietnam, the French government, whose connections with big capital are common knowledge, sees to the construction in and around Paris of apartment complexes whose inhabitants, either through boredom or through an anguish which this architecture cultivates or through economic necessity, are led to prostitute themselves, notably (incidentally) to Americans returned from Vietnam. (Quoted Guzzetti 1981: 47) Despite the vast distances that separate them, for Godard, the Vietnam War and contemporary Paris are parts of the same political reality, and the banality of the grands ensembles are constantly being punctured with reminders of Vietnam. In the scene in which a war veteran hires Juliette and another prostitute, Juliette looks at a copy of Life magazine, which contains photographs of the war. She says, to camera, ‘[i]t’s strange that a person in Europe on the 17 August 1966 can be thinking of a person in Asia’. The moral distance between the humdrum world of the grand ensemble with its casual prostitution and the napalming of civilians in Vietnam is a vast and uncharted conceptual chasm. There is often a sense in 2 ou 3 choses that the characters are trapped behind the surfaces of the consumerist world, that the real is obscured by a shroud that is not easily swept aside. In search of the awakening of moral consciousness Godard and, to an extent, his characters, reach out into this abyss, and attempt to pierce the veil of convenience culture. One early scene, in Juliette and Robert’s apartment, sees Robert and his friend Roger pick up a (fictional) speech by Lyndon Johnson on a homemade transistor radio. They try and make sense of the speech, a kind


of parody of Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to justify war in the name of diplomacy, but their demeanour suggests that they are far from understanding the situation. It is rather as if they were sweeping outer space for signs of intelligent life and had latched onto a forgotten message from another world. The speech itself – which is, as Guzzetti points out (1981: 45–7), drawn from a satirical cartoon – adds to this otherworldliness by reporting events from 1967: the year after 2 or 3 choses was made. This detachment from current affairs, from the important moral and political issues of the time, at home and abroad, must be seen in the context of the kind of erosion of political space that Arendt describes. Godard’s film suggests that in the world that Delouvrier was helping to create, there can be no public: just individuals scanning for meaning in the inhuman landscape in which they are stranded. Godard’s criticisms of Delouvrier and the Gaullist state are powerful, but there are problems with his outlook. For one thing, Godard’s attempts to resist American political and cultural hegemony often take the form of a rather facile anti-Americanism. Correspondingly, he is rather too quick to endorse a militant strain of Maoism, almost revelling in the violence of guerrilla warfare, particularly in the films of the late ’60s and ’70s. Communism – on the Chinese model – is thus presented as a kind of panacea. When the bourgeois order has been swept away, the housing crisis will soon sort itself out. One has to ask on Delouvrier’s behalf the pragmatic question: his revolutionary aims notwithstanding, what does Godard propose should be done with the rapidly increasing population of France, and of Paris in particular, all of whom need housing provision? Sometimes, as with certain criticisms of Haussmann a century before, the resistance to an autocratic and excessively centralised state ends up looking like a misguided faith in the powers of the market to provide housing and amenities for the poor. Speaking in an interview in 1980 of his later decision to make films in the rural backwaters of his native Switzerland, instead of in Paris, Godard remarked that ‘I’m not against cities – I’m against so big a city’ (Sterrit 1998: 101). Any notion of the city as an enclosed political community has been surpassed, and we are presented with an unimaginably vast and sprawling collection of houses. But whether Godard is against them or not, it seems that for the foreseeable future we will have to learn to deal with cities on this kind of scale and try to find ways in which some kind of public sphere can be defended in this context. Godard’s unwillingness to deal with the realities of modern politics makes it very difficult to draw any positive lessons for planners from his


work. However, despite the pessimistic mood, Godard’s film is not without hope that the spark of political consciousness may be rekindled, as suggested by the last words of the film: Listening to the commercials on my transistor, and thanks to Esso, I drive off without a care on the road to dreams. I forget Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Budapest, I forget Vietnam, the housing crisis, the famine in India, I forget everything except that I’m back at zero and have to start from there. While in a sense this is a recapitulation of the central theme of the film – that the empty gratifications of consumer culture act as a barrier to political consciousness – there is a note of hope in the last sentence. A new beginning, a fresh examination of things from the viewpoint of radical doubt, and with the use of the unblinking eye of the cinematic lens, suggests a basis upon which to found the reawakening of conscience that Godard seeks. Godard’s blatant endorsement of anti-bourgeois violence – which becomes more pronounced in some of his subsequent films – cannot be defended. There are also serious problems with the Bazinian idea that the objectivity of the photographic image offers the hope of political redemption, an idea on which 2 ou 3 choses seems to hinge. Yet the film remains an interesting and original record of what it means to live in a city, shot at a time when the metropolis was assuming a radically new form. The transformation it depicts is in some senses the culmination of the process that Rochefort depicted in Les Petits enfants du siècle: the alienation of a city’s inhabitants from its political life in the name of providing housing for the poor. The long-term consequences of this are yet to fully play out, but we can gain a sense of their direction by turning to La Haine. 3.4

Enférmes Dehors: La Haine

Left to languish, to absorb immigration and to house the working class, the situation in the banlieue has deteriorated. Rioting has become a common occurrence. As Alec Hargreaves wrote in 1995, in the banlieue , youths of immigrant origin suffer exceptionally high unemployment rates. They have often been to the fore in street disorders provoked by what they see as aggressive policing. Little-reported incidents of this kind occurred in districts such as Nanterre and Vaulx-en-Velin


during the 1970s. Greater publicity was given to similar events on the Minguettes housing estate in Vénissieux in the early 1980s, and a veritable torrent of media coverage was unleashed during the early 1990s when serious disorders occurred in localities such as Vaulx-enVelin, Sartrouville and the Val-Fourré estate in Mantes-la-Jolie, fifty miles to the west of Paris. Most of these recent disturbances have been characterized by a very similar pattern: an unarmed youth of immigrant origin involved or suspected of involvement in petty crime (most commonly, the theft of a motor vehicle) has been shot dead by a police officer, and this has been followed by an outbreak of street violence by other youths. (Hargreaves 1995: 73) This alarming trend has continued and it is probable that we have not seen the last, or the worst, of these riots. In this section I will use Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine – a film which concerns the aftermath of just such a riot, and the terrible consequences of this cycle of hate – to suggest a link between the violence of the modern banlieue and the types of social exclusion that Rochefort and Godard identified early in the history of the grands ensembles. The fact of mass immigration – and particularly the expansion of the predominantly Maghrebi population of the Paris region – has loomed large in discussions of the social disintegration of the banlieue and the villes nouvelles . One of the most significant aspects of the later development the grands ensembles of the Parisian banlieue is the half truth that they became a ghetto – like the projects in many American cities – for immigrants and ethnic minorities. The comparison with the American ghettos is foregrounded in La Haine. For one thing, Kassovitz is concerned, as Godard was, about the ubiquity of American popular culture in France. Like Godard, his attitude to American culture is ambivalent. On the one hand, the film owes an obvious debt to American cinema: Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is directly alluded to in the scene where Vinz reenacts Travis Bickle’s memorable “you talkin’ to me?” scene in his bathroom mirror, and the hood films of Spike Lee and others – very much concerned with racial segregation and racially motivated violence – are also clearly a reference point (Konstantarakos, 1999: 164). The use of hip-hop music and fashion in the film would tend to reinforce this association with the all-black American ghettos. Popular fears that France might be overrun by a vapid consumerist culture can thus be focussed on the banlieue and, by association with the American projects, take on a racist overtone. Some recent descriptions of the banlieues have seen


them as a kind of ceinture noir , or black belt. This perception reflects a real trend in the changing racial makeup of HLM dwellers. ‘In 1975, only 15 per cent of households headed by a foreign national lived in HLMs. By 1982, the figure had climbed to 24 per cent, and in 1990 it stood at 28 per cent, compared with only 14 per cent of households headed by a French national’ (Hargreaves 1995: 70). However, to treat the social problems of the banlieue as a purely racial issue – or as a problem of immigration, or Muslim integration – is misleading. As Mirelle Rosello has argued: Banlieues now evokes one single type of urban landscape: dilapidated

areas of social housing populated by a fantasised majority of ‘foreigners’ and especially of ‘ Arabes’. Those demonized cités are the symbolic crossroads where anti-Arab feelings crystallise around issues of housing: images of drug-ridden basements and of vandalized letter-boxes are often ethnically encoded. (Rosello 1997: 240) This categorisation of the banlieue as a stronghold of antisocial Arabs is a damaging misapprehension. The figures simply do not support the view that the HLMs of the banlieue are predominantly inhabited by Arabs and blacks. The initial identification of the social malaise of the banlieue with that of the racially exclusive American ghettos cannot therefore be upheld: In the US, it is not uncommon for large neighbourhoods to be almost entirely mono-ethnic, i.e. inhabited almost exclusively by members of a single ethnicized group, particularly blacks. There are very few sizeable estates in France where French nationals are a minority. In most districts where minority ethnic groups are highly visible, they remain minorities, except for occasional micro-concentrations within particular blocks or buildings. (Hargreaves 1995: 74) The all-black ghettos in the cities of the United States are a wholly different phenomenon, and in terms of both the extent of their racial exclusivity and their sheer size, they are on a much larger scale. It is important to stress that the recent riots in the banlieue were not race riots. La Haine is intelligent in its refusal to reduce the analysis of what it calls a ‘society in freefall’ to the problem of race. The three main characters – young, male, unemployed banlieusards – are deliberately given


different racial identities, a ‘black- blanc-beur ’ threesome. In this way, as Carrie Tarr puts it, the film ‘insists on their common bonding within a hybrid oppositional youth culture, based on the language of the banlieue, music, drugs, petty crime, unemployment, hatred of the police, and social exclusion, in a world where white, black and beur youths are all victims of police violence’ (Tarr 1999: 174). One persistent theme in the film is Vinz’s desire to exact revenge (by shooting a policeman) for the shooting of Abdel Ichaha by police. Vinz is a white Jew, but he refers to Abdel – a beur – as ‘a brother’ and ‘one of our lot’, despite not knowing him personally. In La Haine, identification is along class lines rather than racial ones. Race plays a role, to be sure, but the main racism is that the urban bourgeoisie falsely characterise the problem as one of unruly Arabs and blacks crowding in on them from the banlieue . Vinz, Hubert and Saïd are Jewish, Catholic and Muslim respectively, which distances the film from any argument that would ground violence in the banlieue in a religious identification (Vincendeau 2005: 58). The film thus reinstates class as the primary motor of social unrest and suggests that post-war urban planning has left a racially and religiously diverse underclass disenfranchised. Compared with its American counterparts – such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – the film is less focussed on violent racial conflict (Vincendeau 2005: 31). The film suggests that ‘[i]f the mapping of the city is not racial, it is social: poor whites and second-generation immigrants are excluded from the capitalist circulation of money/work/consumption’ (Konstantarakos 1999: 166). The random, undirected violence with which the film is concerned, and which is unfortunately a reality of the banlieue, is a manifestation of class rage in a social grouping that has no access to the democratic institutions of the polis, and no political representation. As Hargreaves puts it: The peripheral location of most jointly aided districts, their poor facilities and physical separation from other parts of the city, combined with high unemployment levels and dense concentrations of mediocre or poor-quality housing, have turned these areas into a byword for social exclusion. (Hargreaves 1995: 73) The real distance from the city takes on the dimension of a distance from the democratic institutions of the republic. La Haine was shot at Chanteloup-les-Vignes, a grand ensemble forty minutes by train from Gare St. Lazare (Vincendeau 2000: 312).


Delouvrier gave the initial order that dwellings for about 20,000 people be provided at the site of the village of Chanteloup, and Emile Aillaud was the architect who built the existing grand ensemble, as seen in La Haine (Aillaud 1974: 116). It was intended to link up with neighbouring developments to become part of a larger ville nouvelle, which was to be called Mantes, but this was one of the three villes nouvelles to be abandoned. Local resistance to the scheme was such that building was halted when the grand ensemble was little more than half complete (Aillaud 1974: 115–116). The alienation that Kassovitz finds in the cité is an alienation stemming from redundancy. Chanteloup-les-Vignes was planned to house workers for a nearby car manufacturing plant, but is now ‘testimony to the devastation of unemployment’ (Vincendeau 2000: 313). Nobody we meet in the cité has a legitimate job – Hubert sells cannabis to support his mother and siblings – and the boredom and redundancy of unemployment are accentuated by the architecture. There is really nowhere to go, and the characters hang around aimlessly in car parks and run-down children’s playgrounds, smoking cannabis and filing the time with banter; that is when they are not being harassed by police or news crews. These interstitial spaces have neither the bustle and security of a busy street nor the atmosphere of a courtyard. As Ginette Vincendeau has argued, there is an ongoing struggle to find space for a more convivial form of social interaction like that associated with the cafés and courtyards of the Haussmannian city. Attempts at recreating social space take place on the margins, on the roof and in the cellars. The roof functions as the most convivial space, symbolically ‘elevating’ the youngsters who, though they are ultimately removed from it, have the upper hand over the authorities. (Vincendeau 2000: 314) Vincendeau is referring to the scene in which Vinz, Hubert and Saïd climb onto the roof of one of the buildings, where there is an impromptu gathering of youths. There is music, someone is serving hot dogs, and there is a feeling of a shared, common space. But it is not long before the police arrive and break up the party, ordering the youths off the roof: ‘this isn’t Eurodisney. You know you can’t be on the roof’. The police are reviled by the banlieusards because they enforce the spatial constraints of the grand ensemble. As Myrto Konstantarakos has put it, ‘the characters in La Haine are excluded from all the spaces, from any location, for they do not have a place in society because of their age


and social class’ (Konstantarakos 1999: 168). The failure of the interstitial courtyard areas to act in the manner of their urban, Haussmannian forebears is manifest throughout the film. Indeed, far from the cordial relations that Renoir imagined in the immeuble of Le Crime de monsieur Lange, the interactions between the apartment and the courtyard-like spaces below are a point of friction between residents. In an early scene, Saïd attempts to summon Vinz by shouting up to his apartment from the courtyard. The HLM is photographed with a view to emphasising its dissociation from the ground, and the ensuing dialogue between Saïd and Vinz’s surly sister is accordingly conducted at a high-decibel shout. A neighbour is roused by the noise, and a hostile barrage of insults is added to the already ill-natured exchange. Apart from making the communal areas of the grand ensemble the sites of conflict and hostility, La Haine also deliberately emphasises the barriers that Delouvrier erected between its protagonists and central Paris. An emphasis on the difficulties of transit between centre and periphery is a common feature of many banlieue films. ‘As movement between centre and margins is made so difficult in all the banlieue films, so the perceived distance between the two increases and appears as much greater than it is in reality’ (Konstantarakos 1999: 162). Kassovitz makes the difficulty of movement between intramural Paris and banlieue a narrative crux, a crucial link in the chain of events that leads to Vinz being shot in the head by a policeman, and Hubert ending the film in a Mexican stand-off with the culprit which is destined to leave at least one of them dead. The fact that the last trains back to the banlieue leave relatively early means that it is not possible for most HLM dwellers – those unable to afford a taxi – to participate in the night life of the city. In La Haine, when the protagonists miss their train – after being held and abused by the police, whose apparent intention, as well as ritual humiliation, is to inconvenience them by making them miss the train – it strands them in a city that treats them by turns with hostility and fear. As Saïd says, after a taxi driver refuses to pick them up, rightly assuming that the proffered credit card is stolen, ‘Motherfucker, we are locked in outside!’ (‘Nique sa mère, on est enfermés dehors!’) As Vincendeau notes (2005: 69), this could be taken as a motto for the film as a whole. This sense that the protagonists are enfermés dehors is present in the first part of the film, in the cité , for example in the scene when the police eject the young men from the roof, and the scene in which they are thrown out of the hospital. But in Paris, this is heightened still further. Not only are they prevented from getting home, there is barely anywhere they can go without being ejected by authority figures. They


are thrown out of a private view in a gallery, out of Astérix’s flat, out of a nightclub. Even walking the streets, they stand in danger of being harassed and they are arrested and beaten by police for possessing cannabis. On another level, the fact that they have no money prevents them from engaging in the normal activities of Parisian life. Saïd bemoans paying ‘fifteen francs for a chocolate shake’; the banlieusard is priced out of the centre by the higher cost of living. This hike in price when the banlieusard arrives in Paris is the modern equivalent of the old taxes levied on goods coming into the city and serves the same purpose of reinforcing the class division represented by the city wall. La Haine therefore bears witness to the fact that the banlieues sustain the old geography of class and, as we saw with Sarcelles in Les Petits enfants du siècle , this geography results in a peculiar inversion of the familiar rural symbolism of the English suburb. The imagery of Chanteloup-les-Vignes in La Haine seems contrived to convince banlieusards not that they have achieved the promised communion with ‘the bosom of our kindly mother earth’ (Howard 1985: 9), but that they really are in the city. Emile Aillaud stated in an interview in 1974: I had already revealed my intentions in a news weekly in December 1972, and declared that: ‘In Chanteloup, firstly, there will be no “green spaces”’. Because Le Corbusier – vegetarian, nature-lover and mountain-dweller – one day invented the prairie, we put prairies everywhere. But this contradicts the very notion of the town. No town in the world ever had lawns, except in parks. The idea that grass forms part of urban life is an artificial, modern invention. The town constitutes another universe, with a very violent poetry. In all those admirable Italian towns, like Mantua or Parma, there is not one blade of grass, sometimes not even a tree. A town is a mental place, a place of civilization in the sense that it is people, their conversations, their rapports, and their ways of life that make it up. Our obsession with fresh air is a pure heresy. (Aillaud 1974: 117, my translation) There is something almost terrifying in this vision of a city without a single blade of grass. That Aillaud considers Corbusier’s proposals to be excessively rural in outlook is a measure of what a defiantly urban vision he brought to Chanteloup-les-Vignes. La Haine provides evidence that trees have since been planted there, contrary to the architect’s intentions, but strips of asphalt where Corbusier would surely have opted for grass testify to a form of urbanism determined to assert the


