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Matt Houlbrook, "Songs of Seven Dials: An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dave
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Matt Holbrook about Songs of Seven, an intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London. So welcome back to the podcast.
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Matt Holbrook
Hello Dave. Thanks for having me back.
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Dave
So this is the third book that we've talked about and I think it picks up on several themes in your other books around this period in London, but also I think really kind of extends your work in new directions. And one of the ways to kind of get into that sense of where the book sits with the work you've been doing, but also its kind of unique contribution in is probably with the title and with the place that you're writing about. And I wonder if you could introduce Seven Dials for example. Like where is it, you know, particularly for people who might not live in London or might not be familiar with London. But also like what gave you the interest in writing a book about this place?
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Matt Holbrook
Yeah, of course Seven Dials is, is a really interesting part of central London that's sits between a lot of areas that are better known. So it's, it's wedged between Covent Garden and Covent Garden markets to the south, the West End and Soho to the west and then sort of north and east Bloomsbury. And it's very distinct from all of those neighborhoods but at different points in its past has often been confused with them. And it's interesting, it's. It takes its name from the seven streets that emit from the circus the dial at its very heart it looks a little bit like a hub and spokes in that kind of arrangement. It has that unusual design. It's laid out as a planned development by the politician and developer Thomas Neill here in the 1690s. And it has this unusual design really because Neil is trying to maximize street frontage and rental income and that's what gives it this really distinctive. Almost like a. Like a wheel or a star shape. Like I said. For most of its history though, it's not the grand planned neighborhood that Neil envisaged in the late 17th century. Very, very quickly by the 18th century and particularly in the 19th it becomes a notorious slum. It's almost. The name Sevendiles is almost synonymous with crime and vice and poverty and the depravity of urban life and is the kind of place that writers like Charles Dickens descend in search of the colour of poverty and the urban underworld. Later in the 19th century it becomes the haunt of philanthropists and police court missionaries, but also very earnest social investigators like Charles Booth and the social researchers who work on his survey of London life and Labour in the 1880s and 1890s. So it's a kind of an unusual area in lots of ways. I think by the time that I am interested in seven dials in the 1920s and 30s, the best way to think about it is as a kind of island that squeezed between these other different neighborhoods all around it and. But then by the tens twenties and thirties it's. It's still poor, it's still declining but it's really a kind of a rough and ready place of home and work that. That services the needs of the neighborhoods around it. So it's the kind of place where people who work in Covent Garden markets or who work in the West End or the offices of central London might find cheap accommodation. Is the place that people who've recently moved to London from across Britain or beyond find cheap, cheap accommodation or cheap, cheap commercial property as well is the kind of place where you might store theatrical props or costumes. So it's a kind of. I suppose it's an area that serves the needs of other neighborhoods around it. I mean that's Seven Dials. I mean that's my rough and ready introduction to Seven Dials. I think the second part of your question, Dave, was how I came to it.
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Dave
Yeah, very much so. What I mean, what you've just said that immediately. There's so much that's kind of obviously fascinating, but obviously as an academic historian, you know, you've got quite a lot of demands on your time. So I'm sure there are lots and lots of different projects and lots of different directions you've could have gone in. But yeah, what was it about Seven Dials that kind of hooked you with a sense that there's a story and particularly a kind of academic research story to be told here?
