Preissl, Sigrid; (2020) London after the Blitz: Film, Architecture, Culture, 1940-1960. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

My thesis explores how mid-century British film represents London’s postwar architectural and social reconstruction. I study filmic representations of the state and planners’ official visions, and portrayals of women and teenage girls’ experiences of postwar domestic and public spaces. In addition to documentaries, I analyse underresearched non-fiction films such as newsreels, and amateur movies, as well as fiction films produced in Britain and set in London between 1940 and 1960. I explore press archives, government documents, and independent surveys to analyse British midcentury cinema in its historical contexts. In Chapter One, I examine the Festival of Britain, which was a nationwide, government-sponsored event. I demonstrate how the favourable and indeed aweinspiring filmic representations of the exhibition and its architecture evoke both the festival and the government’s reconstruction programme as successful. In Chapter Two, I examine contemporary debates about postwar housing designs. I show how representations of modern homes—by focusing on the gadget-filled kitchen—created social and spatial boundaries that excluded women from public spaces, and instead confined them to the domestic. In Chapter Three, I explore teenage girls’ postwar spaces in relation to public anxieties of morality. I demonstrate how films portray newly-available urban entertainment venues as dangerous thus demonising adolescent girls’ behaviours in London’s public spaces. Despite the wide-ranging scholarship on reconstruction and British midcentury film, no other study combines the in-depth analysis of fiction and non-fiction films in relation to both the built environment and social reconstruction, following the two decades after the Blitz. My interdisciplinary study contributes to the fields of film, and architecture as well as to the growing revisionist scholarship of women’s history that places gender politics at the heart of Britain's postwar reconstruction.

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