Architectures of identity: English modernism, domesticity, and imperial decline

This thesis presents a cultural history of domestic space in England between 1910 and 1948. Against the backdrop of several social and economic shifts – imperial overextension, the end of the Pax Britannica with World War I, women’s suffrage, and Britain’s abandonment of the Gold Standard amid the Great Depression – it argues for a new appreciation of how domestic space became a critical forum in which the renegotiation and reformation of English national identity took place. Drawing on literary sources, economic history, architectural design, and the visual arts, the thesis thoroughly revises our historical understanding of how the impending collapse of the British imperial project inflected the cultural politics of modernism in England. By seeking out transdisciplinary blind spots in both literary and art historical studies, and uniting popular and avant-garde culture, this study provides a more nuanced account of the domestic mechanisms that enabled English national identity to wax as British imperial hegemony waned.

The first part of this thesis reassesses the relationship between the suburbia and modernist architecture, as it emerged in the years immediately before and after World War I. It recovers links between suburban domesticity and modernist artists and writers such as Frederick Etchells, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West. It then demonstrates the national and imperial tenor of efforts to promote both semi-detached suburban housing and modernist domesticity. From this confrontational atmosphere of avant-garde bluster, the focus shifts to how inter-war artists conceived their homes (and the artwork produced within them) according to principles of vernacular design, which were encoded with notions of nationalism and nativity. Building on existing scholarship on architecture as a discourse, as opposed to built projects, a study of the writings of J.M. Richards reveals unifying themes amongst an array of artists including Peggy Angus, Barbara Hepworth, Winifred Nicholson, Ben Nicholson and Eric Ravilious.

The second half of this thesis uses its initial foundation in private and interior domesticities to investigate public notions of domestic belonging. With the aid of new archival sources, it looks beyond customary accounts of how modernist domesticity troubled distinctions between private and public spaces to examine how homes became a national concern, and how modern subjects attempted to feel at home in public land- or cityscapes. This is addressed by investigating expressions of homelessness and architectural language in the poetry of W.H. Auden, John Betjeman and Geoffrey Grigson, before surveying their connections with the Georgian Group and its efforts to protect eighteenth-century architecture, predominantly in London. Ultimately it will show how these literary and preservationist discourses relate to a rise in imperial nostalgia and how they influenced attempts to build modernist homes based on eighteenth-century vernaculars. The thesis will end by charting the revival of the picturesque by Christopher Hussey and in the pages of the Architectural Review. The picturesque became a tool with which to domesticate rural and urban space in the 1940s. Through comparison with the late work of T.S. Eliot, this section assesses the picturesque’s inherently colonial and appropriative qualities, and its emblematic relationship with Englishness, to recover how strategies of aesthetic and social reform centred around domesticity attempted to prepare English culture for life after empire. On a national scale these physically and emotionally nested structures of belonging became entangled with an increasingly untenable imperial identity through the 1930s and 1940s.