urban by the systematic exclusion of all foliage. Aillaud’s insistence on the importance of a high population density is justified by the necessity that ‘Chanteloup sera un lieu totalement urbain’: Chanteloup will be a totally urban place (Aillaud 1974: 117). In straining to become more urban than Paris itself, Chanteloup-les-Vignes testifies to the centripetal impetus of the banlieue in general. The real exclusion from the city and its democratic institutions is accompanied by the imaginary sense that we are already there. The iconography is of a kind familiar to inhabitants of Sarcelles or readers of Les Petits enfants du siècle, again referencing the great minds of urban modernity. Huge murals of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Hugo, Nerval, Rimbaud and Valéry adorn the walls of the estate (Vincendeau 2005: 110). Indeed, Kassovitz’s choice of mise-en-scène for the denouement seems designed to juxtapose the meaningless violence of the banlieue with the more coherent world of the 19th century metropolis, as seen by the arch-poet of urban alienation, Baudelaire. Vinz is accidentally shot in the head by a policeman while a vast mural of Baudelaire – visible on the building behind – looks on. The juxtaposition of the figure of Baudelaire – here signifying the cultural richness of the metropolis – with a scene of violence that is shocking and meaningless, emphasises the fundamental difference between city and banlieue . The point is not that the grand ensemble is a slum, but that it has lost its connection with the city. Indeed, Kassovitz asserted in an interview with L’Express that his motivation for choosing Chanteloup-les-Vignes was that he did not want ‘a derelict cité of the kind they exhibit in the media, but a more ordinary one, in order to show that their explosive problems are not caused by architecture’ (Quoted Vincendeau 2005: 15). And architecture, defined simply as the design of buildings, cannot be to blame. After all, if these blocks were located in London’s docklands, they would probably be considered highly desirable. But the social policy that designated the banlieue and the villes nouvelles as modernist dormitories for the proletariat, immigrants and the unemployed, must be partly responsible; the situation cannot be explained merely by the violence and ineptitude of the police. Forcing the poor out of the city might have seemed like a good idea at the time, and the urgent need to provide housing for their growing number was a legitimate reason to look beyond the périphérique for land on which to house them. But one fears that the direst consequences of the planning decisions taken from the late 1950s on are yet to be felt. The left is in a weakened state and the widespread disaffection of the working class, coupled with mass unemployment, has arguably


prepared the ground for a resurgence of the far right. This is hinted at in La Haine through multiple references to the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen, although the protagonists are opposed to the fascists and actually beat up a skinhead – played by Kassovitz – in the course of the film. The fact that housing policy has tended to exclude the working classes and the unemployed from the political community of the polis – in Arendt’s terms – must be seen as a contributing factor in this rise. More worryingly still, it is not at all obvious what can be done to reverse it.

4 Council Housing in London

4.1 Council housing and the post-war consensus In many ways, this final case study tells a similar story to the previous one. In Britain as in France, the post-war housing crisis became so acute that the state was forced to intervene and eventually did so with system-built modernist apartment blocks. In both countries, the polar distinction between the state-housed underclass on the one hand and owner-occupiers or those in the private rental sector on the other has become perhaps the most socially divisive signifier of class in a time at which peace and prosperity – not to mention social democracy – might have been expected to overcome this execrable marginalisation of a whole sector of society. This much is true of both London and Paris. But the conditions under which this scenario unfolded in the two countries differ in fundamentals. After the years of post-war depression in France, during which a floundering government sought in vain to plug the gaping holes in the housing market, a strong, centralising and deeply paternalistic administration took the reins and built grands ensembles in the banlieue . In Britain, the emphasis was not on strong leadership and a reassertion of nationalism, but on a broad social-democratic consensus that saw the state’s role as being to provide for its citizens. The Labour government of 1945–51 was dedicated to eliminating the ‘Five Giants’ of poverty and inequality – in the terms of the Beveridge report of 1942 – Want, Ignorance, Disease, Idleness and Squalor (Timmins 1995: 23). State provision of social security, education, healthcare, full employment, and housing accordingly became the chief aim of government and the welfare state was born. Paris remained intact during the war after being declared an open city in 1940 (Pryce-Jones 1981: 3) and most of the 139


slums had already been pushed outside the walls. London by contrast had been devastated by German bombs, and still had slums in central areas. This meant that, while Paris centrifugally cast its poor out of the city into HLM housing in the banlieue , London’s lumpen class were gathered into inner city tenements concentrated on the sites of former slums and in areas where the Luftwaffe’s clearance programme had been most effectively prosecuted. The reasons for these differences in political outlook and social geography are complex and manifold. On a basic level, France was humiliated and divided by five years of Vichy rule, while in Britain there was a feeling that rich and poor had united to repel the common enemy (Timmins 1995: 31). Even Churchill had said, in 1940: ‘When this war is won, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which have hitherto been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many, and by the youth of the nation as a whole’ (Quoted Timmins 1995: 37). Labour’s unexpected landslide in the general election of 1945 must be seen in the context of this egalitarian turn in the rhetoric of British politics in wartime. Put very simply, the gloom and instability of post-war France was not shared by England. Britain managed to shuck off the remnants of her empire relatively peaceably – with India gaining independence in 1947 – while France was locked into expensive and bloody colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria (Hobsbawm 1995a: 218–22). In Britain, the resources of collaboration and heroism that had been discovered in the war on Nazism were now to be strategically deployed in what Beveridge called a ‘war on Want’. There was a feeling that the efforts of war had already ushered in a kind of socialism that must now make good on its promises. As Hobsbawm notes, across Western Europe, for the first time, ‘[s]ocial and economic reforms were introduced, not (as after the First World War) in response to mass pressure and the fear of revolution, but by governments committed to them on principle’ (1995a: 163). In Gaullist France the emphasis was on nationalist revival after the shameful capitulation of the Vichy years. But Clement Attlee’s government, as well as its housing policy, was infused with a spirit of optimism. The post-war government was on a social-democratic mission to ‘build equality into the fabric of the national landscape’ (Hanley 2007: 77). The man charged with this ambitious task was Aneurin Bevan, also architect of the National Health Service (NHS). Housing was a part of the Ministry of Health until 1951, when Attlee combined it instead with local government (Timmins 1995: 141). While in France large scale

Council Housing in London

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building of public housing was predominantly a post-1945 phenomenon, when the HLM system of financing and managing housing was instituted, in Britain, the council housing sector had emerged in earnest in 1919 with the Addison Act (Duclaud-Williams 1978: 154, Power 1993: 180). Bevan inherited a system of state housing that was already more advanced than any in America or Europe. In all, well over 1 million council houses were built on cottage estates between the wars, although the Tudor Walters standards – inspired by Raymond Unwin the garden city architect – with the generous Addison Act funding were soon dropped. Only 100,000 flats were put up by councils in the inter-war period, mainly in London. (Power 1993: 182) The Tudor Walters standards were devised – in consultation with Raymond Unwin – in the aftermath of the First World War, and represented generous minimum levels of space and comfort for new house building: homes fit for heroes. As Anne Power points out, these standards had been gradually eroded since their inception, in the name of building more homes for less money and in less time (Timmins 1995: 181). Bevan’s aim was to resurrect the high standards suggested by Tudor Walters for local authority housing. He had a ‘strong belief that the people who returned Labour to power in 1945 […] deserved the kind of house that he and his fellow ministers would themselves be happy to live in’ (Hanley 2007: 76). He specified a minimum of 900 square feet of floor space and the guarantee of a garden: this clearly meant brick-built cottages, and not cheaply constructed flats (Hanley 2007: 79). It is also important to recognise that Bevan wanted to create mixed communities, and in 1948 he removed the requirement that housing should be provided only for the working class from the pre-war legislation. He said: ‘I believe it is essential for the full life of a citizen […] to see the living tapestry of a mixed community’ (Timmins 1995: 145). His commitment to the mixed community – encouraging the mingling of people from differing income groups and social classes – and to the cottage-style dwelling, present obvious analogies with garden-city ideal, and indeed it was these kinds of development that were initially offered as the solution. Patrick Abercrombie’s County of London Plan of 1943 proposed eight new towns, and the 1946 New Towns Act was a clear attempt to implement this strategy. As Peter Hall writes, though, the Act had ‘the shell of Howard’s garden-city vision without the substance’, as centralising statist policies replaced Howard’s ultimately anarchist


idea of the self-governing community (Hall 1996: 133). The eight new towns that were designated in the London area by 1950 absorbed a mere 400,000 people, a fraction of the amount needed to house the vast increase in population (Hall 1996: 135). It was clear that the new dwellings designated by the New Towns Act could not hope to cope with demand, for the housing deficit had reached record levels. In Britain during the war, 200,000 houses were destroyed, 250,000 more rendered uninhabitable, and about 250,000 severely damaged. At the peak of their destructiveness, V1 and V2 rockets were damaging 20,000 houses a day in London alone (Timmins 1995: 140). Building had effectively stopped during the war. Demographic pressures were also taking their toll, with an increase in population from 46 million 50 million in the years 1931 to 1951 (Power 1993: 168). Apart from this, ‘[t]he chronic housing shortage was coupled with deep changes in family and work patterns’ (Power 1993: 186). Rising marriage and divorce rates meant that the number of households rose disproportionately to the rise in population, a trend which has continued in recent years (Burnett 1986: 279; Power 1993: 168; Timmins 1995: 141). The wartime coalition government was aware of the developing crisis and – to forestall criticism from a demanding public keen to point the finger – in March 1945 it took radical steps, producing a white paper that accepted the principle of ‘a separate dwelling for every family desiring to have one’ (Timmins 1995: 141). Between 3 and 4 million houses would need to be built in the 10 to 12 years after the war, it claimed. Labour, seeing its opportunity to capitalise on the situation, promised to build 5 million dwellings ‘in quick time’ if elected (Timmins 1995: 141). This proved to be hopelessly optimistic. Bevan’s admirable determination not to compromise on the high standards he set was partly to blame for Labour’s failure to build at the required rate. Alongside this, chronic shortages of both materials and labour in the wake of the war curbed building. And the cuts in government spending enforced as a consequence of the mini-slump, the ‘convertibility crisis’, of 1947 – caused by a condition of America’s $3.5 billion post-war reconstruction loan to Britain which made all global supplies of sterling convertible into dollars on a given date – also took their toll on housing construction, especially as Bevan did everything possible to save the NHS budget from being slashed (Timmins 1995: 147). In any case, in terms of sheer numbers, the Labour government was seen as a disappointment. When they lost the 1951 general election – with the Conservative strategy of promising to


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build 300,000 houses a year proving to be a vote-winner – they had completed 1 million houses of a very high standard in a six year period (Timmins 1995: 148). If it were not for the acuteness of the housing shortage, this might have been seen as a massive achievement, but in the event it precipitated the demise of the Attlee administration and ushered in Churchill’s return to Downing Street, with Harold Macmillan as housing minister. The 1951 Conservative election victory represents ‘an important turning point […] in the development of housing policy’ (Duclaud-Williams 1978: 154). For if Bevan had consistently defended the Tudor Walters standards at the expense of numbers, Macmillan was ruthless in achieving his targets. ‘Macmillan wanted to prove his commitment to the new social democratic consensus by doing even more to house the poor than his Labour predecessor. Unit for unit he succeeded, but at the expense of treating homes as boxes that could somehow be stacked up willy-nilly rather than planned carefully’ (Hanley 2007: 91). He oversaw ‘drastic reductions in the space standards and amenity of public housing’ (Dunleavy 1981: 35). 1951 therefore represents the watershed at which the ideals of the immediate post-war period, of mixed communities living in dwellings built to high standards, were abandoned in favour of an all-consuming obsession with building as many dwellings as possible in the shortest possible time. Bevan’s successors from Macmillan onwards – both Labour and Conservative – were guilty of ‘increasingly indulging in the numbers game at the expense of standards, diversity and social mix’ (Timmins 1995: 146). Now, the central problem for the historian assessing Attlee and Bevan’s conception of the welfare state is whether one regards it as doomed to failure from the beginning or whether on the contrary one holds it up as the great unfinished project of social democracy. The first position can be justified either by the Marxist argument that mere reforms cannot overcome the structural inequalities of capitalist society, or by a conservative argument that society is inherently hierarchical. The second position – a strong assertion of faith in the principles of statist social democracy – was argued by Michael Foot in his biography of Bevan, but became increasingly embattled in the 1980s as Margaret Thatcher dismantled certain areas of the welfare state in the name of neoliberal economics, and still more so in the 1990s when Labour itself arguably began to abandon it. This is a complex question and I find I cannot easily commit to either position. It seems at least possible that if Bevan had not been so beholden to land-hungry, horizontal planning ideas that had their origins in the Garden City movement, more


might have been done in a more sensitive way. What does seem clear is that the fate of social housing since the war, and its position within the larger picture of housing trends and tenure patterns, is of central importance in any attempt to assess the past failures and the future prospects of the welfare state. The erosion of the pure Bevanite ideal of the council house is etched into the landscape of Britain and of London in particular. The architecture of the estates that resulted from this, and the peculiar forms of social deprivation with which they became associated, will be considered below, in Sections 4.3 and 4.4. But the first text to consider in this context is a landmark in British television history that engaged directly with contemporary housing policy, Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home.

4.2

Cathy Come Home and the numbers game

Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home , a dramatised documentary made for television, is directly concerned with the housing crisis and is profoundly informed by the values of the welfare state. The film damns the welfare state in its own terms, and its clear intention is to spur the government into a more thoroughgoing implementation of Beveridge’s ideals. By the time of the economic crises of the 1970s, however, the egalitarian impetus which was the raison d’être of Attlee and Bevan’s welfare state was coming under increasing scrutiny, along with its economic foundation in Keynesianism (Desai 2002: 252–4). To be sure, the NHS was something to be proud of, but, as time went on, it was becoming increasingly clear that both social security and council housing were not only failing to meet demand, but were observably creating ghettos from which it was difficult to escape, cementing inequality into the cities in vast, prefabricated slabs, rather than taking a wrecking ball to the old divisions. Cathy Come Home castigates the government for failing to fulfil its post-war promises. First screened as the Wednesday Play on BBC1 on 16 November 1966, and watched by around 10 million people (Shubik 2001: 161), Cathy is often nostalgically remembered as the crowning achievement of a golden age of socially conscious television, when important and difficult subjects could be tackled in front of a large audience, and crusading writers and directors could make a real difference by speaking truth to power through a popular medium. Mingling fictional narrative with documentary footage and housing statistics, read by an authoritative but affable working class voice, the film drew on the tradition of dramatised documentaries popular in


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the 1950s (Leigh 2002: 40), but with its naturalism, its emphasis on location shooting, and its political trenchancy, it broke new ground on television. The film tells the story of Cathy’s move to London, her marriage to Reg, and the sequence of misfortunes that leads them to fall off the bottom rung of the housing ladder, through the safety net that Beveridge’s system of welfare was intended to provide. This rapid decline is triggered by Reg being injured at work, and facing a period of unemployment. They begin to amass offspring, and are bounced by a series of disasters and evictions from a light and spacious modernist apartment, to a cramped flat in an Islington tenement with Reg’s mother, to lodging in a slum with an old lady, to the dreaded caravan park of Orwell’s nightmares, to an abandoned squat with no roof, to a tent Reg fashions out of a tarpaulin, to municipal temporary accommodation for the homeless, and finally to the streets. The titles that close the film – flashed up over pictures of Cathy, homeless, separated from her husband, her children at the mercy of the care system, at the nadir of her dejection – make the point forcefully enough. ‘All the events in this film took place in Britain within the last eighteen months.’ Throughout the film, facts and statistics such as these are used to put Cathy’s individual story into the context of the wider social whole, and to demonstrate its veracity at the empirical level. So, when Cathy and Reg begin to search for a home in earnest, after they are forced to give up their first, comparatively luxurious flat, the search is contextualised by a voiceover: A few years back, figures released by the LCC revealed that families of certain sizes – at the rate of building in force – would be three hundred and fifty years on the housing list before they were offered a house. The present target of five hundred thousand is not high enough. Even if it is reached there’s still people living in slums ten years from now. What’s needed is a government that realise [sic.] that this is a crisis, and treats it as such. The interplay between such exegetical statements and the diegesis itself has some interesting effects. The presence of such confident sociological statements in a fictional film could be regarded as excessively didactic, but I would argue that the juxtaposition of the techniques of documentary with those of drama is subtler than that reading would allow. Like Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle , Cathy puts itself forward as an overt engagement with government housing policy, and it will be instructive to compare the ways in which the two films approach


the issue of housing. Godard wrote that 2 ou 3 choses was ‘not a story, but hopefully a document to a degree where I think Paul Delouvrier should have commissioned the film’ (Godard 1986: 239). And Jeremy Sandford, who scripted Cathy Come Home, wrote in the Morning Star on 3 December 1966: ‘We hoped it would appear as a document in the 1964 General Election, as an indictment of Toryism, but we were unable to find anyone to back it’ (Hayward 2004: 62). Both statements suggest a willingness to dabble in the nitty gritty of social policy and party politics. Beyond this engagement with the institutional mechanisms of housing policy and the welfare state, one could point to several other features that Cathy and 2 ou 3 choses have in common as political films. As suggested by the word ‘document’ – used by both Sandford and Godard in relation to their films – both films blur the boundaries between fiction and documentary in their effort to bear witness to a contemporary social malaise. The films also share certain stylistic tropes. For example, Godard and Loach employ non-diegetic voices in analogous ways. As well as the prominent position of Godard’s whispered monologues, and, in Cathy , the narrator that I have already mentioned who reads statistics, both use the device of having tenants speak – non-diegetically – about housing conditions, over incidental shots of their homes. Both films are also interested in the relation between the story of one protagonist and the wider social whole. As Jacob Leigh has put it, Loach and Sandford ‘attempt to locate their fictional characters in a context that allows us to perceive that what happens to Cathy and Reg is not an isolated occurrence but […] a particularisation of a systemic problem’ (Leigh 2002: 46). To an extent, Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses follows the Brechtian aesthetic of preventing the viewer from identifying with its protagonist, creating a ‘barrier to empathy’ (Brecht 1996: 121). In Cathy Come Home, which relies heavily on the viewer’s empathetic identification with Cathy, Loach is attempting something that is much closer to what Lukács admired in Balzac: the typical character who epitomises certain social forces. That this fundamental disparity can be understood in the terms of the Brecht-Lukács debate would square well with a reading that would place Godard in a modernist tradition and Loach in a realist one. Indeed, there are other aspects of the contrast that would support this assumption. The inexorable descent which marks the narrative structure of Cathy Come Home stands in contrast to the quotidian circularity of 2 ou 3 choses; like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway , Godard’s film uses the device of being set on a single day to explore the mundane aspects of