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Matt Holbrook
Yeah, I was drawn, I mean, it was the story that brought me to sevendials. I mean, obviously as a historian, as a writer, I'm interested or have been interested in the relationship between capital and culture, between capital and urban space. And that's something that I worked on in Queer London. I've touched upon it in different articles over the years and so Seven Dials fits with that. But with this book I was drawn back to Seven Dials by the story that's at the very heart of the book. And it's a story of a libel trial brought by an ordinary working class couple who own a cafe in what was Great White lion street in Soho in Seven Dials, sorry, Jim Kitten, who's born in Sierra Leone, his wife Emily, who's born in a really, really poor part of the East End of London who meet during the Great War, who marry and work in a series of really badly paid catering jobs for a few years until by 1921 they saved up enough money to open a cafe of their own in Great White Line street in Seven Dials. Now that's not very unusual really. Their path to self employment, their path to setting up their own business is a well traveled one for many recent migrants to London in the 19th and 20th century. But I think what is unusual is how that story unfolds. The Kittens Cafe becomes really successful. It's a popular meeting place among black and Asian Britons and amongst people from the local cosmopolitan, local community in Seven Dials. But it quite quickly attracts the attention of local property developers, local politicians, local police, and in particular a really, really unpleasant right wing muckraking newspaper called John Bull, who has officers probably 5 minutes walk away from the cafe on the other side of Seven Dials. And John Bull over a period of four or five years published a whole series of really unpleasant articles about the Cairns Cafe, kind of really, I suppose, really muckraking articles where they present the Cafe and its owners as. As a hold of vice, as a sort of citizen denizens of the underworld. Now, again, that's nothing unusual, but the thing that really, really stands out is the next step. And that's that Jim and Emily Kitten sue the newspaper, John Bull and his publisher, the Adams Press, for libel in a case that's eventually heard at the High Court of justice in February 1927. And I think it's that story, a story that sort of starts on the streets of a working class, cosmopolitan neighbourhood in central London, but then ends up really moving all the way up to the High Court of Justice on Strand and to generating questions. The Conservative Home Secretary in Parliament that really drew me into Seventh Dials. It's really unlikely in lots of ways. There are many cafes like the one open by Jim and Emily kitten in the 1920s and the 1930s. Newspapers publish countless unpleasant racist articles in this period. But for this cafe and this couple to end up in the High Court of Justice and to end up being discussed in Parliament, I think is really unusual. And I wanted to understand with the book what had to happen for that, that process to take place. And trying to answer that question, how did the cafe end up being discussed in court or in Parliament? I think that was what took me back to Seven Dials. And the more that I looked, the more that I followed up the leads over the years, the more I realized that actually the story of the libel trial and the story of the Kittens arrival in Seven Dials and the rise and fall of their business is really the story of what we would now call gentrification. The process through which modern London was remade in the 1920s and the 1930s. And the conflicts that eventually explode in court and in Parliament are actually rooted in the conflicts over urban space, over the city that take shape on the tiny back streets of a place like Seven Dials in the decades after the Great War.
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Dave
Let's maybe stay on that point, actually, and then we can come back to the liable trial itself. Because one of the things you do in the book is you sort of talk about the way that Seven Dials on the one hand is fairly kind of prime real estate on the edge of central London. And there are various property developers, various kind of characters who are making quite a lot of money from transforming the city. But at the same time, there's a moment where Seven Dials is constructed. And I think this is a kind of exact quote as a kind of a problem to be solved. You know, it's not just here is a Story of, you know, real estate speculation, but also a kind of, you know, moral crusade. And I wonder if I could maybe ask you a couple of things about that. The first thing is what's going on with some of the gentrification, some of the property developments and then we can maybe come back to kind of narratives around basically like racism, anti kind of immigrants and I guess you'd call it kind of anti poor sentiment in the press. So yeah, what's the story of kind of finance and property first?
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Matt Holbrook
Yeah, I think there are two big things happening after the First World War. One is sort of straightforwardly political and the other is about politics and property, politics and capital. I think the political one first, the big context. What happens in Seven dials in the 20s and 30s is the ambition of local politicians, politicians and planners from Holborn Metropolitan Borough Council to basically to raise Seven Dials to the ground and redevelop it. So their ambition, which is driven by their desire to increase ratable value to rental value and to increase the prestige of the area, their ambition is to flatten Seven Dials and to turn it into something like a grand plaza that will rival Piccadilly Circus. So instead of this little tangle of narrow streets and tenements and warehouses and factories, it's going to be a series of office blocks or department stores organised around huge thoroughfares moving down from a new bridge across the Thames at Charing Cross straight through into towards the north of London. And those plans for the redevelopment of Seven Dials are introduced in 1920 as the Seven Dials and Drury Lane Improvement Scheme. It's the kind of grandiose political vision, utopian vision of politicians and planners that we would become used to after the Second World War. So it's all about, I think, turning Seven Dials from a place of a cosmopolitan place of home and work into a place of commerce and of leisure. No one ever really says the quiet part out loud, but the plan to work rests on the assumption that the 5,000 people who live there will be moved somewhere else. And there are very few journalists asks where they're going to go to and the answers they get are kind of non committal and vague. So there's a kind of political process going on here. Holborn Council just want to kind of demolish Seven Dials and build again. That then comes into, comes and sits alongside, I guess the kind of the capital driven strand of gentrification. So I said before, like Seven Dials sits on the edge of the West End and the edge of Covent Garden markets and, well, on the one hand, the Covent Garden market lobby have run out of wholesale and warehouse space, so are looking to expand in the decades after the First World War. So for them, Seven Dials is somewhere you can find cheap commercial property to build new warehouses and to solve the problems that the market faces until it moves south of the Thames in the late 1960s. But at the same time, there's a kind of. There's a huge construction boom, a huge redevelopment boom in the 1920s, where the West End of London is transformed. It's the kind of the supply side of the process that we usually collapse into cliches of the roaring twenties or the hedonism of the 1920s. So nightclubs, restaurants, theatrical entrepreneurs, property developers, all are increasingly looking east and into previously unfashionable working class neighborhoods because property values in the traditional precincts of the West End are becoming too expensive. And so that's the context in which theatrical entrepreneurs start looking at Seven Dials as a suitable location to build new theatres or to redevelop a hotel to meet the needs of modern London in this period. Now, the interesting twist in the story is that by the end of the 1930s, neither of these visions of gentrification succeed. And that sets the context for Seven Dial's decline after the Second World War. But both of them, the kind of the political and the property, the capital vision of what Seven Dial should be, are really crucial in shaping what happens in the area in the 20s and 30s.
