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Abstract
England between 1919 and 1939 experienced enormous suburban expansion. In Greater London the population grew by about seventeen percent, while the built-up area doubled in size. Thousands of shopping parades were built on suburban high roads and in estates, providing the residents of these new communities not just with a local place to shop for their daily (or more major needs) but also offering a center for local activities and interactions, both informal and formal. These parades are still a familiar feature of the suburban landscape but, until recently, both the buildings and the complex process of their development have been overlooked. Drawing upon existing histories and geographies of shopping, of the commercial property market, and of suburban development and culture, this paper examines four cases in order to bring into the foreground the network of participants and processes in the financing, designing and building of London’s interwar shopping parades.
Acknowledgements
This article expands on research commissioned by Historic England in 2013 and the authors are grateful to Kathryn Morrison, Joanna Smith and Matthew Whitfield for their assistance with their report. Their thanks, too, to the participants at the 2015 conference “Behind the Scenes: The Hidden Mechanisms of Architectural and Design Cultures,” University for the Creative Arts, School of Architecture, Canterbury, and to its organizer, Jessica Kelly. The authors are also indebted to the many local authority archivists who helped with their research; to The Open University, which in 2016 funded research leave to work on the present article; to Eleanor Gawne, for advice on sources; and to Jane Hamlett and Joanna Smith, for careful feedback on a first draft. Finally, two anonymous reviewers are thanked for constructive comments.
Notes
1 Deborah S. Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Peter Scott, The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2 Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Peter Scott, “Marketing Mass Home Ownership and the Creation of the Modern Working-Class Consumer in Inter-War Britain,” Business History 50, no. 1 (2008): 4–25, at 16.
3 Scott, Making of the Modern British Home, 93.
4 Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, The Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London: Cassell, 2002), 67–69.
5 Andrew Alexander, John Benson and Gareth Shaw, “Action and Reaction: Competition and the Multiple Retailer in 1930s Britain,” International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research 9, no. 3 (1999), 245–259, at 248.
6 For example, Lesley Whitworth, “Men, Women, Shops, and ‘Little, Shiny Homes’, the Consuming of Coventry 1930–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, Coventry, 1997).
7 Mark Swenarton, “Tudor Walters and Tudorbethan: Reassessing Britain’s Inter-War Suburbs,” Planning Perspectives 17 (2002): 267–286.
8 Jon Stobart, Spend, Spend, Spend: A History of Shopping (Stroud: History Press, 2000), ch. 6.
9 Kathryn A. Morrison, Shopping Parades (London: Historic England, 2016). Available online: https://content.historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/iha-shopping-parades/heag116-shopping-parades-iha.pdf
10 The information above is drawn from Morrison, Shopping Parades.
11 James H. Johnson, “The Suburban Expansion of Housing in London, 1918–1939,” in Greater London, ed. J. T. Coppock and Hugh C. Prince (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 149–150.
12 Morrison, Shopping Parades, passim.
13 Giles, Parlour and the Suburb; Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991); Deborah S. Ryan, “‘Living in a Half-Baked Pageant’: The Tudorbethan Semi and Suburban Modernity in Britain, 1918–39,” Home Cultures 8, no. 3 (2011): 217–244.
14 J. W. R. Whitehand, “The Makers of British Towns,” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 4 (1992): 417–438; J. W. R. Whitehand, “Commercial Townscapes in the Making,” Journal of Historical Geography 10, no. 2 (1984): 174–200; Jeremy W. R. Whitehand and Christine M. H. Carr, “The Creators of England’s Inter-War Suburbs,” Urban History 28, no. 2 (2001): 218–234.
15 F. Howkins, Development of Private Building Estates (London: Estates Gazette, 1938), 279.
16 Peter Scott, The Property Masters: A History of the British Commercial Property Sector (London: Spon, 1996), ch. 4.
17 J. C. Bundock, “Speculative Housebuilding and some Aspects of the Activities of the Speculative Housebuilder within the Greater London Outer Suburban Area, 1919–1939” (M.Phil. diss., University of Kent, Canterbury, 1974), 13.
18 For a mixture of styles, built at much the same time in a single high street, see Ed Harris, Defining Whitton (Twickenham: Twickenham Local History Society, 2011), 18–22.
19 Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Viking, 2000), 30–32.
20 A. A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900–39 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 225–228.
21 Miles Horsey, “London Speculative Housebuilding of the 1930s: Official Control and Popular Taste,” London Journal 11, no. 2 (1985): 147–159, at 156; Jack Rose, The Dynamics of Urban Property Development (London: Spon, 1985), 19–20; Jackson, Semi-Detached London, 229.
22 Harris, Defining Whitton, 17.
23 Howkins, Development of Private Building Estates, 12–13; Jackson, Semi-Detached London, 130.
24 Scott, Property Masters, 77.
25 Michael J. Law, The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 180–189, 200.
26 Howkins, Development of Private Building Estates, 12–13.
27 Ibid., 96.
28 Horsey, London Speculative Housebuilding, 150–155.
29 Scott, Property Masters, 78–79.
30 Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967), 17.