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modern urban alienation. While Cathy trades in extremes of poverty and pathos through its progression of worst case scenarios, these three modernist texts, by tracing their protagonists’ experiences through one ordinary day – from morning to night – avoid an easily moralised narrative arc, and bear witness to a broader range of experiences. Loach’s film, by contrast, is shot in such a way as to insist on the unity of his fictional world and the camera is therefore cast as an unobtrusive observer. When Loach was asked in an interview if non-naturalistic forms of drama offended him, he replied: I believe it’s possible to film something that’s quite real. … You can cut the thing together so it breaks the naturalism of the storyline and makes the audience critical of what it’s seeing, aware that they’re watching a piece of film come together. So in that sense it’s not natural, but from the point of view of what is in front of the camera, that should still be very real. I like disjointed cutting, and even using an inappropriate soundtrack on occasions, but I’ve never liked overacting or saturated performances. (Fuller 1998: 20–1) Godard’s realism, by contrast, is a modernist one defined in the terms of Bazin and of Brecht; he constantly disturbs the unity of the fictional world to remind us that we are watching actors in a film, and that the position of the camera, and therefore our position as viewers, is a deliberate and artificial construction. If there are significant contrasts to be made between the two films in terms of their formal approaches, then their different relationships to the audience provide an even stronger contrast. For Bazin – and for the young Godard, before he became disillusioned with Hollywood – the generic conventions of Hollywood cinema amounted to a new classicism, in MacCabe’s terms ‘using established genres and an accepted language to address an established audience’ (MacCabe 2003: 207). But by the time of 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle Godard’s relationship to the audience had changed drastically, a fact no doubt in part due to a transformation in his attitude to Hollywood, now seen as the dark heart of a malign cultural imperialism, and no longer as the epicentre of a new classicism. By 1968, Godard’s relationship to the audience was that of the quintessential modernist, ‘deconstructing established genres and grammars to address an ideal audience’ (MacCabe 2003: 207). Godard’s modernism is grounded in a profound distrust in the establishment mass media, television in particular.


This distrust can be explained in part by the very different position held by television in French and British culture. As David Bellos puts it, in France, ‘[t]elevision was politically suspect from the day it was established as a sub-branch of the Ministry of Information, and it has remained in the doghouse ever since’ (1993: 374). Under de Gaulle, French television was excessively controlled by the state and shamelessly manipulated to the political advantage of those in power (MacCabe 2003: 203). While in France, film proved to be resistant to state control and so retained cultural respect and flourished, the British film industry foundered. But the BBC was in its halcyon days (Bellos 1993: 373–5). MacCabe has argued that the ‘Golden Age’ of British Television in the ‘60s – and Cathy is emblematic of this age, the ‘play which stands for all the socially conscious drama of that time’ (MacCabe 1999: 96) – can partly be accounted for by the dominance and autonomy of the BBC (MacCabe 1999: 95–105). If anything, in Britain, television was – briefly at least – the answer to the problem of the audience, and one could argue that it created the conditions for a new classicism. For MacCabe, television of this period, shared with earlier classical forms – ‘fifthcentury Athens, the Elizabethan stage and Hollywood in its earlier silent heyday’ – the context for the meeting of an elite culture with a mass audience, allowing the development of ‘an extraordinary combination of both official and popular culture’ (1999: 100). A slot such as the Wednesday Play guaranteed an established audience who were comfortable with the language of television, and Loach was able to use this language to criticise the government’s housing policies with impunity. In doing so, Cathy places a primary importance on the preservation of the family. Indeed, Cathy’s downfall is measured in the film by a progressive erosion of her family, and the inadequacy of housing provision is directly to blame for this. The narrative of Cathy’s decline is periodically interrupted by montages of documentary images with the voices of tenants dubbed over the top. These words and images emphasise the ways in which cramped and otherwise unsuitable accommodation places strains on the family that it can barely withstand. For example, as Reg and Cathy move into Reg’s mother’s flat in an Islington tenement and the inevitable tensions that arise from overcrowded living begin to take their toll on Cathy’s relationship with her mother in law, Loach brings home to the viewer the reality of living in such close quarters. Loach capitalises effectively on the combination of documentary footage with the fictional events he depicts. Firstly, the tight space into which the family is confined is delineated. The two women prepare a meal in a cramped kitchen, made still more inconvenient by the fact


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that what is apparently the flat’s sole lavatory is in the same room. Loach makes Reg’s brother, emerge from the lavatory as Cathy is cooking, and the close camerawork emphasises the claustrophobia of the situation. These cramped conditions lead to rising tension in the family and eventually its disintegration. The mother-in-law complains that ‘it don’t work’ when the whole family have dinner together – due to constraints of space – and makes Cathy eat separately. She also resents having to clean up after Reg, blaming Cathy for teaching him ‘dirty habits’. ‘I do think it’s a bit hard the council won’t do nothing for you, I mean I’ve done my bit, I’ve brought up five children’, she says. The arguments between the two women, which often turn on issues of space, culminate in Cathy’s mother-in-law ordering her and her family out. To which Cathy responds: ‘You can keep your rotten old flat, I can’t stand it anyway, it’s driving me round the bloody bend’. These scenes highlighting the cramped conditions in which Cathy’s family live are intercut with sequences of documentary montage, a prominent stylistic trope in Cathy Come Home. These operate as a counterpoint to Cathy’s particular story and are an example of the kind of editing technique that ‘breaks the naturalism of the storyline and makes the audience critical of what it’s seeing’ (Fuller 1998: 21). These sequences encourage the audience to become critical of the institutions that place Cathy in this situation, rather than seeing her fate as selfinflicted or simply unlucky. We are asked to see the degeneration in relations between Cathy and her mother-in-law as an inevitable consequence of overcrowding, and not as the result of any undue obduracy in either party. Just as in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle we hear the voices of Algerian immigrants who are consigned to live in the banlieue voicing their opinions of their homes as we view images of these developments, here, tenement dwellers provide a commentary to the montage of images of tenement life. Disgruntled tenants air their grievances about the flats, their sentiments reinforcing the idea that the cramped lodgings are directly to blame for family breakdown. One woman says: I think this is the only tenement block in Islington where you can sit in your toilet, with your door open, and cook your breakfast at the same time. Others complain of the impossibility of maintaining a healthy marital sex life while living in such close quarters with children. The selection of statements which are placed together here are clearly designed to suggest that family life becomes difficult in such conditions, hinting at


the pressures being felt by Cathy’s own family, forced to cohabit with her mother-in-law. After leaving the Islington tenement, the disintegration of Cathy’s family continues. When Cathy and Reg are reduced to living in a caravan and local residents, keen to rid their area of gypsies, set fire to the caravan park, some of their children are killed. With two remaining children, Cathy and Reg move first to a run down shack, and then they go to temporary accommodation for the homeless. The policy of such hostels was to accommodate – and effectively to incarcerate – the mother and her children, but not her husband. Loach makes much of this enforced separation and its effect is that Reg starts to drift away from his increasingly disconsolate family; we see Cathy complaining that he does not visit frequently enough. The final sequence of the film sees Cathy, after being evicted from temporary accommodation and attempting to bed down for the night in Liverpool Street station, having her children taken away by social services. Cathy’s maternal distress is made all the more visceral by the fact that Carol White’s own children are used (Hayward 2004: 67). The use of this very public space also heightens the effect of the scene, suggesting the absolute absence of privacy and adding humiliation to Cathy’s woes. The image of her sitting alone at Liverpool Street station, as if waiting for a train but clearly with nowhere to go to, is mirrored in the final shot, over which we see the credits, which sees her standing at the side of the road, as if to hitch a lift. Knowing that she has nowhere to go, we are left to wonder if Cathy has been reduced to prostitution. At every stage of this descent, Loach makes it clear, through the use of a variety of techniques, that the state is to blame. The failure of the local authority to provide sufficient housing, the unrestrained Rachmanism of private landlords, the prohibitively high house prices, and the blatant cruelty of the rule which enforces the separation of husband from wife when the family is at its lowest ebb, all are laid at the door of the government. But beyond the insistence that the ‘present target of five hundred thousand [new homes per year] is not enough’, there is little in the film to indicate how its angry and well-informed audience should channel its activism. There is a suggestion, in the early part of the film, that the generously proportioned modernist apartment in which Cathy and Reg first set up home might be some kind of model dwelling. Cathy says: Funny, a place like that even smells different. Must be the central heating. Felt different too. In your bones. Oh what a place! Parquet


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flooring. Tin-openers fixed to the wall. Double glazing. And the neighbours! Talk about stylish. These words are complemented by images of Cathy and Reg enjoying the sunshine from their balcony. There is no sense, as we saw in H. G. Wells and Christiane Rochefort, that there is something intrinsically wrong with flats, or with architectural modernism. When properly built, with decent standards of space and light, Loach suggests that such developments can suit the modern couple very nicely. There is a parallel to be drawn with Orwell, whose advocacy of flats was shaped by a similar, common sense emphasis on the right of the working class family to decent accommodation, as I showed in Section 2.3. Nevertheless, this film offers no specific remedy to the problems it portrays – a fact that Loach later acknowledged. The reception of Cathy is key here, particularly in terms of the government’s attempts to absorb its criticisms and champion its insights into the housing crisis. Some local authorities abandoned the policy of separating husbands from wives in emergency accommodation and the housing minister Anthony Greenwood had a special screening arranged. Ironically, this strategy of congratulating the filmmakers on a job well done resulted in the film being deployed as a legitimation of the present administration, who simply professed to agree with the basic thesis of the film and claimed to be attacking the housing problem with renewed vigour. As Anthony Hayward reports, Loach was immediately sceptical about the motives of such figures: ‘We were very suspicious of all those who tried to climb on the bandwagon’, he said. ‘We saw Anthony Greenwood and he tried to pat us on the head, and we were not of a mind to be patted on the head; we wanted to draw blood, really. But there was nothing in the film that suggested what ought to have been done, so I think that was the end of our reformist period.’ (Hayward 2004: 69) That Loach sees the film’s recuperation by the authorities as a weakness of the film is instructive although his analysis is, in a sense, a confused one. If the problem with the film is that it fails to suggest measures to ameliorate the housing crisis, then it seems difficult to reconcile this with the idea that the film is ‘reformist’. One of the key events connected with the first screening of Cathy , which is often cited as evidence of its success, is the founding of the homelessness charity Shelter.


But, while acknowledging the good work that Shelter has often done, Loach is right to insist that charity is not the answer: What’s inadequate is the idea that homelessness is a problem that should be solved by a charity. It boils down to a structural problem within society: Who owns the land? Who owns the building industry? How does housing relate to employment? How do we decide what we produce where we produce it, under what conditions? And housing fits into that. You can’t abstract housing from the economic pattern. So it is a political issue; the film just didn’t examine it at that level. (Fuller 1998: 24) Perhaps by the time of this interview, Loach had taken on board criticisms – like those put forward by Engels – of reformist strategies for improving the condition of working class housing. His argument is certainly framed in the same terms, and his notion of Cathy representing the culmination of his ‘reformist period’ would seem to support this. For Loach, the issues around Cathy ’s reception had distinct implications for his future practice: [W]e said to ourselves that that if we were to do a film like that again, we’d somehow have to tackle the ownership of land, the building industry and the financing behind it. Otherwise you’re not really challenging anything. (Fuller 1998: 24) Loach’s assertion that Cathy is ‘a film about a social situation; it’s not a political film because it doesn’t deal with structure at all’ (Fuller 1998: 24) is a line that he sticks to assiduously, but it is questionable. As I have already shown, the film’s attempt to put Cathy’s story into the context of housing statistics and other aspects of the prevailing political climate is one of its most distinctive features: if it is not a political film, it certainly tries to be. Loach says that ‘it doesn’t deal with politics; it deals with personal tragedy’ (Fuller 1998: 24), yet the film is quite overt in its attempt to position Cathy’s personal tragedy as the result of certain institutional and governmental failures, as the ‘particularisation of a systemic problem’, in Leigh’s words (Leigh 2002: 46). As I have suggested, the film is in fact rather successful in this respect. Whether or not we accept Loach’s account of Cathy ’s political shortcomings, the fact that it could be so easily assimilated and championed


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by the authorities meant that, whatever Loach’s agenda, the film played into the hands of the numbers game that successive housing ministers had been playing since Macmillan’s incumbency. The ongoing competition between political parties as to who could build the most units in a year was driving down standards while creating deep and enduring social divisions. In an introduction to Down and Out in Britain, an Orwellian exploration of homelessness and poverty, Jeremy Sandford wrote, referring back to the issues raised in Cathy Come Home ‘[g]ood housing is the only real answer, but even a shack would be better than what happened to Cathy’ (Sandford 1971: 10). One can see how, despite Sandford’s best intentions, such arguments could be used in the service of an indiscriminate policy of fast, cheap and ill-conceived building. In the same text, Sandford alludes explicitly to the Beveridge report, challenging the state to fulfil its wartime promises. ‘That there should henceforth be freedom from want.’ With these brave words the Welfare State was founded. There are still too many areas where we have failed to achieve this. Ours is a society in which it is still all too easy to fail. A society in which the State, while appearing to offer a helping hand to those who get in a mess, instead often administers a sharp kick in the crutch. (Sandford 1971: 10) The perception was a valid one. Sandford’s arguments, however, are made in the faith that with a bit of tweaking the welfare state will eventually come good and produce the freedom from want that Beveridge had promised. The subsequent history of British council housing suggests that this is not the case, or not so simply so, and a question about whether the Beveridge report, the Attlee government, and the whole Keynesian apparatus was in some way flawed from the beginning refuses to go away. Cathy Come Home , for its part, has its heart in the right place, but it may have served only to legitimate the strategy that put numbers first, and precipitated the system-built council estates that now mark the frontier of the most significant class divide in British society.