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Dave
Yeah, and at the same time, I mean that point about where will the residents go? And the book, it's worth saying, has a very sophisticated analysis of the relationship between things like media and both visions of the kind of future but also the question of pressures from capital about property developments in the area. But really the kind of construction of the place, as you know, here is a site that is central, but it's somehow full of immigrants, full of vice. It needs to be, you know, quite ruthlessly policed. It is, as I've mentioned, you know, a problem that has to be addressed is something that eventually kind of underpins the court case, but also, I think, is central to how the place is sort of seen. And I wonder if you could sort of bring that to life, really. What was the sort of dominant media narrative of the place, in contrast, actually, to the, you know, the experiences of residents themselves?
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Matt Holbrook
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the basic point is that. That you have to call a slum into being in order to justify your grand schemes for its demolition. And that's something that you can see really clearly in the rhetoric of the Seven Dials and Drury Lane improvement Scheme. Now, by the time the scheme is introduced in 1920, more judicious observers of urban life have begun to see how the Seven Dials is becoming increasingly respectable from the 1890s onwards. Really, it's moving away from the worst excesses of its status as a place of poverty in the 19th century. But the improvement scheme recycles this rhetoric of Seven Dials as a Victorian slum, an anachronistic black spot in inverted commas at the heart of central London. It's a place where the housing is decaying, where there's no open space for schools, where it's kind of unfit to bring up the citizens of the New Jerusalem in the 1920s and 30s. And you can see quite clearly that this rhetoric about the decay and the decline of Seven Dials is being used to justify the plans for its demolition and reconstruction. The kind of particular version of this. There's a sort of a new version of this that appears in the middle of the 1920s, when newspapers like John Bull begin to identify Seven Dials as what they call one of London's black colonies. And that is. Well, in some ways, that description reflects the reality of what's happening on the streets of Seven Dials. It's the kind of place where recent migrants like Jim Kitten can find a place to set up a cafe, to live and to build what is, by the mid-1920s, a really popular social hub for black and Asian Britons, for students or musicians or theatrical workers and so on. And it's also the kind of place where men and women from across British Empire or from the United States can find cheap accommodation, cheap furnished Rooms to live in. I think though, the idea that Seven Dials is a. Is a black colony is also a kind of a moral panic in lots of ways. Seven Dials does not have a huge residential black and Asian population in the 20s and 30s. It's the kind of place where, where. Where people come from elsewhere, other neighborhoods across London and beyond to, to socialize in the cafes and the restaurants, basically. So the IDEA that, that seven DARs is a, is a, is a black colony is a kind of. Yeah, it's an artifact of the moral panic over race and citizenship that follows the Great War. It's a kind of a newspaper construct that on the one hand channels or draws upon the hysteria around the black and Asian presence in Britain after the riots or race riots or the racist riots of 1919 is the kind of construct that takes up, that weaves a whole series of kind of police arrests or police raids of places like the Cairns Cafe into a story of black criminality and black vice. And I think what it does by the middle of the 1920s, the idea of the black colony as this sort of inverted commas, alien presence at the heart of central London almost works to racialize the problems of urban poverty and the slum. So it's not just Seven Dials as a place of poverty and slum housing that needs to be removed. It's Seven Dials as a racialized place of poverty and slum housing.
