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Abstract
This introductory essay highlights the key themes that appear in the four essays that make up the special issue: ‘Complex Interior Spaces in London, 1850–1930’, which focuses on street markets, railway stations, winter gardens and people's palaces, and a hospital. Those themes include complexity and multifunctionality; nodes and networks; modernity; materiality and spatiality; the public/private spheres; and user experience. The fact that the essays emanate from a design historical perspective places a new emphasis on the complex interiors of the buildings under review, and on the activities that went on in them, rather than on their architectural facades. While these building types were not unique to London, this introduction suggests that their size and scale were particular to that city.
Notes on contributors
Fiona Fisher is a researcher in design history and member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University. Her recent publications include Designing the British Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood, 1948-1968 (Routledge, 2015) and, with Penny Sparke, The Routledge Companion to Design Studies (Routledge, 2017).
Patricia Lara-Betancourt is a design historian and member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University. Her recent publications include ‘Republican Homes: Modern Flows in Domestic Architecture in Santa Fé de Bogotá, 1820-1900' in Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid (Bloomsbury, 2018); and ‘Displaying Dreams: Model Interiors in British Department Stores, 1890-1914’ in Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (Routledge, 2017).
Victoria Kelley is professor of the history of design and material culture at the University for the Creative Arts. Her most recent research is a monograph published by Manchester University Press, Cheap Street: London's Street Markets and the Cultures of Iinformality, 1850-1939 (2019).
Penny Sparke is a Professor of Design History and Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University. She studied French Literature at the University of Sussex and was awarded a PhD at Brighton Polytechnic in 1975. She taught the History of Design at Brighton Polytechnic (1975-1982) and the Royal College of Art (1982-1999). From 1999 to 2014 she was Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design & Music and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Kingston University. Her publications include As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (1995); Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (2005); and The Modern Interior (2008).
Notes
1 It is worth noting that the one complex and technologically innovative building that has already received considerable attention is the department store—both European and American—which has been the focus of work by historians of retailing and consumption. Studies include: G. Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds.), Cathedrals of Consumption: European Department Stores 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); A. Lasc, P. Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Male Petty (eds.), Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retailing (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); E. M. Orr Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Century (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019); and J. Whitaker The Department Store: History, Design, Display (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).
2 Along with several other European iron and glass buildings, the Crystal Palace was mentioned in N. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to the Bauhaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Book Ltd., 1960).
3 D. Murphy, The Architecture of Failure (Winchester, UK, Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2012), 2.
4 See, for example, P. Sparke, As Long as it's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995).
5 See C. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) and M. Pimlott, Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior' (The Netherlands: Jap Sam Books, 2007) and The Public Interior as Idea and Project (The Netherlands: Jap Sam Books, 2017).
6 See, for example, M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: [3rd edition] 2011) and H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).
7 A. Smith ‘The Expansion and Remodelling of the London Hospital by Rowland Plumbe, 1884–1919’, The London Journal, 45:2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2019.1583455
8 R. Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2.
9 J.A. Tarr and G. Dupuy, eds., Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988).
10 V. Kelley ‘London's Street Markets: The Shifting Interiors of Informal Architecture’, London Journal 45:2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2019.1703432
11 Joseph Paxton's Great Victorian Way of 1855, which was never actually built, would have consisted of a ten-mile covered loop around much of central and west London, integrating a glass-roofed street, railways, shops and houses.
12 F. Fisher, ‘Inside London's Railway Termini, c.1870–1939’, London Journal 45:2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2019.1710033
13 K. Hetherington, Capitalism's Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 10.
14 Hetherington, Capitalism's Eye, 22.
15 Hetherington, Capitalism's Eye, 20.
16 Op. cit., 4.
17 P. Sparke ‘“Covered Promenades for Wet Weather”: London's Winter Gardens and People's Palaces’ London Journal, 45:2 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2019.1699337
18 Hetherington, Capitalism's Eye, 122.
19 M. Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (New York: Verso Books, 2009).
20 Hetherington, Capitalism's Eye, 20.
21 Hetherington, Capitalism's Eye, 29.
22 Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 136.
23 See J. Hix, The Glasshouse (London: Phaidon, 2005).
24 S. Inwood, City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London (London: Macmillan, 2005), 23.
25 Inwood, City of Cities, 9.
26 Ibid.
27 Inwood, City of Cities, 10.
28 Inwood, City of Cities, 225.
29 Inwood, City of Cities, 420.
30 Inwood, City of Cities, 448.
31 See E. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).