4.3

Model homes: Nil By Mouth

The last section recounted how a socialistic critique of housing conditions came to be used as an ideological justification of a policy which was obsessed by producing dwellings quickly and – in stark contrast to the days of Bevan – unconcerned with standards and with the diver-


sity of social mix. The task now is to give an account of the effect of this policy on the fabric of London’s housing, and to explore, through readings of Nil By Mouth and Wonderland , the social divisions that go along with it. The period is characterised by the increasing prevalence of system-built high-rise and deck access blocks in local authority housing and increasing social and economic polarisation between owneroccupiers and council tenants. This polarisation is made more acute by the decline of private rental as a popular tenure; from 58 per cent of the national housing stock in 1947, it fell to a mere 11 per cent in 1983 (Burnett 1986: 283). The turn to flats instead of single-family houses can be seen as a pragmatic decision taken to increase the number of homes built per year. But it is important to note here that while houses had been preferred by Bevan, tenements and flats already had a history in London of providing dwellings for the poor at relatively low cost. ‘The long and intricate history of the house reflects its close relationship with English culture’, writes Alison Ravetz (1995: 41), ‘the much shorter history of the flat, on the other hand, reflects how far it was alien to the English scene, always second best to the house and allowable only in exceptional circumstances’. The tenement tradition can be traced back to Henry Roberts, Honorary Architect for the Society for the Improvement of the Conditions of the Labouring Classes [SICLC], set up by the Earl of Shaftsbury in 1844. In 1849, Roberts’s ‘Model homes for families’ building was completed, on Streatham Street in Bloomsbury where it still stands (Towers 2000: 13–14). Graham Towers explains the importance of this building in terms of the later development of multi-storey housing, and the particulars of its structure: Its form was to become an archetype for urban multi-storey housing and it set standards of accommodation extraordinarily high for the time. At five storeys, its height almost exactly matched nearby houses and this was probably considered an acceptable maximum height to walk up. The block was served by a single staircase and the flats were approached at each level by access galleries in the open air. Roberts considered this arrangement more healthy than internal common staircases. Each of the 46 flats was self-contained with its own scullery and a WC compartment with space for refuse storage. Roberts set down 140–150ft 2 as the required standard for living rooms and 100ft2 for the main bedroom. He also considered that separate bedrooms should be provided for children of opposite


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sexes. The architect paid particular attention to the standards of construction, believing that good housing should be sound and dry and have permanent ventilation to each room provided by chimneys or ducts. (Towers 2000: 13) The idea was simple enough; by piling dwellings atop each other instead of stringing them out along mazy suburban streets, one kept ground rent to a minimum and thus made savings, some of which could be put into increasing standards of space, light, and sanitation. Roberts hoped that such housing would be funded by ‘philanthropic capitalists willing to invest in social housing at a limited rate of interest’ (Towers 2000: 13). Many did so. In 1862, George Peabody founded a trust to house the London poor. ‘In stark contrast to the SICLC, the Peabody Trust opted for ‘associated dwellings’ – not self-contained flats but two- or three- room apartments with shared toilets and sculleries’ (Towers 2000: 13–14). As this economy measure suggests, standards were much lower than those in Roberts’s ‘Model homes for families’ building, and, while there are now some very appealing Peabody homes surviving from the Victorian period – which have been renovated, and well kept – their first inmates suffered poor conditions, as well as the inconvenience of shared facilities. In the 1890s, responsibility for the housing of the London poor started to shift from philanthropists to public bodies, various agencies of the state, which in London meant the borough councils and the LCC. Multi-storey dwellings were ‘an inevitable corollary of slum clearance, since it was taken for granted that only they could supply enough accommodation for the numbers of people displaced’ (Ravetz 1995: 42). The Boundary Road Estate, a 1069 dwelling development on the border of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, was begun in 1893, and is the earliest example of a council estate in Britain, providing impressive standards of space and light, when compared to the slums it replaced (Hanley 2007: 54–55). As London, Liverpool and Manchester built blocks of flats for the poor into the inter-war period – usually of the familiar ‘gallery access’ type, where rows of front doors open out onto a shared gallery on each level – there continued to be widespread doubts about whether such dwellings could ever serve as adequate homes for English families (Ravetz 1995: 46). Tenements retained the stigma of being more cramped and less ‘homely’ than houses. Yet they received support from some unlikely quarters; even the Garden City movement – traditionally opposed to high-density dwelling – began to see the inner-city


tenement as a unlikely ally in curbing the creeping progress of suburban sprawl (Ravetz 1995: 47). In 1937, an LCC report made the by now familiar case for blocks of flats as the preferred way of catering for displaced slum dwellers. ‘By building blocks of dwellings five storeys high’, it was argued, ‘it is generally possible, except in the case of exceptionally overcrowded districts, to provide on the same area as that from which the old buildings have been cleared new housing accommodation for approximately as many persons as those displaced by the clearance and at the same time to leave ample space about the buildings for light and air as well as for necessary courtyards’. (LCC 1937: 38). The blocks that resulted – five storey brick built walk-up tenements with balcony access, structured around courtyards – were built to a series of generic ‘type plans’, of which the four issued by the LCC in 1934 were typical. They attempted to increase space standards by standardising the sizes of bedrooms at between 100 and 120 square feet, and living rooms at 150 or 160 square feet (LCC 1937: 39). Further improvements were heralded by the New Type Plan of 1937, which promised ‘generous utilities and storage, fitted kitchens and private balconies’ (Towers 2000: 32–3). The buildings specified by this plan were designed to defend the domestic, private realm of the family, reproducing the conditions of the suburban home – what Wells called ‘the little brick cell containing kitchen and scullery, living rooms and bedrooms’ (2005b: 218) – at high density. The LCC’s aspiration to provide the working class with all the comforts of home in high-density flats was a noble one, shared by Orwell. However, this gradual increase in standards brought with it an inevitable increase in cost, which eventually devolved to the tenant. The LCC justified increased cost of the New Type Plan by arguing that ‘suitable tenants will be found for the new dwellings at rents which will reflect the value of the additional accommodation and amenities obtained’, and that many council tenants ‘are able and willing to pay higher rents than those appropriate for the type of dwelling at present being provided by the Council’ (LCC 1937: 48). The implication of finding ‘suitable tenants’ to pay the higher rents is that a new division is created within the working class. As more financially and socially stable families gravitated towards the more salubrious dwellings that were the product of such policies, the poorest and most socially disadvantaged groups become concentrated in the least desirable dwellings with the worst standards of light, space and air. As will become clear, this trend increasingly determines the social makeup of the London council estate in the latter part of the century.


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While the number of dwellings built by the LCC in the interwar period is by no means insignificant (LCC 1937: 262), it is small in comparison to the scale of post-war development, and when war broke out building ground to a virtual halt. In wartime, thoughts began to turn to reconstruction, and to the re-housing of the slum populations and those displaced by bombing. Patrick Abercrombie had long been sympathetic to the Garden City movement, but when he came to write – with J. H. Forshaw – the County of London Plan of 1943, he argued that flats, though undesirable in many respects, would necessarily form a significant proportion of the new homes built in central London after the war. Continuing in the vein of previous LCC publications, he reasoned that while houses with private gardens were preferable because they ‘fit the English temperament’, any attempt to re-house the masses in such dwellings in central London would mean that ‘only a quarter or a third of the present population could be re-housed there’ (Forshaw & Abercrombie 1943: 77). For this reason ‘a large number of flats must be included in the new layouts’ (Forshaw & Abercrombie 1943: 77). To increase the proportion of single-family houses, which would be a desirable outcome, it would be necessary to reduce the population density, largely by the decentralisation of the population which would be brought about by the eight new towns that Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1945 prescribed, between 20 and 35 miles from central London (Hall 1996: 171). In this respect the Abercrombie plan was a modification of the Garden City, albeit a ‘nationalized and bureaucratized’ version (Hall 1996: 134). In any case, the preference of Bevan and the Labour administration of 1945–51 for out-of-town, cottage developments in the Garden City style meant that the focus was on such developments, and few council flats were built in this period. Labour’s 1945 election manifesto had pledged to avoid building blocks of flats, which were seen as no better than ‘barracks’ (Hanley 2007: 84). Under the pressure of Macmillan’s promise to build 300,000 dwellings a year, flats came into favour again, and the Conservatives’ return to government also empowered private developers – much restrained under the Bevanite regime – to recommence building suburban homes for sale to the middle classes. Given the concomitant decline of private renting, a two tier system was developing, with increasing numbers becoming owner-occupiers and those who could not afford to buy renting local authority flats on estates which proliferated on the sites of former slums and heavily bombed areas (Hamnett 2003: 135). The style of these dwellings was in part a continuation of the kinds of dwellings the LCC had built in the pre war period. It is also true


that modernist architecture – particularly in the form of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture , which had its first English edition in 1946 – had a more pronounced influence than previously. Le Corbusier’s demands – that ‘WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE!’ (1929: 232) and that ‘the existing centres must come down ’ (1929: 128) – seemed apposite for a city that had been partly razed by German bombs, and the many bomb sites presented themselves as fertile soil for a radically new conception of urban dwelling: just the tabula rasa that the modernists had been calling for. Lynsey Hanley has pointed out that aside from the fact of its relative cheapness this decidedly continental, modish new style also appeared to offer the opportunity ‘to create a more European, less Pooterish future for Britain’ (Hanley 2007: 103). A chance, in other words, to forge a national identity that was not grounded in the parochial philistinism of the village green and the suburban villa. Duncan Sandys, who succeeded Macmillan in the Ministry of Housing, advocated high-rise and system built slab blocks, the horrid, penurious stepbrothers of Corbusier’s Unité D’Habitation. Sandys’s distinctive contribution to the statute books (and to the skyline) was the 1956 Housing Subsidy Act, which incentivised the building of high-rise blocks by offering additional funding to local authorities for every additional storey built above the sixth floor (Hanley 2007: 93, Timmins 1995: 184). Local authorities – especially in London – proved eager to cash in, and a major boom in high-rise developments resulted. This was to continue into the 70s through successive governments, and became a point of party-political consensus. At the peak of the high-rise boom in 1967, over 60 per cent of housing approvals in Greater London were for high-rise flats (Dunleavy 1981: 44). These were built both by local authorities, and by the Greater London Council (GLC) (Dunleavy 1981: 48–9), which replaced the LCC in 1965. 384 high-rises were built in London in the decade 1964–74 (Porter 2000: 353): about one every ten days. This figure does not include low-rise gallery-access and deck-access estates, which were also often system-built with a similar look and feel to their high-rise cousins. Over thirty years on, Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997) presents a grim picture of what has become of these cheaply erected eyesores. A ghastly tale of alcoholism, drug addiction and domestic violence in a severely dysfunctional family, the film was shot on the Ferrier estate in the borough of Greenwich, a knot of system-built high-rise and deck-access blocks completed by the GLC in 1970, and ‘an extreme example of the stark geometry produced by industrialized building methods’ (Cherry & Pevsner 1983: 278). Oldman’s film is unforgiving in its depiction of the prevailing conditions of council estate life,


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constantly reminding the audience of its setting via incidental shots of the estate. These montages of exterior shots are usually completely devoid of people, showing the estate as a desolate place of eerie quiet. The rows of identical windows, the ranks of identical dwellings, recall many of the depictions of mass housing that I have already examined, and again they stress the alienating effect of this uniformity. But Nil By Mouth focuses its attention on what is specific to the post-war housing estate, stressing its sinister soundlessness and its dislocation from the ordinary urban fabric. Alison Ravetz writes: More importantly than their lack of architectural quality, most highrise estates made little if any physical link with their surroundings but they stood in isolation, neither containing urban amenities within themselves (as was the case with Corbusier’s ‘Unités’) nor having around them anything more than council estates normally provided. On urban sites they mostly occupied tight plots where any surrounding space was appropriated by road access and car parking. […] Large deck-access estates became, in effect, labyrinths impenetrable to outsiders, the invariable telltale being a profusion of direction signs with arrows pointing to block names or flat numbers divided into ‘odds’ and ‘evens’; for as in Radburn layouts, the absence of streets made addresses impossible to find by any ordinary logic. (Ravetz 1995: 52) Ravetz explains the look and feel of the estate in terms of an ‘absence of streets’, and the visual style of Nil By Mouth tends to emphasise this absence, dwelling on the ill-defined spaces that replace them. The raised walkways, the long corridors bathed in a perpetual neon glare, and the sinister car parks of the estate figure prominently in the mise-enscène. Billy, a heroin addict, is the character most associated with these interstitial spaces. Having no fixed abode, and being compelled by his addiction to seek heroin and the money to buy it with, he is often photographed alone, trudging the maze of decks, corridors and walkways which link the flats in the estate. The idea of bringing the social relations of the street inside the building, away from traffic noise and the dangers of the busy road, was a key component of modernist architecture. In 1933, Le Corbusier had proclaimed the ‘Death of the Street’ (1967: 119), and argued in The Radiant City that: ‘[s]treets are an obsolete notion. There ought not to be such a thing as streets; we have to create something to replace


them’ (1967: 121). Modernist architecture strove to create alternatives, and the decks, walkways and corridors of the London council estate were very much conceived in this vein. Alison and Peter Smithson were prominent architects whose ‘new Brutalist’ manifesto did much to promote the use of ‘avowedly “hard” designs using dramatic building forms and a great deal of exposed concrete’ (Dunleavy 1981: 58) in public housing projects. They continued Corbusier’s critique of the street, arguing that the task of ‘[r]e-identifying man with his environment cannot be achieved by using historical forms of house-groupings: streets, squares, greens, etc., as the social reality they represent no longer exists’ (Smithson 1967: 22). They proposed instead ‘a multi-level city with residential streets-in-the-air’ (Smithson 1967: 26). As Ravetz writes, the decks themselves were intended to provide opportunities for socializing, thus restoring the friendly, busy atmosphere of the neighbourhood street, without its traffic noise and danger. In reality, decks involved a superfluity of hard-to-maintain stairs, passages, landings and illumination; far from being convivial they were cold, draughty and menacing places where the prudent did not linger. (Ravetz 1995: 55) This sense of menace is felt particularly strongly by the women in the film, who often have cause to fear for their safety because of the threat of violent, marauding men. Ray and his friend Mark, and the violent masculine world they represent, exert a kind of tyranny over the interstitial spaces of the estate, making women and families feel under threat. At one point, these men create an ugly scene in the courtyard, shouting loud threats and insults at Ray’s mother-in-law Janet. We see an anonymous mother cowering in the exposed, concrete courtyard and attempting to shield her child from potential danger. The idea that women are never quite safe in this network of balconies, car parks and ‘streets in the sky’ is reinforced when Ray’s wife Val – having left him – returns to their flat. She is accompanied by her mother, and her brother Billy has to go ahead and check that the coast is clear, while they wait shiftily outside. The danger that Ray will attack is ever present. Aside from the real dangers that they represent, visually, these corridors, decks and walkways would not look out of place in a prison or an asylum. This is a common feature of the London council estate: these were not streets in any ordinary sense: in particular they were not overlooked by windows, as streets of houses would be, and the


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rows of front doors along them could belong to dwellings on three different levels. This exemplified a special phenomenon of high-rise estates: unfamiliar kinds of space which were neither public nor private, and which lacked any defined function. At the same time, the important buffer space between the home and the public street, traditionally provided by the front garden, was absent. (Ravetz 1995: 56)

Nil By Mouth demonstrates how this unique terrain of the council estate fails (contrary to the intentions of Corbusier, the Smithsons and others) to recreate the social and practical amenities of the street. Criticisms of the Smithsons or Ernö Goldfinger – who, as architect of the GLC’s infamous and iconic Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower, had become strongly associated with the high-rise in the popular imagination – have often been disproportionate. Warburton comments of Goldfinger’s work that ‘[i]ts aesthetic appeal from outside is that of the sublime rather than the beautiful. There is nothing quaint or homely about the exterior’ (Warburton 2005: 156). This fact in itself probably did much to turn public opinion against high-rise living. And when, on 16 May 1968, a gas explosion in Ronan Point, a system-built high-rise near Canning Town, caused the death of five people, the reputation of the high-rise (and of the system-built council estate) was irreparably damaged. The memorable image of Ronan Point after the disaster, with its structural concrete panels blown out and the floors and ceilings of the apartments unhinged and dangling, did much to compound the widely-held belief that high-rise living was unpleasant and dangerous (Porter 2000: 353). What the estate represents to the popular imagination is in some ways just as important as its architecture. Following the Ronan Point disaster, stories detailing the physical and social deterioration of council estates, particularly of the high-rise variety, abounded. Trellick Tower suffered particularly acute problems and became known as ‘The Tower of Terror’ (Warburton 2005: 167). The belief that estates were awful places to live became a self-fulfilling prophesy as anyone who had any choice – which is to say money – began to avoid them, which meant that the socially disadvantaged became increasingly concentrated in them. It is too easy to point the finger at Goldfinger, the Smithsons, Le Corbusier, and anyone who has advocated high-rise apartment blocks and large deck-access estates as the solution to the housing crisis. Social problems over which even the best architects have no control have been laid at the doors of these modernists. What Warburton calls ‘the fallacy of architectural omnipotence’ (2005: 167) has led some critics to blame the archi-


tects, and Lynsey Hanley is guilty of this in her otherwise insightful book Estates: An Intimate History . She complains, for example, of ‘the noise of the endless traffic approaching the Blackwall Tunnel’ that afflicts Balfron Tower, and seems to hold Goldfinger responsible for it (Hanley 2007: 113). Similarly, the crime in these buildings is not in any simplistic way caused by their architecture. The point – which elsewhere Hanley seems to well understand – is that the estate becomes the frontier of a class divide. So the architects are not wholly to blame: a wide range of social and cultural factors contribute to the makeup of the council estate. Marking out the estate as a realm distinct from the ordinary urban fabric may have had its origins in a utopian desire to provide efficient, modern dwellings for all, but this clear demarcation has accrued class connotations. Nil By Mouth is a grisly depiction of a habitat that has taken on a damaging set of associations – with unemployment, drugs and crime – which tend to be self-perpetuating. As Hanley has argued, the distinctive style of the council estate becomes a convenient peg upon which to hang our fears of a malevolent underclass, a semiotic indicator that tells us where the city ends and the nightmare begins. The good intentions behind the new Brutalism could not prevent it from becoming a marker of municipal neglect and social decline. From the mid-1960s onwards you could tell council estates from a mile off, giving you the chance to avoid them, to duck out and treat them with the suspicion that their reputations seemed to warrant. (Hanley 2007: 65) So, while post-war housing developments in Paris had reinforced a centuries-old spatial separation of rich from poor, expelling the underclass from the city proper – immaculate and undamaged by war – and erecting monstrous grands ensembles in the banlieue , in London, a city perforated by bombing and still cursed with Victorian slums, the barrier that developed was signified by a visible contrast in architectural style. Council estates appear all over London, but the rigorously applied and universally legible semiotic regime that prevents them from forming an ordinary part of the cityscape also reinforces the sense that their inhabitants are members of an indigent underclass. The nature of this underclass of council tenants – and the ways in which it is distinct from the historical working class that is the traditional subject of British naturalist cinema – is a central theme of Nil By Mouth. In an essay comparing the portrayal of contemporary working class experience in Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff (1990) with Nil by Mouth, Kerry