31 Ruth Durant, Watling: A Survey of Social Life on a New Housing Estate (London: P. S. King, 1939), 20–21. At Whitton, a speculative development, both the shops and the housing continued building throughout the 1930s; Harris, Defining Whitton, 18–21.
32 Andrzej Olechnowicz, Working-Class Housing in England between the Wars: The Becontree Estate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55.
33 For example, Hillier, Parker, May & Rowden, a pre-eminent commercial estate agent, and Greater London Properties Ltd, responsible for developing many shopping parades. For a full discussion of interwar investment in this sector, see Scott, Property Masters, chs. 3, 4; also Bundock, “Speculative Housebuilding,” 411–412; and Marriott, Property Boom, 13–17.
34 Morrison, Shopping Parades, 14.
35 Rebecca Preston and Lesley Hoskins, “London’s Suburban Shopping Parades, 1880–1939.” Report for English Heritage (Swindon: Historic England Library, 2013).
36 Scott, Property Masters, 48–62.
37 For the facilities offered by the multiples, see J. B. Jeffreys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 193–249; and Stobart, Spend, Spend, Spend, chs. 5, 6.
38 For Woolworth’s, see Morrison, English Shops, 244.
39 Unless otherwise noted, George Cross, Suffolk Punch (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 364–93, is the source for this case study.
40 British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol4/pp151-155 (accessed November 25, 2016).
41 City of London, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LMA/4070/03/01901/R, ACC/1280/032–3; LMA/4070/03/02704R.
42 Morrison, English Shops, 201–202.
43 LMA/4070/03/04209/R, /4210R, /4437R.
44 Scott, Property Masters, 79.
45 LMA/4070/03/06414/R; LMA/4070/03/A04513, LMA/4070/03/04857/R, LMA/4070/03/04982/R.
46 Simon Pepper and Mark Swenarton, “Neo-Georgian Maison-Type,” in Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics, 1900–1930, ed. Mark Swenarton (Bracknell: HIS BRE Press, 2008), 40.
47 LMA/LCC/VA/DD/R245.
48 Wandsworth Local Studies & Archives, Drainage Plans, 1921/1302; 1925/3128; 1927/4159; and WBC/9/1/2/404: Upper Richmond Road: Applications for new buildings and drainage plans.
49 London County Council, Becontree Tenants’ Handbook (London: British Publ. Co, 1933), 21–22.
50 Report of the Housing and Public Health Committee, March 6, 1935: LMA LCC/HSG/GEN/2/35.
51 Fred Wellings, Dictionary of British Housebuilders: A Twentieth-Century History (Trowbridge: Cromwell, 2006), 152.
52 “Ideal Property and Land Development,” The Times, May 18, 1935: 21.
53 Rose, Dynamics of Urban Property Development, 120.
54 Bexley Local Studies & Archive Centre (BLSAC), LASF/DC/4/2/441; ANBNN/A/25.
55 BLSAC/LASF/DC/4/2/441. An identical scheme was prepared for Ideal Homes’ Falconwood Park estate at nearby Welling.
56 BLSAC/LASF/DC/4/2/510.
57 The House Property & Investment Co. Ltd (HP&IC): Catalogue of Sale held by Jones, Lang, Wootton & Sons (November 1951).
58 Charles Welch, London at the Opening of the Twentieth Century (Brighton: W. T. Pike, 1905), 234.
59 BLSAC/LASF/DC/4/2/489; LASF/DC/4/2/525.
60 BLSAC/LASF/DC/4/2/527.
61 BLSAC/LASC/DC/4/3/19/1–3; LASF/DC/4/2/666.
62 BLSAC/LASC/DC/4/3/161/1–4; BLSAC/LASF/DC/4/2/489.
63 BLSAC/LABX/DC/4/1/6911.
64 BLSAC/LABX/DC/4/1/6614, /6911.
65 HP&IC, 14, 36, 61, 64, 88.
66 Morrison, Shopping Parades, 15.
67 “Filwood Park Shopping Centre,” Western Daily Press, June 15, 1938: 5.
68 Marriot, Property Boom, 18.
69 Kathryn A. Morrison, Woolworth’s: 100 Years on the High Street (Swindon: Historic England, 2015), 68.
70 A. E. Smailes and G. Hartley, “Shopping Centres in the Greater London Area,” Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers) 29 (1961): 201–213.
71 Morrison, Woolworth’s, 107.
72 For Falloden Way, see LMA/ACC/3816/P/02/0724; and LMA/ACC/3816/P/02/0633. See also Richmond Local Studies Collection PLA 04431 for a similar parade at Whitton.
73 Lesley Hoskins, Living Rooms: 20th-Century Interiors at the Geffrye Museum (London: Geffrye Museum, 1998), 21–23.
74 “Flats in St John’s Wood, London. Marshall and Tweedy Architects,” Architectural Review 82, no. 498 (1938): 221–226.
75 Morrison, Shops, 241 ff.
76 For example, Marriott, Property Boom, 17.
77 See the index of architects’ work in the architectural press, “grey books,” RIBA Library.
78 Preston and Hoskins, “London’s Suburban Shopping Parades”; Morrison, Woolworth’s, 107; Morrison, Shopping Parades, 15.