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Dave
How do we get from, as you've said a couple of times, a sort of quite standard set of tropes in. I mean, I was going to say media then, but you know, media now as well. All you have to do is look at the front page of many newspapers. But how do we get from there to the libel trial? I mean, probably we do need to know a bit more about Jim and Emily and their kind of story. But at the same time it's also a kind of fascinating leap, isn't it, from I guess, the kind of everyday experience of an area being stigmatized, demonized. But then the act of getting involved in a libel trial.
- [25:16]
Matt Holbrook
Yeah, I mean, the connections. I think in some ways the connections are really simple and really proximate that around about the same time that the Kittens take a cafe in Great White lion street in. I think probably in the late summer of 1921, a hotel magnate and property developer called Bracewell Smith acquires a share, acquires a significant stake in the Shaftesbury Hotel, which is right across the road from the Kittens Cafe. It's a really narrow street and so the kind of proximity of these two very different businesses is really striking. I think if you stand on what was Great White lion street, what's now Mersey street today, you get a sense of the kind of claustrophobic intimacy in which this story takes shape. The thing about Bracewell Smith is that he's in the process of becoming extraordinarily wealthy, but he's also becoming extraordinarily politically well connected. So by the time, by the early 1920s, he's become a member of Holborn Borough Council, he's elected to the London County Council. Later on he will go on to become Lord Mayor of Holborn, a Conservative MP for Dulwich, and eventually he's Lord Mayor of London and Chair of Arsenal Football Club. And I think that's the kind of, this is the kind of the figure or the, the connections that Bracewell Smith embodies is what makes this story more kind of something out of the, out of the ordinary for Bracewell Smith as he's trying to redevelop the Shaftesbury Hotel. That's part of the process through which he's trying to build his, acquire the capital that he needs to develop his property portfolio across London. So he's also investing in hotels like the part the Grand Park Lane Hotel Piccadilly. He's acquiring or developing blocks of mansion flats, billiard halls, all of these kind of things across London. But for him, the Kittens Cafe is a real problem. The people staying at his hotel can look out of the window, the dining room or the dance hall through these big place, class place, plate glass windows, and they can see this, this bustling, busy, pretty loud cafe across the street. A cafe frequented by residents from across Seven Dials just looking for somewhere to eat. But a cafe that, that draws, draws men and women from across the British Empire in the United States. And I think Brace Will Smith increasingly, as far as I can see, comes to see the Kittens Cafe as a problem. It's offending his customers, it's offending his sensibilities, but I think crucially it's limiting his ability to develop his business. And it's Smith who exploits his political connections to mobilize local residents, local authorities, police, national government against the cafe. So he's almost certainly the driving force behind a petition signed by at least some owners of other businesses around the cafe. I think he also is. It's probably Bracewell Smith who is talking to John Bull, inviting them to, to, to expose or to write about the cafe. And eventually it's Bracewell Smith, who uses his connections within London's Conservative Party to lobby the. The Conservative Home Secretary, Sir William Johnson Hicks, to take action against the cafe. And so it's that, I think the interesting thing about Seven Dials, the interesting thing, even just about Great White lion street, is that you can see in really precise, vivid detail the connections between politics and property and power. And you can see the traces of what's happening behind the scenes to create these conflicts.
- [29:08]
Dave
I mean, you can say really clearly in the trial as well, which is kind of like, I was going to say, the centerpiece of the book, but it is literally the middle chapter of the book. And I mean, there's so much we could talk about. And that kind of sense of the broader social, political, economic structures that underpin so much of the discussion is really kind of clearly there. And at the risk of sounding flippant, you know, to give a spoiler alert, the kittens do not win the libel trial. But I almost got a sense from that fourth chapter that it's not only they don't win it on the facts, as it were, but they don't win it because we're at a point in social, political, economic kind of moment where ideas about race, the British Empire, poverty, slums, who has a voice and who doesn't, the way lawyers are quite kind of useless. And again, I got the impression, like, quite racist towards their own clients all sort of come together to mean that almost they were never going to win the libel trial. And at the risk of kind of saying, tell me absolutely everything about it, I wonder if you could sort of sum up both what happens in the court case and then maybe why it matters and why it's kind of important to the book's analysis.