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William Purcell (2001: 113–31) argues convincingly that Oldman’s film is much more successful in adapting its realism to the demands of its subject: the post-Thatcherite working class. Loach – while admirable in his attempt to give voice to the oppressed – essentially falls down by approaching the working class as if it had not changed since the 1960s – or indeed the 1920s – and adopting a cinematic idiom that replicates that of his early work. Purcell defines two areas in which the contemporary left have failed properly to deal with the problem of the working class. On the one hand, there is the ‘postmodern left’, who have made the error of treating ‘gender-race-class’ as a triad of issues that are fundamentally to be solved on the level of identity politics, and – perversely, in the case of class – through a celebration of difference (Purcell 2001: 115–17). After all, the aristocracy have been celebrating class difference for centuries! Here Purcell draws on Terry Eagleton’s polemic against political trends in postmodernist academia (Eagleton 1996: 56–60). On the other hand – and this is where Loach comes in – Purcell identifies a segment of the Left who retain ‘a narrow and inadequate definition of class, one that is primarily limited to static forms of status and employment’ (Purcell 2001: 115). For Purcell, it is the work of E. P.Thompson that provides a way out of this position, permitting a view of class that is dynamic and developmental, and not defined purely in terms of work, but in terms of the ways ‘the social, cultural and economic experiences of class interact and function in everyday life’ (Purcell 2001: 115). This is a well-framed criticism of Loach, who has tended to view the conflict between capital and labour as an unchanging, even an eternal one. From the industrial problems of the 1920s, depicted in Days of Hope, to the present, the Trotskyite analysis which pits an industrial working class – betrayed by politicians and trade unions and attempting to reorganise – against callous bosses is the recurrent theme of Loach’s oeuvre. On one level, Riff-Raff does attempt to deal with the lack of protection for casual workers that was a result of Thatcherite policy, yet its argument is for the resurgence of a militant trade unionism. Needless to say, such a resurgence would be an irrelevance to the characters in Nil By Mouth. Loach’s politics are those of the old left, and his working-class characters come from the old working class. The opening of Nil By Mouth in some ways positions it within the parameters of conventional representations of the working class, established by the naturalist films of the 1960s, as well as hinting that we are dealing with something rather different. As Glen Creeber has noticed (2000: 193–4), the scene is markedly similar to the opening of Loach’s Up the Junction (1965), which appeared the year before Cathy Come Home


in the Wednesday Play slot and also starred Carol White. In both scenes, we are shown a series of snatches of conversations in a working men’s club, complete with working class accents, and – in both cases – a lewd story that further marks the scene for class. Whether or not this constitutes a direct allusion to Up the Junction, it certainly serves the purpose of placing the film within the stylistic lexicon of British naturalism, associated with the representation of the traditional working class. However, Nil by Mouth in several ways marks its difference from this tradition, and suggests that the class it represents has undergone fundamental changes since the heyday of naturalism in the 1960s and 70s. For one thing, to compare the lewd stories that are told and the language of the characters, the world of Up the Junction comes across as an age of innocence, with decent working class people struggling against inhumane institutions. Terry recounts a story of a contractor being caught naked, having a bath in the flat he is supposed to be refurbishing, by the landlady. Tellingly, this scene actually occurs in Riff-Raff – with Larry the butt of the joke – again emphasising the continuity of working-class experience in Loach’s films. Even when we take into account the more prudish mores of 1960s culture, it is clear that this anecdote is meant to be amusing rather than shocking, and to elicit bonhomie from a middle-class audience. By contrast, in Nil by Mouth, Mark’s story of accidentally finding himself at an orgy is intended to shock in terms of both its content and the manner of its presentation. Mark mimes pelvic thrusting as he describes a woman ‘getting a severe portion right up the fucking Gary’. Obscene language like this – often directed venomously at women – runs throughout the film, clearly labelling the characters’ speech as that of the underclass. Unlike the rigidly conventional, mild-mannered inhabitants of Orwell’s Ellesmere Road, the residents of the Ferrier Estate make no effort to disguise their class origins by putting on the airs of polite society. Anecdotes like this – a recurrent theme of the film – are not presented as smutty but essentially good-natured fun, as parts of a nostalgically presented oral culture of the working-class, as are those in Riff-Raff and Up the Junction. They are gross, they often turn around unnecessary acts of violence, and their protagonists often end up in prison. They also suggest that this is a culture that has a profound problem in terms of gender relations; a fact that many of the film’s critics have commented upon, and which is confirmed when Ray beats his heavily pregnant wife senseless in a scene that is hard to watch. She loses her baby. Nil by Mouth is in some obvious respects a less political film than Riff Raff , or any Loach film. While in Riff-Raff , Larry provides a constant


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stream of contextualising information about the impact of privatisation, the government’s attack on organised labour, and the ills of Thatcherism generally, and in Cathy Come Home statistics about housing place Cathy’s struggle within the context of governmental neglect, in Nil by Mouth, no character betrays the slightest hint of class consciousness, and there is no authoritative voice to inform the viewer which particular government policy is to blame for the horrors on the screen. The film explores the problem of class as a social and a cultural relation – one not merely determined by employment – and it offers no easy solutions. Loach’s rather static definition of the working class is grounded in the struggles of an industrial past. He sees the working class as a group of people who wear hard hats to work, and there is no question that on this reckoning, the characters in Nil By Mouth are not working class at all, but – to apply what is perhaps an anachronistic category – lumpenproletariat. In Marx’s analysis, the lumpenproletariat, like the petty-bourgeoisie, is ultimately historically insignificant, a mercenary crew that threatens to distract from the historical confrontation of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Oldman’s film is at pains to emphasise the discrepancy that exists between the lumpen council estate dweller and the old working class. With the exception of Val’s mother Janet – who works in a factory – the film’s characters are unemployed and rely on crime (in the case of Ray and Mark, and Billy to an extent), begging (in Billy’s case), and presumably – although this is not shown – welfare payments, for their survival. Janet: Where you going tomorrow? Billy: Help a mate out at work. His [Ray’s] work. Val:

What work? He ain’t got no fucking work. If he’d wanted work he’d finish this room couldn’t he.

Janet: He’s taking the piss.

Far from wishing to get a job, Ray is openly contemptuous of work and finds other ways of funding his prodigious consumption of alcohol and cocaine. Here, Ray has roped Billy into a vaguely defined dodgy deal. Ray and Mark’s conversations frequently touch on various illicit transactions. Oldman’s script bears witness to the shift from a productive working class – with revolutionary potential, in Marx’s eyes – to what The Communist Manifesto would see as the ‘passively rotting mass’ of the council estate. After being attacked by Ray in a dispute over drugs,


Billy – his nose inadequately bandaged and leaking blood – approaches a man, who is supervising his son playing, to ask for a cigarette, and then money. Billy: Got a spare fag mate? [gets fag] Ah blinding, ta, cheers mate. Man: Been in a fight? Billy: No, No I’m a brickie. Fell off some scaffolding at work. It’s alright, it’s only a scratch. [motions to boy] Is that your boy? Man: Yeah. Billy: Yeah I’ve er, fucking I’ve just had me fucking bike nicked from over there. Needed it, like, to get up the hospital, you know what I mean? Couldn’t lend us a pound could you mate, so I can get the bus. … Erm… I’ll pay you back, I only live in the flats. Man: [motioning to boy and moving off] Gary, come on. Billy: [realises he is getting nowhere] Thanks for the fag, yeah. Man: [to boy] Come on.

Billy pretends that he is a bricklayer in order to reassure this evidently dubious man that he is an upright member of the working class and not a lowlife junkie, and so to lend his tall story more credence. There is almost a sense of pathos about the decline of the manual labourer here, and, as this stranger refuses to reply to Billy’s piteous tale and makes off with his child, Billy’s polite and apologetic tone, and the fact that he seems to understand and, to an extent, accept his position, elicit the sympathy of the audience. Unlike in Riff-Raff , there is no sense that the resurgence of trade unionism and the revival of working-class political consciousness offer a way out. Instead, as this brief scene draws to a close, Eric Clapton’s bluesy soundtrack fades in, and we see a montage of Billy begging in the street before injecting heroin while hiding in the car park of the estate. His addiction is the ultimate symbol of his social status, making him into a parasite by condemning him to constantly beg for money and excluding him from the society of the more respectable working class. His grandmother, Kath – old enough to remember life before the estate – refuses to let him stay with her, as she does not want drugs in the house.


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By focussing on subjects such as heroin addiction, domestic violence and alcoholism, Nil By Mouth attempts to examine the social and cultural forces that maintain this class in its subjection, rather than framing the argument in the traditional terms of a class war between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The lessons of Masterman, Orwell and E. P. Thompson have been learnt. Class is a matter of social, cultural and economic dynamics; to reduce it to a simple category defined by employment is not simply inadequate, it is obfuscatory. Part of the brilliance of Nil by Mouth is that it defines the coordinates of a contemporary semiology of class as relating in quite a fundamental way to the type of housing inhabited. Patterns of housing tenure, and the different types of geographical terrain in which these patterns are manifested, testify to a class system that is quite literally ‘built into the physical landscape of the country’ (Hanley 2007: 18). In other words, just as George Bowling and his family are better described by Masterman’s notion of ‘the Suburbans’ than by any class formation in Marxist analysis, the characters of Nil By Mouth should be defined as council estate dwellers rather than proletarians. Just as the suburban street can reassure its inhabitants of their middle-class status, regardless of their actual relation to capital, the council estate brands its inmates as brash and uncouth proles. As Hanley puts it, ‘[t]he shorthand for proletarian hell used by those who don’t live on them is “council estate”’ (2007: 44). This can be blamed in part on government policy. In 1965, Harold Wilson’s Labour government issued a white paper that ‘recognized owner-occupation as the “normal” tenure and, by implication, relegated public housing to the position of a residual, short-term expedient’ (Burnett 1986: 287), a complete reversal of earlier Labour policies which had envisaged that well over 60 per cent of the national housing stock would be council-owned (Timmins 1995: 184). In London this resulted in a ‘polarization […] between huge estates of poorer working class and immigrant council tenants and, on the other hand, affluent owneroccupiers. Islington, Kentish Town, Camden Town, Kilburn, Lewisham, Sydenham, Wandsworth and adjoining districts were becoming parcelled up between estate ghettos and expensive enclaves of owner-occupation’ (Porter 2000: 352). Nationally, the proportion of owner-occupied homes grew from 26 per cent in 1945 to 72 per cent in 2007 (Hanley 2007: 98). Owner-occupation became increasingly ‘widespread among betterpaid manual workers’ (Burnett 1986: 282), effectively granting them membership of the middle-class, and concentrating those worse paid or unemployed in the ghetto of council housing. Chris Hamnett finds this bifurcation of the housing market to be a key factor in the city’s class


stratification, describing ‘the increasing social residualisation of council housing and an increased social polarisation between council tenants and homeowners’ (Hamnett 2003: 129). Hamnett points to the alarming fact that the proportion of households letting from local authorities in Inner London who are ‘economically inactive’ – whether due to ‘longterm unemployment, retirement, ill health, disability or single parenthood’ – rose from 27 per cent in 1971 to 57 per cent in 1991, comparing very unfavourably with owner occupation (Hamnett 2003: 149). The ‘right-to-buy’ policy that was pursued by the Thatcher government of the 1980s developed in tandem with the notion of a ‘property-owning democracy’. Michael Heseltine – Secretary of State for the Environment in Thatcher’s first term – argued that homeownership ‘stimulates the attitudes of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrock of a free society’ (Quoted Daunton 1987: 70). The unfortunate corollary of the ideology of the property-owning democracy is that those who do not own their homes, and especially those living in council-owned properties, tend to be excluded from this new definition of citizenship. The Conservative government of the 1980s saw it as ‘axiomatic that the status of the council tenant was a sort of serfdom, and its aim was to end council housing as soon as possible’ (Ravetz 2001: 200). Huge discounts were offered, resulting in 1.3 million public-sector dwellings being sold off by the end of the 1980s (Ermisch & Halpin 2004: 258). The policy was sold as an opportunity for the less well-off to purchase a stake in the nation, and on the surface it seemed to promise a more variegated spread of tenures in areas that were previously exclusively council-owned. Right-to-buy has had some positive effects for better-off tenants, who have in many cases become homeowners (Ravetz 2001: 161). But the corollary of this is that the tenure has become a ghetto for those who are less easily recuperated into the lower middle class. This has also led to a stronger identification of the new underclass with the architecture of system-built council estates. Under right-tobuy, ‘most of the units sold were from better-quality public housing stock’ (Ermisch & Halpin 2004: 258). As a result, those who could not afford to buy even at a discount became increasingly concentrated in system-built estates (Hamnett 2003: 145). Boxy, concrete slabs like the Ferrier estate saw little right-to-buy uptake and as the national stock of council housing was depleted by the policy, poorer and more troublesome tenants become concentrated in such places, in turn making them still less desirable and contributing to a vicious cycle. Meanwhile, more attractive suburban-style estates now began to match the tenure


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patterns associated with the suburbs as their residents embraced rightto-buy, and accepted the mantle of middle-class respectability that came with home-ownership. Overall, the policy served to reinforce the increasing division of the city into a large majority of culturally middleclass, owner-occupying but wage-labouring ‘Suburbans’, a smaller but still significant group of culturally working-class but often economically inactive and welfare-dependant council estate dwellers, and a smaller still but hugely influential rich minority at the top, who keep London house prices high and so impede social mobility. The full effects of the current recession on this are yet to be felt. Culturally, the most significant class division in contemporary Britain is not the revolutionary face-off between bourgeois and proletariat that Marx envisaged, but a squabble between the two traditionally reactionary classes. Far from withering out of existence, the petty bourgeoisie (middle class owner-occupiers) and the lumpenproletariat (economically inactive council tenants) now dominate the landscape. Marx was wrong, and if we want to know why we have to look at the fundamental role that housing types and tenures play in class formation. Aside from its insight into the way that contemporary class structures relate to housing tenure, Nil By Mouth is also concerned – as H. G. Wells and Ken Loach were, in very different ways – with the way that the family can adapt to urban mass housing. It has been one of the most frequently voiced criticisms of multi-storey deck-access and high-rise developments that they are ill adapted to the requirements of family life. In this regard, Nil By Mouth is rather interestingly poised. Oldman resists the temptation to make the brutality of Ray’s behaviour merely a consequence or an expression of the brutalism of the estate’s architecture. Ray’s sociopathic rage can be explained in terms of his own father’s alcoholism and abusive behaviour, which he describes to Mark after he has beaten Val, when she has left him. A heavily intoxicated Ray describes the violence and cruelty with which his alcoholic father treated him and his mother. After a drunken accident, he recalls, his father ended up in hospital with the customary ‘Nil By Mouth’ sign above his bed. He says: I coulda put that on his fucking tombstone, you know? Cos I don’t remember one kiss, you know, one cuddle, nothing. I mean, plenty went down, not a lot come out, you know, nothing that was any fucking good. And I’d look at this man that I called dad, you know, my father, and I knew him as dad, he was my fucking dad, but he wasn’t like other kids’ dads, you know. It was as if the word itself was enough.


