English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

Introduction

A Changing Landscape

For the writer, artist, architect, or social commentator, 1930s England was superficially a beautiful country. Traumatised as it certainly had been by the carnage of World War I, it remained in many areas materially unscathed by the conflict: a fact that was all too evident to those who had returned home from Flanders and found that the idealised “England” that they had carried in their thoughts was, to a large extent, still there. For some, the country’s survival was a sign of its favoured status: God had spared it, if not the lives of so many of its young men. The church clock at Grantchester was still standing at ten to three, even if Rupert Brooke, like so many of his generation, was dead and buried in “some foreign field.”¹

For many people, however, life in post–World War I England was materially and socially harsh, arguably worse than it had been before 1914. Declining agricultural wages led to a depopulation of the countryside and a drift towards towns and cities by those in search of work, but the industrial foundations upon which the might of the Victorian empire had been built were far from stable. As the effects of a global Depression permeated every aspect of the nation’s economic life, the social costs of industrialisation, so often written off as the necessary cost of progress, became impossible to ignore. When coal mines or shipyards closed down, whole