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Matt Holbrook
Yeah, I mean, the fundamental issue with the libel trial is that it is impossible to hear the story that the kittens want to tell in the winter of 1927. So the story that they want to tell is that they are British citizens drawing upon English law to defend their good name, their reputation and their business. A business that's been absolutely ruined by the articles published in John Bull. I think the other thing that they're trying to do, which is less explicit, is they're trying to use the resources of the law of libel to defend a black social hub at the heart of London. And that doesn't work in this case, but it hints at different possibilities for anti racist, anti colonial activism, urban activism after the Second World War, and it doesn't work well at all effectively. One of the things that Happens almost as soon as the trial begins is that it's the Kittens themselves who are being scrutinized and judged. So their argument is, the Kittens argument is that their reputation has been ruined by the racism and the racial discrimination of a British newspaper. In turn, John Bull, the Adams press plead justification of their articles and they call a string of witnesses. Bracewell Smith in particular, local police officers, but also a handful of white British business owners from in and around Seven Dials who basically testify as to the. Who provide really lengthy testimony as to the kind of the crimes and the vice and the disorder that they've seen taking place in the cafe. And these are the kind of stories that can be heard by a judge and jury and newspapers in the 1920s. They're reported at great length in the press. They clearly acquire a lot of credence among the judge in the case. Conversely, when the Kittens call other local. Other residents of Seven Dials to give evidence on their behalf, when they themselves testify on their behalf and they talk about how, you know, they've worked really hard to save up the money for the cafe, they work really hard to manage it. They're really careful in maintaining their accounts. They produce the account books to show what they do. And they also have. They have. Have other people giving evidence on their behalf. Marcel Vatro, who's a French wine waiter who lives upstairs, talks about the kind of respectability of a cafe. The Sierra Leonean jazz musician, jazz drummer Frank Kobe Dyer Kennedy sort of talks really powerfully about how the cafe is a kind of social hub. It's like a meeting place for men like him. The only difference is that this is the kind of place that the police come in and clear them all out. So it tells this kind of really powerful story of the importance of the cafe in sustaining a black presence in central London. But the problem is that the politics of race, the moral panic around race after the First World War, the influence of Bracewell Smith and the kind of authority that he projects in court and probably behind the scenes in this period, it means that whatever the Kitten sages cannot be, cannot be heard. It's not just that they lose the case. They're really. They're left out of court. By the end of it. The presiding judge can't resist getting in on the joke and just really this whole series of unpleasant asides and jokes at the expense of Jim Kitten. So they're laughed out of court, they lose the case, they have to pay costs. And, you know, it's a. It's a really tragic story. It's a story of, of a successful business that then collapses because of the attention, the scrutiny they come under from, from ambitious property developers and local politicians. Jim Kitten's forced to declare bankrupt the cafe is, is, is, is sold. I think it manages to stay open for at least a year after the libel trial. But in the first few months of 1928, there are a couple of different things that happen on Great White lion street that I think are really suggestive and really important. The one is that for a tiny little street in Seven Dials, there is an unusually large number of arrests for public order offenses, usually drunk and disorderly, but those sorts of, of public order crimes. It's not immediately obvious from the court registers, but when you start to follow up the names of the people being arrested, you quickly realize that a lot of them are black or Asian. So there's clearly that after the trial, after the Kittens have gone bankrupt, the police harassment of the cafe increases quite strikingly. The other thing that happens is round about the same time, almost exactly the same time, the whole of the triangular block on the corner of Seven Dials that the Cairns Cafe is part of is is sold at auction as a development opportunity, an investment opportunity. And I think these two things, police harassment plus the sale of property in the area, that's, I mean, when I, when I made that connection, it felt a little bit like the smoking gun. Like this is what's happening. This is the context for the conflicts that are taking place around the Kittens Cafe. Right here.
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Dave
Part of the, I suppose next stage is really where you've kind of pitched yourself as, as a historian and where I guess the kind of story of the 1920s and 1930s returns to quite kind of familiar ground. The sense of not just Seven Dials, but kind of like London moving on from, from this moment and later on in the book you talk about the building of the new theater, the idea of Seven Dials becoming like, you know, sort of a fashionable part of central London. And essentially the kind of story of this sort of cosmopolitan area on the edge being really kind of forgotten. And there's some great photographs in the book, so there are demolitions and kind of urban development that occurs in sort of slightly haphazard kind of ways. And I'm interested in a sort of kind of what happens next. How do we move, I guess from that moment of the trial being a window into some of the conflicts and constructions of the area to a point where by the time we're getting to kind of, you know, certainly after the Second World War, Seven Dials is, you know, quite a kind of like, well, to do quite well thought of part of London, even if it is still kind of edgy and on the edge.
