Respectability and race between the suburb and the city: an argument about the making of 'inner-city' London. (May 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Waters, Rob
• Editors: Andrews, Aaron; Kefford, Alistair; Warner, Daniel
• Is Part Of: Urban history. Volume 50:Part 2(2023)
• Page Start: 214
• Page End: 231
• Publication Date: 2023-05
• Subjects: Cities and towns -- History -- Periodicals; Cities and towns -- History -- Bibliography -- Periodicals; 909.09732
• DOI: 10.1017/S0963926821000730
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0963-9268

Abstract

Abstract: This article concentrates on the development of an inner-city imaginary, and a linked suburban imaginary, in the era of post-war reconstruction and post-colonial migration. It argues that these two historical processes – reconstruction and migration – need to be seen as interlinked phenomena, which bound the histories of race and class together. First, it proposes that understanding how the inner city developed and was lived as a structure of feeling requires attending to its meaning both among those who peopled its often-nebulous borders, and among those who escaped it but nonetheless measured their escape by it. Second, it proposes that understanding the popular force of inner city and suburb as imaginative spaces means recognizing how they became crucial landscapes in a revived culture of respectability, which in the second half of the twentieth century became a racialized culture. This was the other migration that defined what the inner city meant.