Month: November 2018

On 19 November I was pleased to present at the symposium Imagining City Futures Across Disciplines, a Turku Institute of Advanced Studies (TIAS) event co-organized with SELMA, in cooperation with the Association for Literary Urban Studies.

The title of my paper was ‘Zoning versus Private Action: Envisaging Urban Futures in Twentieth-Century St Louis and Houston’. The point was to look at twentieth-century projections of the future and ask how this could become material for deepening our thinking on the futures of twenty-first cities. In terms of imaginative place, as proposed in Deep Locational Criticism, the effort in this specific case is to focus on regional intersections and not on a centre versus periphery model. The specifics of the Mississippi and Gulf Coast regions of the USA are vital here.

My study focused on specific planning texts of St Louis and Houston produced between the 1920s and the 1940s. It put these into dialogue with other views of the cities concerned. For St Louis, these would include the memoirs and poetic views of the city which I described in earlier presentations on it given this autumn (including those of T.S. Eliot, Henry Armstrong, and former residents of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex). For Houston, these included a 1940s guidebook to the city and the 1990s view of it given by the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst, who wrote of an approach to it as one along which cars:

career […] to the gathering rhythm of power pylons, used car lots, motels, the cacophony of billboards selling burgers, judges, vasectomy reversal, everything exposed and unashamed, the great aesthetic shock of America in all its barbarity and convenience (Hollinghurst, in GUST 1999 collection)

Cornerstones of the method include the study of city personality, the establishment of city typologies including those identifying specialized cities such as ports or leisure-focused cities, and the examination of text types not commonly thought literary, via techniques of literary analysis.

City plans are profoundly imaginative, even fictional, texts. St Louis, driven between 1915 and 1950 by the single-minded visions of Harland Bartholomew (1889-1989), differs profoundly from Houston, where official zoning was rejected in the 1920s and the general plan of the city that emerged in the 1940s was focused far more on facilitation than direction, above all through the improvement of the road network.

Image at top: from The Major Street plan for Houston and Vicinity (1942), public domain (archive.org).

On Saturday I presented at the Modernist Studies Association in Colombus, Ohio, via Skype. Many thanks to organizer Sarah Fedirka, chair Courtenay and co-panelist Elizabeth Evans. It worked surprisingly well, on the whole, although reading my paper out without seeing the room and just trusting that someone was clicking through the slides in the right order at the other end (they were) was a novelty. I was able to participate in the Q and A well too: not seeing who was in the room made it easier to focus on the words of a question.

The title of the paper was ‘Holborn Inhabitations: Fragile Geographies of London’s Italian “Colony”, 1877-2017’.

Here are the first few paragraphs:

In 1877 Adolphe Smith wrote that that while ‘[m]ost persons are aware that there is an Italian colony at Saffron Hill, it is strange how few visitors ever penetrate this curious quarter’. In the text of Street Life in London, written to accompany John Thomson’s incredibly vivid and pioneering works of street photography, Smith produced sketches following in the footsteps of Dickens’s persona as Boz.

140 years later, shortly before his death at the age of 95, the London organized crime boss Bert Rossi told a ghostwriter, ‘I’ve kept my money, live in a nice part of London. Who’d have thought an Italian boy from the Saffron Hill slums would end up living next door to Boris Johnson?’ In these words, Rossi taps into Saffron Hill’s close-to-legendary reputation as a London slum district. It is a reputation that stretches stretching back far earlier than Rossi’s birth thereabouts in 1922, indeed beyond Dickens (in Oliver Twist, Fagin’s gang is based on Saffron Hill) as far back as the early-eighteenth-century. Then the ‘Thief-Taker General’ Jonathan Wild had a house on Saffron Hill in which he was said to dispose of bodies by dropping them into the waters of the River Fleet via a trap-door, and to have escape routes leading to Clerkenwell, on the eastern side of the river. An inn, the Old Red Lion, survived into the mid-nineteenth century, by which time it seemed a shameful yet fascinating relic of an earlier London: needing removal but also transmission via illustrated record.

The houses of this narrow north-south artery, crammed between the City of London to the east and Holborn to the west, backed on to the Fleet River or rather ditch. It was no doubt a physically repugnant area at least until the 1840s when today’s Farringdon Road was cut through the area and the Fleet hidden away in a sewer.

My paper works with a long timescale of modern and migration. This begins half a century before Smith and Thomson produced Street Life in London when Italian political exiles began choosing the city as somewhere to live outside the reach of tyranny, and indeed reaching back to the turn of the nineteenth century heyday of the actor and comedian Joseph Grimaldi. The memory of this legendary clown was used to romanticize the area by a survival of the era of high modernism writing in the 1970s, Sacheverell Sitwell.

The images show, from above, the entrance to St Peter’s Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road and, below, the blue plaque commemorating Joseph Grimaldi on Exmouth Market, EC1.