- [39:27]
Matt Holbrook
Yeah, I think, I mean, the crucial thing is that the grand plans, the ambitions for Seven Dials go nowhere. They don't work. So the Seven Dials and Drury Lane improvement plan of the early 1920s falls apart really because of, well, partly because of the conflict between different authorities, different jurisdictions within the politics of London, partly because of the crisis in local government funding at the start of the 1920s. That means there's no money to invest in these big schemes. So that kind of political vision for what sevendile should be just collapses. It's occasionally sometimes resurrected all the way through to 1927, 1928, but by the end of the 1920s the ambitions of Holborn Borough Council have shifted elsewhere. That they're really interested in Bloomsbury and the founding hospital site to the north when they're thinking about, about the prestige of the borough. So that's one thing. And then I suppose the second thing is that the commercial visions for Seven Dials don't have the effect that they're Expected to. I think the revealing moment is, is in autumn 1930 when the Cambridge Theater is opened right at the heart of sense of Seven Dials. And it is, it is. What's the best way of talking about it? It is a kind of an architectural sensation when it's opened in 1930, that it's seen as. Seen as an example of cutting edge British architecture, British modernist architecture in this period, that it's a kind of modern architecture, British modern architecture that will rival that of, of Germany from for example. And it's a kind of. It's a monument in steel and concrete that's clad in Portland stone that looks in almost every illustration and photograph like a lighthouse that's bringing light, that's beaming light over the decaying slums of Seven Dials. And actually that's the way it's talked about at the time. Theater critics, architectural critics, the owners of the theatric, the theatre itself, talk about the Cambridge Theatre as the development that is going to bring mzernity to Seven Dials, that's going to bring Seven Dials into the West End of London. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. Partly it doesn't work I think because of the nature of Seven Dials and the location of the theatre. Partly it doesn't work because there are a number of high profile shows at the Cambridge that, that just don't go anywhere. Partly I think it just doesn't work because of the kind of the planning blight that settles upon Seven Dials after the failure of the improvement scheme. So there's just not the same kind of. There's not the same transformative energy that you see in the 1920s. So by the 1930s, the kind of. The grand plans for Seven Dials have gone to all intents and purposes. Local politicians are not particularly concerned with the area beyond managing the problems of slum housing and poverty by using the Housing Acts, by inspecting properties, by trying to encourage landlords and letting agents to improve them, by scheduling the worst properties for demolition and clearance. While all that's happening, then the neighborhood is just continuing to decline. Tenements are being converted into warehouses or offices, tenements are being condemned and the housing that's remained is increasingly in poor condition and is being increasingly subdivided to fit to provide accommodation that the people working in Covent Garden or in the precarious, those kind of precarious service sector jobs in the West End actually need. So Seven Dials is still, it's still the kind of place that people moving to London from, from. From Europe or to the empire or beyond can find accommodation. But it's really, it's increasingly a place in decline. Its decline is accelerating physically in the late 1930s and that's the kind of context for the problems, the sense that Seven Dials and the wider Covent Garden neighbourhood are in complete crisis by the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, I mean, it's.
- [44:20]
Dave
Worth saying, I mean walked literally right the way through it on Sunday afternoon on the way somewhere and it's very much not like that now. And there's probably another book actually to be written about by the time we get to the kind of 60s and 70s, how it ends up being re. Gentrified I think probably is the right term given the kind of struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. And I wonder if we might wrap up really with a reflection on what is the place like now and what I suppose your analysis means for the place now. Yeah, even if you can see traces. But actually I'd say the kind of broader points around stories and media, the transformation of central London, questions of race and poverty are still with us.