Ray is vicious, at least in part, because his father was vicious. But one must be careful to avoid psychologism here, and his fraught relationship with his father cannot be taken in isolation as the root of his behaviour. The breakdown of family is a societal problem, not merely a personal one, and in Nil By Mouth, it is endemic to the council estate. It is also therefore a structural element of the class formation that Nil By Mouth depicts. Billy is also given a scene in which to talk about his father, and he tells the macabre tale of going on holiday with his grandmother, and returning home to find that his father had had his dog killed. As Billy puts it, ‘[h]e was just fucking mean, my old man. Spiteful cunt’. The film portrays the male-dominated culture of drink, drugs and interminable anecdotes as being in conflict with the realm of stable family relations. Both Claire Monk and Glen Creeber have written about the way in which Ray’s contempt for his wife is reinforced by a laddish way of life. Ray hates the fact that his father was closer to his friends than his family, complaining to Mark that he ‘thought more of them cunts than he did of us’. But again Ray is guilty of the same behaviour. In the opening scene in the working men’s club, for example, Ray fobs off his wife Val and mother-in-law, much to their chagrin, in order to drink with his friends. As Monk points out: Even at home, Ray’s social mingling is entirely with other men: if the women come in, the men go upstairs, or out. This homosociality is marked as pathological by means of the contrast between Ray’s allmale social circle and Val’s mixed-sex group of friends. (Monk 2000: 164) Indeed, it is a jealous rage induced by Val playing pool with another man that drives Ray to beat her up. As Monk suggests, the architecture of the flat, or the estate itself, is used to enforce a firm barrier between Ray’s homosocial world, and his family. In one scene, while Ray and Mark trade anecdotes and brag about their sexual exploits to Billy, Val lingers for the most part in the kitchen, separated from the action by a pane of glass, but in earshot of Ray bragging about an orgiastic and adulterous sexual encounter. In this scene Val is hurt by Ray’s behaviour, but above all she seems utterly bored by these yarns. When she tries to show an interest in the conversation Ray replies with snoring sounds and calls her, in a South London dialect of Esperanto, ‘el plankos dossos’, implying ‘as thick as two planks’. Ray reclines on the sofa talking incessantly, and raps on the glass to place his order: ‘Oi! I’ll have a cup of tea – what am I, a spade?’ So in this scene the glass performs the symbolic role of


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keeping Val out of the male-dominated world that Ray inhabits, while keeping her in domestic servitude and within range of the insults that are thrown at her. But later in the film, when she has lost her baby and left Ray, and survival has become the sole priority, it is precisely within this domestic realm that the women begin to feel a sense of security, and an escape from the menace of the external spaces. When Val returns from hospital, she and her daughter move in with Janet and Val’s grandmother, Kath. Kath’s flat becomes a refuge for these four generations of women, and there is a rare scene of real domestic warmth when Val – her injuries starting to heal – dances with her grandmother. The flat is seen here as a realm protected from the dangers of the outside, as seen on several occasions when Ray attempts to gain access. In one scene, a heavily intoxicated Ray is heard shouting, pressing the buzzer, and thumping at the door, and we see these four women scared but united, huddled on the landing. Janet holds a knife, ready to attack Ray should he manage to force entry. A similar, earlier, scene sees an enraged Ray trying to get his daughter back from Janet, while Val is still in hospital. He directs a torrent of abuse and threats at his mother-in-law, warning her: ‘I’ll fucking kill you you cunt’. The concrete slabs and the iron bars that are fundamental to the architectural grammar of the council estate had seemed to reinforce the familiar metaphor of the urban dwelling as prison. But here they serve a defensive purpose, protecting the women – and the family – from the hostile exterior. Ray grips the iron bars that are keeping him at bay and shouts abuse through them. The flat is not a prison, here, but a fortress. Ray picks up some kind of rock or brick and, leaning around the iron grille, throws it through the window of the flat, smashing the window and narrowly missing Janet. There is a real sense that a protective skin has been punctured, and that the evil miasma which hangs in the air of the estate might waft in. The possibility that the family may achieve renewal within the domestic environment, which becomes a shelter from the mean terrain outside, is again suggested by the ending of the film. There is something incongruous about this purportedly happy ending, and it would be rash to assume that it represents a resolution of the tensions that the film dramatises. But it is undeniably the case that the ending of the film gestures towards at least the possibility that Ray’s flat can become a home to this family, and defend it from the harsh world outside. In stark contrast to the scene that I have discussed above, when Val is excluded from the all-male discussion in the sitting room, the whole family is gathered around the kitchen table. Ray has repaired the room, having trashed it in a previous scene in a drunken rage, and there are Christmas decorations. Ray, who appears


sober for the first time in the film, is seen holding his daughter and paying her attention – while elsewhere in the film he simply ignores her – and the jokes are shared with the women, who appear to operate on a much more equal footing than previously. We learn from the conversation that Billy is now in prison, and the family set off to visit him as the film ends. Now, while it is clear that the violent hatred that existed between these individuals has dissipated, it is not clear that Val has moved back in with Ray. It would seem just as likely that, on the way to visit Billy, Val and her entourage are dropping off their daughter for Ray to look after. While civility reigns, therefore, this scene is not necessarily to be read as the restoration of domestic bliss. Indeed, even if Val has forgiven Ray, then it is unclear that this would constitute a happy ending given the severity of his crimes. It is certainly difficult for the audience to forgive him. There are other reasons for seeing the film as fundamentally pessimistic, despite the positive note sounded by the ending, reasons fundamentally bound up with the film’s presentation of the council estate. For even as the ending offers a glimmer of hope, this hope is defined in negative terms, where a heavily defended domestic interior offers some limited relief from the horrors of what passes for public space in the council estate. Teige’s focus on the minimum dwelling was orientated towards carving out a minimum niche in which the basic requirements of life might be provided. And in Nil By Mouth, this niche has been created without regard to the interstitial realm that links the flats, much less to the relation of these flats to the city as a whole. The estate is like an island, less the selfcontained vertical village community imagined by architectural modernism than a ghetto, difficult to escape, and isolated from the myriad transactions of the city. And it is with this in mind that I now turn to Wonderland , a film that can be read as an attempt to overturn this view.

4.4

Wonderland : The estate in the city

The presentation of London council housing in Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland shares some thematic concerns with Nil By Mouth, but it attempts to see beyond the confines of the enclosed and pathologically class-bound culture of the estate and take a more optimistic view based on the idea of the estate’s connection with the city. Like Nil By Mouth, the film is concerned with how the family is to be preserved in metropolitan conditions. But instead of observing at close quarters a family penned in on an estate, beset by addiction and violence, Wonderland distributes the family over a range of different types of housing and tenure, in order to explore the ways in which relationships between


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siblings and across three generations shape and are shaped by the urban conditions of London at the end of the twentieth century. The principal characters are the three sisters, Nadia, Debbie and Molly, and their parents, Bill and Eileen. Nadia lives in a high-rise block near the Oval in South London. The ease with which this is established – we see the view from Nadia’s window, which overlooks the instantly recognisable cricket ground – is in many ways indicative of the difference between this film’s presentation of the council estate and that of Nil By Mouth, where there is little to locate the estate or to put it into relation with the known landmarks of London. Like Nil By Mouth, Wonderland attempts to explore the anomie and alienation of mass housing, and to link this to wider social problems. But unlike that film, Wonderland seeks to overcome the semiotically enforced separation between the estate and the rest of the city, and therefore to recuperate its characters, if not into a grand conception of the public sphere, then at least into networks of social and economic exchange that are recognisably urban. By means of comparison, one might start by looking at the way the two films depict a common feature of the high-rise development; we could take, for example, the lift. Lifts are frequently points of tension and frustration, and a study has shown that they are the most common cause of discontent with highrise life (Warburton 2005: 160). Ernö Goldfinger discovered this when he moved into Balfron Tower, which is located in Poplar in the East End of London. Balfron had only two lifts, which resulted in ‘long delays for anyone leaving or returning to their flat’ (Warburton 2005: 159–60). In Nil By Mouth, the lift forms a part of the unfriendly terrain that I have described, another element of the network of nondescript and vaguely menacing corridors and walkways that link the flats. In one sequence, just after he has been beaten up by Ray, Billy takes the lift down from Val and Ray’s flat. The first shot in the sequence, filmed through the scuffed Perspex of a fire door, shows him walking down the corridor outside the flat and into the heavily vandalised hallway outside the lift. Hurried by the first pangs of withdrawal, Billy impatiently hammers the button, and we hear in the distance the creak and groan of the mechanism stirring into life. The whole sequence retains that feeling of an inconvenient and perilous interstitial realm that only exists to be passed through. In the next shot, we see the lift doors on the ground floor from outside. When they open and Billy comes out, into another hallway covered in graffiti, the camera pans around to show the corridor, and lingers on this. This short sequence illustrates the disorientating effect of the lift, particularly in the context of multi-storey housing developments. The


doors open and one emerges into a space that is practically indistinguishable from any other floor. Goldfinger evidently picked up on this problem during his stay in Balfron Tower, as he attempted to solve it in his next major social housing project, Trellick Tower. In this building, ‘[w]all tiles on the different floors were colour coded so that when the lift doors opened tenants could tell instantly whether this was their level’ (Warburton 2005: 166). In the Ferrier Estate, as depicted by Nil By Mouth, there are few features distinguish between floors save, perhaps, some particularly obscene graffiti or a distinctive upturned shopping trolley. In Wonderland , Nadia’s journey from the door of her flat to the front of her building is presented rather differently. As in Nil By Mouth, Winterbottom stresses the loneliness and anonymity of the journey and the humdrum spaces she passes through. The camera dwells on her impatience as she presses the button, holding it down, and waits for the lift to arrive. When in the lift, we see her staring blankly toward the camera. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, we hear the recorded responses to a lonely-hearts ad that Nadia has placed. This juxtaposition serves to place Nadia’s loneliness and her search for love in the context of her environment, emphasising her solitariness and the difficulty of any neighbourly interaction in such a purely functional space. But an interesting effect is created on the soundtrack as the voices are played over one another, each message fading out as new ones begin, creating a kind of chorus of lonely hearts, uniting these lonely Londoners in their search for love. The sequence thus balances a mood of loneliness and anomie with an insistence that this is an experience shared by many, inviting the audience to think beyond Nadia’s confinement and to consider the realm of possibility – romantic or otherwise – offered by the city. This outward-looking perspective is reinforced by the way in which the sequence is shot. While Nil By Mouth dwelled on the identical, institutional corridors and so emphasised the sense of an inescapable enclosure, in Wonderland , the sequence begins with a view over the rainy city, out of the window out of the high-rise. After holding this admittedly rather drear prospect for a few seconds, the camera whip pans to Nadia locking the door of her flat, and follows her down the corridor to the lift. This use of the pan from the city as a whole to the individual high-rise dweller creates a sense that the estate and its inhabitants are continuous with the city, rather than – as in Nil By Mouth – utterly alienated from it. In Bazinian terms, ‘[c]lassical editing […] separated reality into successive shots which were just a series of either logical or subjective points of view of an event’ (Bazin 2004a: 28). The use of a pan instead of a cut therefore does more to emphasise the continuity of the objects captured in the


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frame. The suggestion that the radical discontinuities of urban life can be overcome is also suggested diegetically in this scene. When Nadia comes out of the front door of the building, she meets her father Bill, who has come to take a look at her boiler. This encounter implies that although the high-rise can encourage feelings of isolation and separation, its inhabitants are nevertheless entwined in a wider mesh of relationships within the city, and that familial relationships are particularly important. The presentation of the estate where Nadia’s sister Debbie lives with her son Jack is consistent with this reading. This estate is largely constituted of medium-rise deck- and balcony-access blocks, and again the ways in which Winterbottom photographs them, as well as the interior of the flat, are instructive. In one sequence Nadia – who is babysitting – puts Jack to bed, and he complains of being unable to sleep. She turns the light out, leaving an illuminated globe on at his request. We then cut to a series of four exterior shots of the estate which segue the scene into the bedroom of Franklyn – a lonely young man who has a crush on Nadia despite not really knowing her – in a different estate. He is listening to music and reading by a small light. Franklyn’s mother then comes into his room, turns the main light on, and harangues him for not having a girlfriend. By using a series of exterior shots of the estates to move between these two uneasy bedtime scenes, there is a suggestion that these experiences are common to all who live here. The analogous and simultaneous experiences of these characters – who are unconnected at this stage of the narrative – suggest that they are linked. The film makes use of the essentially Dickensian technique of juxtaposing seemingly unconnected characters – as if to suggest the irresolvable complexity of the city and of modern life – and then gradually revealing the connections between them and their mutual interdependence. So in Bleak House, the anonymous third person narrator asks ‘What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!’ (Dickens 1996: 235). The project of Dickens’s great novels was to make a unifying plot out of the unconnected lives and experiences of the inhabitants of a massive, chaotic and apparently incomprehensible city. Wonderland achieves a similar effect less through an elaborate Dickensian plot than by slowly revealing the interrelation of the characters in their everyday lives. One way in which this is suggested is by the use of electric lighting in the two scenes I have just mentioned, where lights are turned on and off. Just as the lonely hearts messages Nadia had received


implied a network of interrelations centred around the mechanism of lonely hearts advertisement and the telecommunications network, the juxtaposition of these two scenes, and the external shots that are used to move between them, seem to propose the national grid as a part of the connective tissue that holds the city together. The film itself was shot using a handheld camera with 16mm stock and without lighting (Jeffries 2000) so that the film is quite dark and the sources of light – particularly in night scenes – are especially pronounced. As well as Nadia turning out the light as Jack goes to bed, and Franklyn’s mother Donna turning his light on and off, the shots of the outside of the block – where, as the daily activity of the estate grinds to a halt and its inhabitants go to sleep one by one, some lights are on and some off – attempt to reconcile the experiences of the protagonists with those of anonymous millions who are engaged in the same everyday activities associated with bedtime. The other light sources in this sequence also tend to shift the focus from the isolated individual to the broader life of the city as a whole. The moon, like the illuminated globe in Jack’s bedroom, suggests a cosmic perspective: the whole city shares its light. An analogous effect is created by the first shot in this sequence, in which the illuminated dome of St. Paul’s cathedral is framed by the balcony of Debbie’s gallery-access block. Instead of the cosmic perspective suggested by the globe and the moon, this refers the audience to a symbol of London, placing the estate into relation with the city as a whole through this landmark. As Charlotte Brunsdon notes, this is part of Wonderland ’s engagement with ‘landmark London’. She writes: It is more common […] for naturalist cinema – which Wonderland isn’t quite – to mark its authenticity through its eschewal of landmark London. There are no views north in Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth (1997), nor south in Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff (1991) (Brunsdon 2004: 65–6). I would take this further and suggest that, in avoiding the view north and the familiar sights of a more recognisable London, Nil By Mouth accentuates the sense that the council estate – by virtue of its social and cultural makeup as well as its distinctive terrain – is thoroughly divorced from the city proper. Wonderland , by contrast, suggests that the estate, partly by virtue of being in London, is a part of a broad network of social and cultural connections and because of this its tenants can be recuperated into the city.


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This suggestion is not simply a hollow platitude, and the film does take seriously some of the problems that are put forward in Nil By Mouth. And although it is the public spaces of the city that ultimately redeem it, the film does not ignore the kinds of problems with dewyeyed celebrations of public space that I have highlighted. In fact, public spaces are often depicted as places to fear. Eileen – the mother of the family – is particularly uncomfortable with them. The home she shares with her husband Bill is a maisonette typical of inner London council estates When Eileen returns home, she is startled by a group of youths setting off fireworks. ‘I hate those fucking things’, she says. We see the group of young men laughing, and, as in Nil By Mouth, there is a sense that these exterior spaces are menacing. The group of kids making trouble, or engaging in what is now called ‘antisocial behaviour’, is a standard feature of the estate, and the high-rise tower blocks visible opposite the row of maisonettes reinforce this association. The film’s use of the familiar streets of central London seems designed to present the streets themselves, and not merely the landscape of the estate, as places of isolation where identity is lost in the crowd. Winterbottom frequently uses a kind of blurry, sped up cinematography to isolate the wandering character against a backdrop of indistinct and rapidly moving forms. This is not the street as public sphere, and even the spark of poetic inspiration or class recognition that exists in the Baudelairian chance encounter seems unlikely to materialise: how can one experience a moment of mutual recognition with a blurry mess? The tramps and Big Issue salesmen which periodically crop up in the film – likely possessors of Baudelaire’s ‘yeux des pauvres’ – merely form a part of the indistinct morass of the street, and are duly ignored. Perhaps for these reasons, Mazierska and Rascaroli see little hope in the film, arguing that ‘fragmentation and chaos prevails’ (2003: 192). The film is just as unstinting in its portrayal of the internal, domestic spaces of the estate. For Eileen, unlike the women in Nil By Mouth, there is little of consolation, and no refuge, inside her flat. In the scene when she arrives home after visiting Molly, once Eileen gets inside – still observably shaken from the shock of the fireworks – she sits down and we hear the sound of the neighbour’s dog barking loudly. Eileen looks distressed, and then begins to imitate the sound of the barking: there is no respite from the noise. Eileen’s husband Bill offers little comfort, and the domestic spaces of their home are made uncomfortable by a series of rows. These are also focussed on the noise from next door, for example when Eileen confronts Bill as the neighbours are having a rather loud fireworks party, accompanied by the barking of their dog.


Eileen:

Aren’t you gonna do something?

Bill:

What do you want me to do?

Eileen:

Doesn’t it bother you?

Bill:

[Shakes head]

Eileen:

’Course it bothers you but you’re too pathetic to do anything about it. [Gets up and leaves for the kitchen] Pathetic.

Bill:

[Pause, and then shouts to the kitchen] Call me pathetic. Who’s pathetic? You’re the one who’s fucking pathetic!

