Twentieth Century British History最新文献

Rent Tribunals were first established in England and Wales in 1946 as a means of regulating rents among furnished lets in the private rented sector, before their authority was extended to cover unfurnished dwellings in 1949. This article shows how rent tribunals created an informal space of justice that provided a forum for tenants' voices. Tenants used rent tribunals to dramatize their everyday complaints, articulate their sense of entitlement to better housing, and organize collectively to exert pressure on landlords and administrative machinery. The tribunals in turn reconfigured the state's relationship to the space of the home and echoed representational tropes circulating in popular culture. But in putting landlordism on trial, rent tribunals, and those who participated in them, also came up against the limits of traditional constructions of property ownership and the home. The expansion of homeownership intersected and in some cases fused with increasingly racialized notions of belonging, domesticity, and national identity. Through an examination of these novel regulatory forums, the article highlights both the centrality of working-class agency and the contradictory nature of the welfare state.

This article examines and centres the activism and experiences of Black mothers to demonstrate the primacy of race in the construction working-class motherhood in late twentieth-century Britain. While recent scholarship has demonstrated the way in which working-class mothers could be vectors of social change in post-war Britain, it has obscured the experience of Black mothers. This study addresses the ethnic bias in the historiography of motherhood by drawing on the personal testimony of Black mothers, as well as the campaign literature generated by grassroots organizations in Britain's inner cities. It corroborates recent scholarship by demonstrating that by participating in tenant's' associations, playgroups, and mothers' groups, working-class mothers developed a mode of motherhood that worked around their own practical needs and demands. However, it argues that these opportunities for assertiveness were refracted through the lived experience of both systemic and interpersonal racism that Black women faced in post-imperial and post-industrial Britain. Moreover, by examining the community efforts taken by Black women in inner-city areas, the study also contributes to recent studies on race, class, and community activism in urban Britain. It demonstrates that the intersecting experiences of race and class could combine to produce forms of community activism among mothers, particularly in the form of tenants' associations. However, racism continued to persist in inner city neighbourhoods, which isolated Black mothers from mother-centred community groups. Examining motherhood at the granular level, this article demonstrates the importance of viewing the British working-class from the perspective of not only gender, but also race.

After the First World War the British state tried to show the families of the dead their thanks, and memorialize the dead, through the two-minute silence and the creation of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. However, before families of deceased servicepeople encountered the state through national commemorations they encountered it through the administrative paperwork of death. Other than brief mentions in wider works, the bureaucracy of death is remarkably absent from discussions of death, yet the paperwork associated with death was a significant part of family experiences of bereavement, particularly in wartime. This article argues that state bureaucracy played a key role in defining people's experience of wartime bereavement, both practically, through the paperwork sent, but also temporally, by controlling when and how families could carry out grave-related elements of mourning, such as choosing an epitaph. Over the course of the early inter-war period, the bureaucracy of death encountered by the families of the war dead could profoundly shape their experience of loss.

Utilizing group oral histories from nineteen women who were pregnant and living in areas of social and economic deprivation in Glasgow, Scotland, between the late 1970s and early 2000s, this article analyses the difficulties the women faced in accessing information about pregnancy and welfare entitlements. It reveals a disconnect between women's knowledge about reproduction and maternal health and welfare benefits and the political initiatives designed to improve antenatal care and pregnancy outcomes in Britain since the 1980 Short Report. This divide was widened by a broader Scottish culture of reticence around sex education and the ongoing moral influence of the churches. The article clarifies the class-blind English arguments within the patient consumer model that was promoted since the 1960s. It demonstrates how marginal groups were ill equipped to participate as patient consumers, either individually or as a collective group. More broadly, this article gives voice to an underrepresented group and highlights how these women utilized adaptive decision-making to navigate their pregnancy journeys in a society with uneven maternity and welfare provision and inhibitions about sex education. By highlighting the realities of marginality and lived experiences, it adds nuance to conventional welfare and policy histories.

This article examines the redevelopment of Euston Station forecourt as a speculative development of offices designed by the prolific post-war commercial architectural practice R. Seifert & Partners from c.1970 to 1979. The article offers a reading of the development as a piece of state-encouraged, public-sector led property development. It uncovers the encouragement given by Harold Wilson's Labour government to for-profit property developments on nationalized land and the simultaneous control of private sector office development by the same government. It reveals a consistent labourite vision of public sector property development.

The Mini was launched in 1959 during Britain's motor revolution. This iconic car has long been analogized with the popular iconography of the Sixties, but I argue here that this association only scratches the surface of its more complex meanings. Rather, the Mini embodied the tension arising from a motor revolution that was transformative yet limited. By looking at how the Mini was marketed, perceived, and used (and by whom), I suggest that it was a conduit through which Englishness and national decline were mediated against the backdrop of mass motorization. It also reflected the motor-car's growing importance as a public and private space. I draw on a number of historical sources to make this argument, including automotive advertising, a source that is currently underutilized by historians. In doing so, I seek to overcome the normative tendency in academic history to overlook the car's cultural significance.