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This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King's Research Portal At This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ ‘The Weight of a Rhetoric of Buildings’ Literary Uses of Architectural Space, 1909-1975 Vickery, Simon James Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Oct. 2021 1 ‘The Weight of a Rhetoric of Buildings’: Literary Uses of Architectural Space, 1909- 1975 Simon Vickery Thesis for the degree of PhD in English King’s College London, 2015 2 Abstract This thesis examines the often uneasy dialogue between literature and architecture in twentieth-century Britain through reading literary representations of architectural space, with a particular focus on London. In a period characterised by the development of new technologies and building practices, the continuing and rapid expansion of urban centres, and the traumas of global warfare, many and varied writers responded to these shifts and transformations through turning their attentions to architectural spaces, taking them as points at which competing tensions collide, and thus using them as a way to register moments of personal, social, political or cultural change. The introduction sets out the parameters of my study and situates it in relation to recent criticism, while outlining the thesis’s central concerns. My first chapter explores, through a number of different literary texts, three moments and their related preoccupations: the Edwardian era and the place of both the machine and the country house in its artistic imaginary; the years following the First World War and the experience of returning combatants; and the emergence of the first shoots of a British architectural modernism during the inter-war decades. I argue that each of these texts uses architectural space to create a dialogue with the past or an imagined future, or both. Chapter 2 focuses on the Blitz and argues that, in this chaotic and destructive moment, writers were pushed to find new ways to write about a newly, and dangerously, active architecture. I look at this concern with the forms and limits of representation amongst writers alongside what I identify as a turn towards documentation amongst architects. Chapter 3 is interested in attitudes towards post-war reconstruction at a time when it was still largely, or entirely, hypothetical. Beginning with plans drawn up while the war was still raging, and following the debate through until 1956, I contrast an enthusiasm for reconstruction amongst architects, commentators and the general public with the deep sense of unease that was being articulated in that moment by writers. The literary texts considered in Chapter 4 all engage with the narrative of reconstruction’s ‘failure’ that began to emerge in the mid-1950s, offering sustained literary engagements with the realities of post-war architecture. But at the same time as engaging with this very public conversation they are all equally if not more preoccupied, I argue, with using architecture as a way to explore individual psychology. 3 Contents List of Illustrations ..................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... 6 Introduction: ‘Ferro-concrete is fallible’ ................................................................. 7 Literature vs. Architecture: ‘Mutually exclusive and antagonistic’ ....................... 10 ‘An almost permanent construction site’ ................................................................ 14 Architecture as ‘unavoidable fact’ and literary device ........................................... 16 Architecture and Spatiality in Criticism and Theory .............................................. 18 Moment, Fragment, Individual ............................................................................... 21 Modernism(s) ......................................................................................................... 22 Architecture in Writing .......................................................................................... 24 1. ‘Irresistible change’, ‘domestic pastoralism’ and ‘machine-made man’, 1909- 1939 ............................................................................................................................ 27 ‘Something morbidly expanded’: H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster ............................ 28 ‘And the houses all listening’: Ford Madox Ford and Richard Aldington ............. 46 ‘A city born by fiat’: Wyndham Lewis .................................................................. 52 ‘Something Clean and Square’: Evelyn Waugh ..................................................... 64 2. ‘This Construction of Destruction, This Deposit of the Blast’: Writing a Blitzed Architecture, 1940-1945 .............................................................................. 74 ‘Sparks from experience’: Documentation and its Limits ...................................... 79 ‘What a domestic sort of war this is’: Public/Private Stories on the Home Front . 94 Ruin as (Re)Discovery: Writing a New Architecture........................................... 110 3. ‘The Cities Which Men Make Reflect Their Souls’: Planning, Building, Writing, 1944-1955 ................................................................................................. 119 ‘Present privation and threatening disaster’: Evelyn Waugh ............................... 123 In the Ruins: William Sansom and Rose Macaulay ............................................. 134 Playing In the Ruins: Graham Greene and Rumer Godden ................................. 152 4 4. Writing Reconstruction’s ‘Failure’, 1955-1975 ............................................... 158 ‘Net curtainitis’: Angus Wilson and New Town Blues ........................................ 162 ‘OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING’: B.S. Johnson and Decrepit London ...................... 177 ‘New Jerusalem’: J.G. Ballard and the Failure of High-Rise Living ................... 189 Coda: Drizzle at Stratford ..................................................................................... 206 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 212 5 List of Illustrations Figure 1, Kingsway .................................................................................................... 15 Figure 2, Australia House, Awakening of Australia .................................................. 54 Figure 3, A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane, EC4 ............................ 86 Figure 4, Devastation, 1941: An East End Street .................................................... 112 Figure 5, Cheapside .................................................................................................. 113 Figure 6, Devastation 1941: East End, Wrecked Public House ............................... 115 Figure 7, St Dunstan-in-the-East, photographed in 2014 ......................................... 138 Figure 8, Christ Church Greyfriars, photographed in 2014 ..................................... 139 Figure 9, Percy Circus, photographed in 2015 ......................................................... 181 Figure 10, Trellick Tower ........................................................................................ 191 Figure 11, Wembley Stadium .................................................................................. 206 Figure 12, Olympic Park, Stratford .......................................................................... 207 Figure 13, Olympic Park, Stratford .......................................................................... 207 6 Acknowledgements I want to express my gratitude to the staff of the Department of English at King’s College London, which has been a consistently nurturing environment during my postgraduate studies. In particular my supervisor Lara Feigel has always been generous in offering her guidance, support and wisdom, for which I am very grateful indeed. I want also to thank Max Saunders and Patrick Wright, who helped give the project shape in its relatively early stages. I have also learnt a great deal from my fellow students, and the City-Centric and Politics in Practice discussion sessions were amongst the richest experiences of my time at King’s. Particular thanks
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