A discussion between two scholars focused on the experience of loneliness in the post-war city. Edwina Attlee spoke about her new book, Strayed Homes: Cultural Histories of the Domestic in Public. She drew together some of the people who appear in her book, regular and irregular users of cafes, launderettes and fire escapes, spaces that accumulate regular users through their informal acceptance of the irregular. Single people, unhappy families, people who just don't want to go home yet, people who can't. What can the existence and persistence of strayed homes in the city tell us about the uneven access to warm, safe, secure housing; what can they tell us about the home? Jess Cotton discussed her project Lonely Subjects: Loneliness in Postwar Literature and Psychoanalysis, 1945-1975. This project is a postwar literary-historical study which investigates the relationship between the development of literary, psychoanalytic and welfare institutions and communities in relation to loneliness. The event was chaired by George Townsend.
Speakers
Dr Jess Cotton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her project Lonely Subjects: Loneliness in Postwar Literature and Psychoanalysis, 1945-1975, is a postwar literary-historical study which investigates the relationship between the development of literary, psychoanalytic and welfare institutions and communities in relation to loneliness. The aim of this project is to provide a new paradigm for how we think of loneliness in relation to postwar forms of community – and also to make a case for a more social literary and psychoanalytic culture.
Edwina Attlee lectures in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is the author of Strayed Homes: Cultural Histories of the Domestic in Public, exploring spaces of public intimacy through a close reading of the launderette, the sleeper train, the fire escape and the greasy spoon – ordinary sites that connect strangers in the city. She is currently researching the history of the English nursery, with a focus on the 1970s National Union of Students’ campaign for creches in places of higher and further education.
Chair
George Townsend is a researcher and curator. He has a PhD in English and Humanities from Birkbeck, on the cultural history of Parson's Pleasure, a former men's nude bathing place on the River Cherwell in Oxford. Currently he is turning the PhD into a book and developing an exhibition about the history of bathing in the Thames.
Image credits: Nigel Henderson, Photograph showing a row of back gardens (1959-56). Copyright, the estate of Nigel Henderson.
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