The tension in the flat is always high: two people who hate each other have been incarcerated in the same cell. The continued barking, which prevents Eileen from sleeping, drives her to poison and kill the dog. This gives her some respite from the noise, but puts her at the mercy of her conscience, and she watches glumly on as the neighbours bury their beloved pet. The film thus asks whether it is possible to live at such close quarters with others in toleration. If it stops short of answering this question in the affirmative, I shall argue that in this film – contrary to Mazierska and Rascaroli’s insistence that chaos prevails – the city in a sense comes to the rescue of its inhabitants. Firstly, it is important that the film sees its characters as living in London before they live in this or that estate, or this or that suburban house. Both Debbie and Nadia work in Soho, and much of the action takes place in this clearly recognisable area in the very centre of London. This is very different to Nil by Mouth, where the city centre is only visited once, when Ray, Mark and Billy have a night out in the West End. Inevitably, these men are drawn into the seamier side of Soho’s nightlife, and, rather than placing them in a familiar setting and allowing them to take up a position within the ordinary transactions of the city as we know it, the episode serves to reinforce their identification with an unsavoury underworld of crime, drugs and vice. In Wonderland , by contrast, living in a council estate does not exclude the inhabitant from the city. We see a variety of characters living in a variety of different types of dwelling with different tenures, and it seems to have relatively little bearing on their interactions. Moreover, it is clear that some of the functions that might normally be thought to reside in the domestic realm have been transferred into the public sphere. In the London of Wonderland , it would seem that Teige’s desire to reduce


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the dwelling to a bare minimum and create communal facilities to cope with some of the displaced functions of the home has been at least partly achieved, albeit more by accident than design. Karel Teige’s view that with the advent of the minimum dwelling various domestic functions could be ‘aggregated for common use outside the apartment’ (2002: 247) is made possible by the highly developed division of labour and the specialised land use associated with urban conditions. Wonderland sees hope in this aggregation of various social and domestic functions in dedicated spaces, suggesting that these places play a role in stitching together a fragmented city. Both Nadia and Debbie work in such places, Nadia in a café and Debbie in a hairdresser’s. In the London of Wonderland , some of the functions of the living room have devolved to the café. The convivial atmosphere of the café – and of the hairdresser’s or the football ground that Jack and his father Dan visit – offers some compensation for the isolation and anomie that the characters feel in their flats. Indeed, it is telling that the only scene in which we see the three sisters together takes place in the café. This is not a scene of domestic harmony, as there is a palpable tension between the tearful Molly and Nadia, who laughs when she hears that her heavily pregnant sister has been deserted by her partner. But it does suggest that while the spaces for this kind of interaction might be missing from the urban home (and perhaps from the council estate in particular), they are provided by the city. Functions previously ascribed to the private home are pooled in specialised spaces such as the café or the hairdresser’s, and the family’s survival is assured by its ability to adapt to the urban context through its use of such facilities. This is a clear point of contrast with Nil By Mouth, where communal facilities fail to provide any context for such domestic functions. The estate’s laundrette, for example, is permanently populated by junkies and alcoholics, and is therefore very far from being seen as a safe, semidomestic zone. If there is a problem with Wonderland ’s optimistic picture of the council estate and its position within the city as a whole, it is one of class. Mazierska and Rascaroli write: In this lower-middle-class family money is not the most pressing issue – a modest prosperity has been achieved; Debbie and Nadia have what seem to be stable jobs; Eddie can just about afford to quit his job, despite the arrival of a new baby; and Dan drives around in a BMW. (Mazierska & Rascaroli 2003: 190)


True enough, but this ‘modest prosperity’ is problematic in a way that Mazierska and Rascaroli do not acknowledge. It is instructive to contrast this with Nil by Mouth, where the proceeds of crime are blown on strippers, booze and drugs, and Billy’s sixty-pounds-a-day heroin habit is funded by sponging from his barely solvent mother and begging from strangers. Dan – Jack’s father – is the character in Wonderland who is closest to this world: apparently unemployed, he tries unsuccessfully to borrow money from his ex, Debbie, although he is, rather suspiciously, able to drive a BMW and drink incessantly. But even Dan is to some extent saved by his connection to this outwardly ‘lower-middle-class’ family. Partly because of the unmistakeable class associations of the types of housing that the family inhabit, Mazierska and Rascaroli’s insistence on the ‘lower-middle-class’ status of the family is problematic. Clearly, they are far from the unemployed lumpen class depicted in Nil by Mouth, but it is odd that the fact that they work should qualify them to leave the ranks of the working class. I have spoken of the way that Wonderland seeks to recuperate the council estate dweller into the fabric of the city. But is there also a sense that the film’s impulse is to deny class, by imagining an exclusively middle-class city? The modernday lumpenproletariat that inhabits the Ferrier Estate in Nil by Mouth have been replaced here with a family who are far from affluent, but who have arguably hoisted themselves into the lower reaches of the middle classes. The council estate is thus effectively re-imagined in a way that ignores its culture, the self-perpetuating cycles of unemployment, addiction and crime that are associated with the estate. As I have shown, the film is far from enthusiastic about the councilbuilt housing it depicts, and its optimism is grounded in a sense that the location of this housing within an urban context redeems it. It is not ruled out – unlike in Nil by Mouth – that some of the characters may have profited from Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy, and that they are therefore owner-occupiers. Molly and Eddie’s flat – the exception within this family – is the first floor of a converted Victorian terrace, signifying that they are most likely either owner-occupiers, or private tenants. In the other three flats, which I have already described, it is left open. The possibility that at least some of the family are owner-occupiers would tend to reinforce the argument that they have graduated into the lower middle class. I would argue that whether or not the characters have themselves purchased their homes, the estates Winterbottom depicts are very much those of the right-to-buy era. This is ascertainable, again, by examining carefully the way in which the film deals with the issue of class: while renting from the council is generally a residual tenure, the


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possibility of owner-occupation on estates that was opened up by rightto-buy potentiated a mixture of tenures and therefore an upward shift in the class makeup of estates, which is observable in Wonderland . The film thus tentatively suggests that the state’s partial withdrawal from the building and management of public housing has enabled high-rise and deck-access estates to be recuperated into the city amid a general trend towards owner-occupation. If the film embraces the Thatcherite ideal of the property-owning democracy it does so, perhaps paradoxically, under the sign of the Bevanite ‘mixed community’. Where Bevan had sought to abolish class distinctions by building working-class homes that would be indistinguishable from middle-class ones, Winterbottom, working with the stock that is on offer, imagines a situation in which the council estate, in part through being parcelled out to its inhabitants under the right-to-buy, can become part of a middle-class, owner-occupying city. Nil By Mouth is the flip side of this Thatcherite coin: by showing the increased social residualisation of the kinds of system-built estate where right-to-buy uptake was minimal, Oldman’s film explores the dark underbelly of the policy. If Wonderland is in part a celebration of a kind of independence from the state, where private home-ownership and the social networks of the city redeem the council estate, then the film is not entirely negative about the role of the state. It is telling, perhaps, that two of the three (or perhaps four) narrative resolutions that conclude the film, where lost family members are reunited, take place in a police station and a hospital. The resolutions of the various plotlines begin when the missing Darren – who has absconded but is on a weekend break in London with his girlfriend – finally leaves a message on his parents’ answering machine to let them know that he is alright. This then cuts to a shot of Jack, having been lost and then mugged, sitting alone in the waiting room of a police station. With a whip pan – often used in the film to link apparently disconnected objects – the camera reveals his negligent father, who is advancing up the steps of the police station with Nadia. Jack is reunited with his father, who is duly admonished by a policewoman for his lapse in parental responsibility, as is Debbie when she arrives shortly afterwards to collect Jack. The police are portrayed here as the agents of an essentially benevolent state, acting as a safety net and protecting the family against its own incompetence. In another storyline, Eddie – scared of the responsibility that fatherhood brings – has run away from his pregnant wife, and crashed his moped, injuring himself. The scene in the police station cuts to the distraught Molly in labour in hospital, with Eddie – undergoing treatment for his


wounds – still unaccounted for. After the baby is born, the hospitalised couple encounter each other while being wheeled down a corridor by hospital porters. In a clear echo of the preceding scene, there is the reassuring sense here that there is a benevolent state ready and willing to deliver Molly’s baby and to scrape Eddie off the tarmac when he falls off his scooter, and in doing so, to bring this young family together for the first time. The welfare state is imagined here as a safety net rather than as something that would provide the cradle-to-grave provision that the early advocates of state housing had imagined. Wonderland , unlike many of the texts examined in this book, does not look to the home to sustain and guarantee the family. Urban housing, it grants, is bound to have a certain anonymity about it. It is also happy enough to see the state withdrawing from public housing with a view to promoting a more variegated pattern of tenures, perforating the council estate with an admixture of classes. The ‘living tapestry of a mixed community’ that Bevan had hoped to create through state housing programmes is redeemed, here, through the Thatcherite policy of rightto-buy. This forms part of a controversial conception of the propertyowning democracy, which has the downside of excluding those who own no property to an unprecedented degree (see Daunton 1987), as we saw in Nil By Mouth. Where Wonderland is more successful is in its engagement with spaces outside the home into which certain domestic functions have been displaced, and which often give the context for social interactions that do not take place within the home. The café, the hairdresser’s, but also the hospital and the police station, form a variety of extra-domestic contexts in which the social life of the city is sustained.

Conclusion

Housing policy and urban planning can seem dry, worldly subjects, but I hope that this book will encourage those interested in representations of the city to give them more consideration. Many of the local conclusions arising from the four case studies presented here have already been drawn in the relevant chapters, and I will not repeat the detail of each here. I want merely to stress, very briefly, two more general themes that have arisen in the course of this book and some questions arising from these themes which might bear on future research in the field. The first is methodological: the argument that there are good reasons for placing the urban home – and its relationship to the city as a whole – at the centre of our understanding of representations of the city. And secondly, since it has often been my concern to use literary and filmic texts as ways of thinking critically about the successes and (more often) the failures of housing policy in London and Paris, I want to try and unify some of the positions I have taken on this. I began this book by questioning the hegemony of certain theorisations of urban life whose emphasis is on the novelty of the city’s public spaces. Since many of these theories were first developed as a reaction to Haussmannisation, an exploration of the continuing significance of the Haussmannian immeuble in Parisian life was an obvious first step. Unquestionably, the apartment block is at least as important as the boulevards in terms of the long-term legacy of Second Empire Paris for the everyday lives of Parisians. The materials examined in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 suggest, I would argue, that in more recent developments – like the London suburbs, the Parisian grands ensembles or the London council estate – the notion that the flâneur is the key figure of modern urban subjectivity become more problematic still. The streets of 183


West Bletchley in Coming Up for Air , the deserted walkways of the Ferrier Estate in Nil By Mouth and the run-down children’s playgrounds of Chanteloup-les-Vignes in La Haine are no more amenable to flânerie – in Benjamin’s sense – than are the snow-capped peaks of the Alps. In the large-scale public housing projects considered in Chapters 3 and 4, it is not simply that the street is neglected, but that it disappeared under attack from modernist ideas derived from Le Corbusier and others. If the role of flânerie has been overemphasised in accounts of Second Empire Paris, then it is simply irrelevant to more recent types of urban development. That is the substance of my polemic against flâneur theory. I have also attempted more positively to show that taking the home as the central term in our understanding of the city can itself yield interesting results. A tentative re-theorisation of urban experience has got underway in these pages. By using literary and filmic representations of the city to explore the relationship between ideas in architecture and planning on the one hand, and subjective experience on the other, I have shown both how narratives of urban life are inflected and shaped through their responses to mass housing, and how these responses form part of a critical discourse on what the home is, and what it should be. Novels and films, through their portrayals of the subjective experience of the city, become critical of urban conditions and manifest the political goals of their makers. This is an area where the findings of this book are little more than suggestive: there is certainly scope for a more thoroughgoing theoretical account of the relationship between urban housing and urban subjectivity. What I have provided here, if you like, is a template, a route into narratives of city life that can suggest new and interesting insights into the ways that the city is planned, perceived and envisioned. The results that this investigation has yielded are as diverse as the texts under consideration and it is here that I move to the second and final theme of these concluding remarks. I had hoped, I think, when embarking on this project, that I would be able to derive from my readings of films and novels some practical knowledge that would bear on the manner in which cities should be planned. Ambitious, perhaps. As the book evolved, it became more historical in emphasis: the task now was to show – through four case studies in the development of mass housing in London and Paris – how these different developments shaped the class-geography of the two cities in different ways, and how attitudes to urban dwelling evolved in relation to this. The projected manifesto was abandoned: we may never find out what kind of housing

Conclusion 185

Jean-Luc Godard might have ordained. In the course of this historical study, however, certain judgements about the way in which urban housing is planned have nevertheless been suggested by the literary and filmic texts under consideration, and some of these judgements are more convincing than others. I would like to end by drawing a few strands together. One of the principle oppositions which structures thinking about urban expansion is that of low-density suburban sprawl against highdensity high-rise development. Put another way, there is a question over whether the expanding urban population is to be accommodated by the horizontal or vertical growth of the city. In Chapter 2, I considered the contrasting opinions of H. G. Wells and George Orwell on this subject, as they manifested themselves in their fiction. In The Sleeper Awakes, Wells painted a bleak picture of the possible consequences of building a high-density, vertical city. Elsewhere, he advocated the horizontal dispersal of the population across the countryside. When Orwell approached this problem in Coming Up for Air , he stressed the destruction of the countryside that such a policy could cause, but also – tellingly – suggested that the distance that the suburbs put between their inhabitants and the city deprived them of a meaningful locus for social life. In Section 3.3 I pointed out that Godard’s critique of the expansion of Paris into the banlieue and beyond could be seen – in the terms of Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennet and Jürgen Habermas – as a principled objection to the way in which the expansion of the modern city tends to erode the public sphere. We do not necessarily need this conceptual apparatus, however, to see that in some important senses Orwell was right, and that the judicious use of high-density flats, close to the entertainments and amenities of the city, does more to promote a thriving society than does the endless residential sprawl of suburbia. There are also, as Richard Rogers and James Lovelock have argued, compelling environmental reasons for resisting land-hungry, low density development (see Rogers 1997, Lovelock 2006). Orwell’s perception is supported by the accounts of post-war state housing in London and Paris that I put forward in Chapters 3 and 4, with some caveats. The pattern of housing development in Paris – inaugurated by Haussmann and continued by Delouvrier – whereby the poor are forced out of the city and into the banlieue, adds to their economic hardship an acute social deprivation. Representations of the post-war banlieue from Les Petits enfants du siècle to La Haine testify to the consequences of this physical ghettoisation of the poor. Like the suburban streets of West Bletchley, but with none of the consolations


derived from the symbolic membership of the middle class, the grands ensembles deprive their inhabitants of participation in the social life of the city. Paris remains a walled city. London had different kinds of problems, and in Nil By Mouth we saw how the system-built architecture of the council estate has come to stand for a similar class division. However – whatever warnings I have sounded about the way Wonderland tends to neglect the issue of class – its perception that the location of council estates within the city permits the possibility of participation in its wider social networks is a valid one. In this respect, at least, the London council tenant is better off than the Parisian banlieusard . The real issue and the real social division in London turns around the problem of tenure. M. J. Daunton saw it thus: The prospect of a simple continuation of existing trends in pursuit of a ‘property-owning democracy’ is not an appealing one. This would mean, on the one hand, a shrinking public sector in which the remaining tenants are the poorest and most disadvantaged members of society, living in the high-rise blocks which are difficult to sell: the old, large or single-parent families, ethnic minorities. On the other hand, it might entail a growth of owner-occupation which places considerable strain on first-time buyers and forces into the tenure families who might be better housed in other ways. (Daunton 1987: 119) Written twenty years ago, Daunton’s analysis is still salutary: owneroccupation is not the panacea that it has sometimes been made out to be. The Thatcherite right-to-buy policy caused a bifurcation of the housing market that brought about the concentration of disadvantaged members of society in system-built council estates, letting from the local authorities. The dangers of this – explored in Nil By Mouth – suggest that Orwell’s advocacy of flats as the solution to suburban sprawl must be accompanied by an awareness of the way that social class relates to tenure. In researching and writing this book, I have come to see the necessity of a compact, high-density city, and one where in every area a diversity of tenures – and therefore of social classes – is actively encouraged.

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Filmography 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 1967. Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 1965. Boudou sauvé des eaux, dir. Jean Renoir. 1932. Cathy Come Home , dir. Ken Loach. 1966. Delicatessen, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. 1991. Do the Right Thing , dir. Spike Lee. 1989. La Haine, dir. Matthieu Kassovitz. 1995. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, dir. Jean Renoir. 1936.

196 Fictions of the City Made in U.S.A. , dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 1966. Nil by Mouth, dir. Gary Oldman. 1997. Riff-Raff , dir. Ken Loach. 1990. Taxi Driver , dir Martin Scorsese. 1976. The Tenant , dir. Roman Polanski. 1976. Up the Junction, dir. Ken Loach. 1965. Wonderland , dir. Michael Winterbottom. 1999.

