Life Between Walls: Race, Subdivision and Lodging Houses in Postwar London

Abstract

Four solid walls and a roof over one's head. These, from an essentialist standpoint, are the minima of homely existence. What happens then under conditions of speculation and subdivision when domestic walls are no longer stable givens, but become flimsy, mobile and contested? Drawing on a rich seam of popular British films from the late 1950s and early '60s -set in the transitional world of postwar London lodging houses -this paper examines how partition walls refashioned the interior space of the terraced house. Analysis of popular visual culture is supported by archival research centred on local valuation lists, which allow us to read the traces of these sometimes temporary, often illegal structures. The paper argues that partition walls were key to the extraction of value from a declining private rental sector by property traders and landlords. At the same time, these ubiquitous structures formed a series of highly charged thresholds between disparate individuals. Partition walls were instrumental in the 'spatialisation' of race in postwar Britain, serving to heighten an awareness of otherness while simultaneously bringing individuals into uncomfortable proximity. Finally, the paper asks how people overcame or lived between these divisions, and how this affected questions of visibility and representation.

Assembling Under the Westway: The Emergence of Social Infrastructure in North Kensington, London

“…In an accommodation sector characterised by signs of “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”, this cramped, squalid, and insecure accommodation offer was often the only choice for arrivals from the British Empire, and Notting Hill quickly became a centre of Irish and Caribbean London (Vague 2012). As the London County Council labelled North Kensington an area of concern for housing, there was a simultaneous growth of houses being converted back into single‐family homes (Cartwright 2020). This spatial contraction and densification of deprivation contributed to the 1960s interventionist policies that saw slum clearance occur under the pretext of urban renewal; the Cheltenham Estate (host of the modernist icon of Trellick Tower), Lancaster West (including the now equally iconic Grenfell Tower), Edward Woods, Silchester, and Henry Dickens estates were all built on former slum plots (Leech 1988) (see Figure 3).…”

Shrinking homes? The geographies of small domestic properties in London, 2010–2021

“…London's housing crisis and the production of sub-standard homes London has long offered small homes to newly-arrived residents, especially migrants. In the postwar era, for example, the unsanctioned subdivision of terrace properties created sub-standard lodging houses occupied by racialised minorities (Cartwright, 2020). While these illegal practices were seemingly on the wane in the last decades of the twentieth century (though see Lombard, 2019), the pressures encouraging the production of small housing in the capital grew more intense as London's 'housing crisis' deepened in the twenty-first century.…”