Index Abbé Pierre (Henri Auguste Grouès) 105 Abercrombie, Patrick 141, 157 Addison Act (1919) 141 agriculture 54, 61, 63, 79, 85, 98, 103 Aillaud, Emile 134, 136–7 Algeria 119, 120, 140, 149 anarchism 39, 44, 141–2 apartment blocks 4, 7, 10, 20–21, 23–25, 36, 37, 38–40, 49, 183 balcony/gallery access 156, 158, 175, 176 class makeup of inhabitants 22, 23–25, 32–33 concierge 27, 41, 42 courtyards 41–43, 47–48, 127, 134–5, 156, 160 deck access 154, 158, 159–60, 169, 175, 181 façades 21, 27, 29–31, 32, 36, 37 functional specialisation of rooms 33–34, 154–5, 156 high-rise 154, 158, 159, 161, 169, 173–4, 177, 181, 185 immeuble haussmannien, characteristics 22–23, 28, 29–30, 32, 33 lifts 173–4 plumbing 45 staircases 27–28, 36, 37, 40–43, 44, 154 structural alterations 33–34 see also flats architectural determinism 16, 34, 42, 115, 137, 162, 169 architecture 1, 3, 15, 16, 23, 29, 34, 184 brutalism 160, 162, 169 interior design, see under interior modernist 5, 95, 96, 97, 101–2, 107–8, 110–11, 113–5, 125, 136–7, 139, 145, 150–1, 158–61, 172, 184

suburban 96 Arendt, Hannah 125–6, 129, 138, 185 Attlee, Clement 140, 143, 144, 153 Augé, Marc 3 Balzac, Honoré de 17, 20, 22, 39, 146 Cousin Bette 22 Père Goriot 20 banlieue, see under Paris Barthes, Roland 65 Baudelaire, Charles 11–13, 17, 108–9, 137, 177 ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ 12–13, 18 ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ 11 Bazin, André 5, 43–44, 127, 130, 147, 174 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 34, 144, 148 Bellos, David 148 Benjamin, Walter 4, 7, 11–12, 17, 25–27, 31, 32, 35, 36, 45, 184 The Arcades Project 14–15, 26–27 Berman, Marshall 12–13, 14, 15, 21–22 Bevan, Aneurin 140–1, 142–4, 153–4, 157, 181, 182 Beveridge, William 139–40, 144, 145, 153 Blake, William 60, 93–4 Booth, Charles 59 boulevards, see under streets Boundary Road Estate 155 bourgeoisie, see under class Brecht, Bertold 146–7 Brown, Alec The Fate of the Middle Classes 84 Brunsdon, Charlotte 176 brutalism, see under architecture building societies 89–90 197

198 Index bureaucracy 7, 39, 123–5, 126–7, 157 Burnett, John 85 Burns, John 50 Burroughs, William Naked Lunch 124 capitalism 3, 8, 12, 43, 53–7, 59, 71, 84, 98, 104, 123, 128, 133 ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ 56–7, 88–9 Carey, John The Intellectuals and the Masses 72, 96 Caro, Marc see Delicatessen cellars 34 Chanteloup-les-Vignes 133–4, 136–7, 184 Choay, Françoise 7 Churchill, Winston 140, 143 cinematographic techniques 41, 42–4, 122–3, 127, 147, 173–6, 177, 181–2 Clapton, Eric 166 Clark, T.J. 12, 14, 15, 21–22, 98–9 class aristocracy 55, 56–8, 85 aspiration 5, 24, 58, 86–7, 88–9, 99–100, 111 bourgeoisie 11, 12–13, 14, 18, 23, 24, 35, 56–8, 84–5, 87, 88, 110, 165, 167, 169 geographical distribution 2, 5, 6, 21, 23, 58, 82, 83, 88, 140, 184 ghettoisation 6, 104, 116–7, 125–6, 131–3, 144, 167–8, 172, 185 lumpenproletariat 6, 165, 180 middle class 5, 53, 58, 72, 84–90, 94, 97, 98, 99, 164, 167–9, 179–80, 186 mixing of social classes 2, 13–14, 21–22, 23–25, 63, 116, 141, 143, 153–4, 181, 182, 186 peasantry 8, 54–8, 103 petty-bourgeoisie 84–5, 87, 92, 165 proletariat see working class solidarity 133 working class/proletariat 6, 8, 14, 19, 24, 39, 54, 82–4, 86–7, 90,

99–100, 104, 116, 126, 137–8, 140, 151, 156, 162–9, 180 see also ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ Claudius-Petit, Eugène 104, 105 Cobbett, William 54 Cobden, Richard 54 Cold War 124, 128 colonialism 35, 105–6, 119, 140 commons 54, 55 communism 46, 68–9, 71, 84, 86, 87, 102, 104, 119, 123, 129 concierge, see under apartment block Conservative Party 142–3, 146, 157, 168 consumerism 110, 111–2, 115, 116, 117–8, 128, 131 Cornu, Marcel 104, 107, 108, 116 countryside relationship with city 3, 54–5, 58, 60, 65, 94, 98–99, 109–10 rural depopulation/expropriation 54–5, 58, 62, 103 threatened or destroyed by urbanisation 5, 28, 61, 91–4, 185 council estates 2, 6, 144, 153, 155–82, 183, 186 see also social housing council housing see council estates, social housing crèches, see nurseries Creeber, Glen 163, 170 crowds 11–2, 66–7, 68, 75, 109 Cubitt, Sean 38 Daunton, M.J. 57 Davidoff, Leonore 71–2 de Gaulle, Charles 104, 118, 119–20, 140, 148 Delicatessen (Jeunet and Caro film) 37–38, 40, 44–8 Delouvrier, Paul 5, 118, 120–22, 123, 125–9, 134, 135, 146, 185 density, urban 5, 10, 21, 66, 82, 93, 94–5, 101, 116, 137, 155–6, 157, 185, 186

Index 199 Dickens, Charles 175 Bleak House 175 division of labour 35, 179 Dodd, F. Lawson 62–3 domestic realm 3, 4, 14, 17, 47, 52, 67–8, 73, 82, 156, 171, 177–9, 182 see also interior drug addiction 159, 162, 165–7, 170, 172, 173, 178, 180 dystopia 37, 46 Eagleton, Terry 96, 163 economics 54–7, 75, 105, 152 editing (film), 38, 181–2 Eichmann, Adolf 124 Eluard, Paul 126 enclosure 54 Engels, Friedrich 4, 68, 115–6, 152 The Communist Manifesto, see under Marx, Karl The Condition of the Working Class in England 59 The Housing Question 11 see also Marx, Karl Enlightenment 67, 70, 125 Evelyn, John 50 Fabian Society 62–4, 73, 75 façades, see under apartment block family 3, 5, 6, 25, 67–8, 69–72, 73–7, 78, 81–2, 102, 113–6, 142, 148–50, 156, 169–70, 171–3, 175, 182 and the welfare state 111–2, 182 mothers, role of 69–70, 75, 112 ‘nuclear’ family 68, 71–2, 113–4 socialist critiques of 71, 76, 114 farming, see agriculture fascism 91, 95, 118, 119, 124, 137–8, 140 Faulkner, Christopher 39 female suffrage, see under suffrage feminism 72–3, 74–5, 112–6 Ferrier estate 158, 164, 168, 174, 180, 184 feudalism 54, 56, 73, 82 Fifth Republic 119 First World War 52, 141 flâneur 2, 4, 7, 11–12, 16–17, 19–20, 45, 183–4

flats maisonettes 177 relative benefits of 5, 94–5, 96, 141, 151, 154–5, 157, 185 single level 22–23, 32–33 see also apartment block Foot, Michael 143 Forshaw, J.H. 157 Forster, E.M. Howards End 87 Foucault, Michel 15–17, 115 Fournel, Victor 15 Fourier, Charles 68–9, 71, 76, 113 Fourth Republic 119 franchise, see suffrage Franco-Prussian war 45–46 free love 75–6 French Revolution (1789) 7, 55–6, 57–58, 59 Gandy, Matthew 45–46 gardens 58, 81, 89, 141, 157, 161 ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, see under capitalism Garden City movement 5, 60–1, 62–4, 72, 76, 78–82, 93–4, 101, 121–2, 141–2, 143–4, 155–6, 157 cités jardin 101 ghettoisation, see under class Godard, Jean-Luc 117–130, 131, 145–8, 185 Alphaville 123–5, 126–7 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle 3, 5, 44, 107, 117, 118–9, 122–3, 125–30, 145–7, 149 Made in USA 118, 119 Goldfinger, Ernö 161–2, 173–4 Golsan, Katherine 43 Grands Ensembles 2, 97, 102, 106–9, 110, 112–6, 117–8, 126, 128, 131, 133–5, 139, 183–4, 186 Gravier, Jean-François 120, 123 Great Depression 52 Greater London Council (GLC) 158, 161 green belts 102,104 Greenwood, Anthony 151 Guzzetti, Alfred 129

200 Index Habermas, Jürgen 125–6, 185 Hall, Peter 80, 101, 120, 122, 141 Hamnett, Chris 167–8 Hampstead Garden Suburb 63, 78, 79 Hanley, Lynsey 158, 162, 167 Hapgood, Lynne 73 Hargreaves, Alec 130–1 Haussmann, Baron Georges von, Paris works 1, 4, 7–48, 49, 50, 82, 98–9, 100, 104, 108, 120, 125, 129, 134–5, 183–4, 185 Hawks, Howard Red River , 44HLM developments 2, 5 Haywood, Anthony 151 HBM developments ( Habitations à Bon Marché ) 101, 103 Heseltine, Michael 168 high-rise, see under apartment block HLM developments ( Habitations à Loyer Moderé ) 101, 103, 120, 122, 124, 132–8, 140–1 Hobsbawm, Eric 140 Hollywood cinema 117, 125, 127, 147, 148 homelessness 67, 105, 145, 150, 151–2, 159, 177 homeownership, see under tenure Honegger, J.J. 30, 36, 108 Hooke, Robert 50 houses division into flats 10, 21 semi-detached 49, 87, 96, 110 single-family 27, 157 housing shortages 6, 52, 83, 103, 142–3 Housing Subsidy Act (1956) 158 Howard, Ebenezer 62, 76, 78–9, 81–2, 91, 101, 103, 141–2 Garden Cities of Tomorrow 60–1, 77, 78–9 interior 20–21, 25–27, 31–32, 33, 35–6, 172 design 32 see also domestic realm immeuble, see apartment block

immigration 130–2, 133, 137, 167 industrialisation 54, 55, 60, 99 Islam 119, 132–3 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, see Delicatessen Johnson, Lyndon 128–9 Jones, P.M. 55–6 July monarchy 8, 22 Karina, Anna 118, 126 Keynes, John Maynard 144, 153 Konstantarakos, Myrto 134–5 Labourdette, Jacques-Henri 106 Labour Party 139–43, 157, 167 La Haine 2, 5, 130–8, 185 Lamb, Charles 59 land ownership 50–1, 54–8, 64, 79, 97, 110 reforms 8, 57–8 use 49, 63, 80–1, 116, 179 land use, see under land LCC, see London County Council Le Bon, Gustave 66 Le Corbusier 95, 101–3, 108, 113–6, 122–3, 125, 136, 158, 159–62, 184 Plan Voisin 101 Unité d’Habitation (Marseilles) 113, 122–3, 158, 159 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, see under Renoir, Jean Lee, Spike 131 Do the Right Thing 133 Leigh, Jacob 146, 152 Le Jour se lève (Carné film) 47 Lefebvre, Georges 57 Lefèbvre, Henri 31 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 137–8 Letchworth 78, 80, 81 liberalism 8, 16, 126 free-market 9 neoliberal economics 143 Loach, Ken 169 Cathy Come Home 6, 144–53, 163–4, 165 Days of Hope 163

Index 201 Riff- Raff 162–3, 164–5, 166, 176 Up the Junction 163–4 London as centrifugal city 5, 51, 59, 61, 78, 81–2 County of London Plan 141, 157 great fire 50 housing see houses Paris, contrasted with, see under Paris planning 49–50 suburbs 1, 4, 5, 49–97, 101, 108, 109, 111, 116, 136, 158, 169, 183–4 transport see separate entry London County Council (LCC) 51, 60, 155–8 see also Greater London Council (GLC) Lovelock, James 185 Loyer, François 21 lumpenproletariat, see under class Lukács, György 146 Lüthy, Herbert 119 MacCabe, Colin 147, 148 Macmillan, Harold 143, 153, 157, 158 Marcus, Sharon 16, 20, 25, 26 Marius (Pagnol film) 47 Marxism 4, 12, 54, 84, 126, 143, 167 Marx, Karl 4, 7–8, 54, 84, 85–7, 96, 165, 169 The Communist Manifesto 84, 87, 165 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte 8 see also Engels, Friedrich Masterman, G.F.G. 84–86, 92, 102, 167 The Condition of England 85 Mayhew, Henry London Labour and the London Poor 59 Mazierska, Ewa 177, 178, 179–80 Meller, Helen 49–50 middle class, see under class Mill, John Stewart 54

mise-en-scène 40, 43, 44, 123, 137, 159 Mitchell, Peta 30–31 modernism 146–7 architectural, see under architecture Monk, Claire 170 montage 127, 148, 149, 159, 166 Moretti, Franco 17, 19, 22 Morris, William 54 mortgages 52, 89–90 mothers, see under family Moulin, Annie 55 Muslims, see Islam Nairn, Tom 56–7 Napoleon III, Louis 7, 8–9, 119–20 National Health Service (NHS) 140, 142, 144 naturalism 145, 147, 149, 164 Nazism, see fascism new towns 61, 101, 121, 141–2, 157 New Towns Act (1946) 141–2 NHS, see National Health Service Nil By Mouth (Oldman film) 2, 3, 6, 154, 158–172, 173–4, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186 nurseries 69–71 Oldman, Gary, see Nil By Mouth Olivier, Laurence Hamlet , 39–40 Orwell, George 49, 56, 57, 76–77, 82–97, 108, 145, 151, 156, 164, 167, 185, 186 Animal Farm 92 Coming Up for Air 5, 83, 87–8, 89–94, 110–11, 184, 185–6 ‘England Your England’ 84 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 91 Nineteen-Eighty-Four 76–77, 91, 124 The Road to Wigan Pier 82–3, 86–7, 93, 94 ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ 95–6

202 Index OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) 29 Owen, Robert 68 owner-occupation, see under tenure Panopticon 15–17 see also Foucault, Michel Paris arrondissements 9 banlieue 2, 5, 10, 97, 98–138, 139–40, 149, 185–6 boulevards, see under streets city wall 9–10, 98, 99, 102, 136 Département de la Seine 100–3 London, contrasted with 3–4, 6, 10, 49, 50–51, 53, 55, 82, 98–102, 109, 110–11, 120, 139–41, 162, 186 May 1968 109 occupation, see under Vichy regime périphérique 9–10, 99, 137 P.A.D.O.G. (Plan d’Amenagement et d’Organisation Géneral de la Region Parisienne) 120 Schéma Directeur 120–1, 125 Sewer system 45–46 Paris Commune (1871) 13, 19 PCF ( Partie Communiste Français) 102 Pease, Edward 62 Perec, Georges 47 formal experiments 28–29 Life: A User’s Manual 23, 25–36, 37, 38, 46, 47 Species of Spaces 26, 27, 36 philanthropy 59–60, 105, 155 Poe, Edgar Allen 32 ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ 32 Polanski, Roman The Tenant 37, 39–40 police 119, 131, 133–7 Power, Anne 10, 141 Popular Front 39, 47, 101 population growth 10, 59, 64, 93, 103, 106, 121, 129, 142, 185 movements 55 redistribution 40, 60, 76, 120, 125, 157, 185

rural depopulation, see under countryside postmodernism 163 Peabody, George 155 Prendergast, Christopher 16, 21–22 privacy 27, 67–68, 150, 161 see also domestic realm, interior proletariat, see under class property theories of 51, 56, 90, 97 in land, see land public space 2, 11, 12, 14, 17, 21, 36, 172, 173, 177, 183 public sphere 13, 125, 129, 177, 178, 185 Purcell, Kerry William 162–3 Rabinow, Paul 16 racism 131–3 railways see under transport Rascaroli, Laura 177, 178, 179 Ravetz, Alison 154, 159, 160 Reader, Keith 44 Renoir, Jean La Bête humaine 43 La Chienne 43 La Regle du jeu 43 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange 37, 38–39, 41–44, 46, 47, 48, 122, 127, 135 rental see under tenure resistance (French) see under Vichy regime Reform Bill (1832) 56 Revolution (1848) 7–8 right-to-buy 53, 168, 180–1, 182, 186 Roberts, Henry 154–5 Rochefort, Christiane 118, 126, 131, 151 Les Petits enfants du siècle 5, 107–117, 130, 136, 137, 185 on Godard 117 on marriage 112–3 Rogers, Richard 185 Romanticism 59, 60, 88, 91, 93 Ronan Point 161

Index 203 Rossello, Mirelle 132 rural depopulation, see under countryside Sandford, Jeremy 146 Down and Out in Britain 153 Sandys, Duncan 158 Sarcelles 106–7, 111, 115, 116, 121, 126, 136, 137 Second Empire 4, 7–11, 14, 16, 26–27, 30, 33, 104 Second World War 34, 103, 124, 140, 142, 157–8 see also Vichy regime Sellier, Henri 101, 103 Sennet, Richard 22, 125–6, 185 serfdom 54 servants 23 Shaw, George Bernard 62 Shelter (homelessness charity) 151–2 Simmel, Georg 4, 12, 17, 45, 107–9 ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ 12, 17 Situationist International 31 slums 18, 21, 59, 99–101, 105, 137, 139–40, 145, 162 clearance 10–11, 94, 156, 157 Smithson, Alison and Peter 160, 161–2 social democracy 6, 139–40, 143–4 social housing 2, 5, 6, 101–2, 105–7, 117, 132, 140–4, 155–8, 167, 184 see also HLM developments, council estates socialism 5, 39, 69, 70–1, 73, 75–6, 82, 83, 84, 92, 93, 95, 102, 104, 114, 153 sound transmitted between apartments 41, 44–45, 177–8 use in film 38, 146, 166, 174 state housing, see social housing streets 4, 11–12, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 26, 36, 37, 64, 177, 184 absence in council estate architecture 159, 160–1, 184 boulevards 9, 11–12, 13, 15, 17–18, 22, 51, 183

critiqued by Le Corbusier 184 street numbers 88 Steinberg, Saul 29 suburbia, see under London suffrage female 52 universal male 8, 14

159–60,

Tarr, Carrie 133 Taxi Driver (Scorsese film) 131 Teige, Karel 83, 172, 178–9 television 144–5, 147–8 tenure 3, 17, 144, 154, 167–9, 178, 180–2, 186 owner-occupation 22, 52–3, 55, 58, 85, 88, 89–91, 120, 139, 167–9, 180, 181, 186 private rental 22–3, 53, 58, 139 rental from state bodies 120, 139, 168, 180–1, 186 Thatcher, Margaret 53, 143, 163, 165, 168, 180–1, 182, 186 Thompson, E.P. 54, 163, 167 Towers, Graham 154 Town Planning Bill (1909) 50 town planning movement see Garden City movement, urban planning trade unionism 162, 165, 166 transport 51, 77–8, 80–2, 109, 121, 135 railways 51, 77–8, 121, 135 London Underground 51, 52 Trotskyism 163 Tudor Walters Standards 141, 143 unemployment 82,109, 116–7, 130, 132–3, 134, 137–8, 145, 162, 165–6, 167–8, 180 United States of America 32, 85, 99, 117, 128, 129, 133, 141, 142 housing projects compared with Parisian banlieue 131–2 Unwin, Raymond 61, 63, 72, 79–82, 101, 141 Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! 78 urban growth 1, 5, 10, 49–52, 62, 63, 76–8

(Language, Discourse, Society) Matthew Taunton-Fictions of the City_ Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris-Palgrave Macmillan (2009)

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