- [45:23]
Matt Holbrook
Yeah, I mean the story. If you start to look at what happens in Seven Dials and Covent garden in the 60s and 70s, in some ways you get a really striking sense of deja vu. That the conflicts around urban space and redevelopment that you see in the 20s and 30s play out again in the 60s and 70s. Except this time it's the Greater London Council that proposed demolishing the whole of the Covent Garden and Seven Dials neighborhood and redeveloping it. The difference is Whereas in the 20s and 30s the local opposition from the Labour Party, the housing activists and paternalistic conservatives doesn't work in the 1960s and the 1970s there's a much more successful coalition that forms between local business owners, local residents, housing activists and gentrifiers around the Covent Garden Community association who oppose the demolition and the clearance of Covent Garden and are enormously successful in those terms. They're enormously successful in having the area designated as a housing action area. They have a large number of the buildings in and around Seven Dials listed by what's now historic England. And I think what happens from the sort of 80s and 90s onwards is that in some ways Seven Dials becomes a kind of model for heritage led regeneration. And that then changes a bit in the 90s and 2000s when that vision, that kind of bottom down model of gentrification is I think almost superseded by a turbocharged new wave of capital investment that makes Seven Dials the kind of neighborhood that it is today. And Seven Dials, I mean, you've alluded to this a couple of times. They've. Now Seven Dials today is shishi. It's ritzy, it's consumerist. It's the kind of place where every time you walk through it there's a different queue of young people moved by TikTok or Instagram influencers to queue outside the latest food joint that's open there. It's a place you can go to buy really nice posh coffee, expensive cheese, veggies, beard oils, all of those kind of things. Most of it I think is owned now by Shaftesbury Capital. They're kind of the big landlords in the neighborhood. And I don't know, I mean, I, I have very mixed feelings walking through it now. I think, I think the buildings, the street layout, all of these things would have been instantly recognizable to residents of Seven Dials or politicians or planners from a century ago. But I think what we've lost in the process is that we've kept a place, but we've lost the people. And any trace of this bustling, vibrant, cosmopolitan, working class community that lived and worked and played at the heart of central London has, has gone to a large extent that, that we've kept the place, but it's been at the expense of the people. And the story of Seven Dials, of contemporary Seven Dials is of, of a place that, that feels to me increasingly exclusive. And you know, those kind of problems of, of precarity of poverty, of poor housing, of the kind of the marginality of people who've recently moved to London, those things have not gone away in the past century. Those problems have not been solved. And if anything they're more pressing than ever. But I think what has happened is that they've been pushed out of central London neighborhoods like Seven Dials. And I don't think that to me doesn't really feel like a kind of positive, positive process that we've turned a place of home and work into a playground from outsiders who are coming in from somewhere else.
- [49:40]
Dave
In terms of your own work, I mean, we were sort of talking before we started recording of There are lots of potential sequels in this book. And thinking about not just actually the themes, but some of the characters that were definitely kind of further things you might be kind of mulling over, but thinking about the kind of different ways you've approached the 90s and 20s and 30s, have you got, I guess, another further new angle you're thinking through or working on or actually are you thinking about moving away from the period entirely?
- [50:20]
Matt Holbrook
I don't think, no. I think I'm going to stay with the 1920s and the 1930s because I've got. I feel like I've got, you know, that one of the things that I'm trying to do in this book is to use the story of a place and its people as a way of rethinking, rethinking how we understand the 1920s and 30s and their place in modern British history. I think, you know, on the one hand we're used to. Used to using these familiar cliches of the Roaring Twenties or the long weekend when we think about the two decades after the Great War. And I don't think those labels do justice to the complexity of the period and to the way that I think in many ways, much of what we recognize as modern British life came into being in that period. So I'm interested in the book and still in thinking about the 20s and 30s as the moment at which London and which Britain became modern. But I'm also interested in thinking in different ways about how that process of change takes place. And I suppose one of the neighborhood, one of the places that I've got really interested in since I finished the book is a property at number five lumber court, Seven Dials, now Tower Court. And in the early 1920s, it's. It's occupied. It's run as a boarding house by a woman called Nellie Reggiani, who's born in South London and her second husband is from. Victor Reggiani is from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. And five Lumber Court is a boarding house run by Nelly Reggiano. It's a place of, you know, it's a place on the margins of urban life. The people who write about Nelly Rabbat Giani talk about her looking out of the kitchen window anxiously in case the rent collector is knocking at the door. But if you look at the 1921 census and you sort of see who's living who Nelly Reggiani is renting rooms to, they're almost entirely young, working class women, women in their late teens or early 20s who work in the Lambert and Butler cigarette factory or are milliners or tailoresses or working local shops or clean local offices, or in one case, a woman called Kanye Toon, who is a dance instructress at Brett's Dance Academy on Charing Cross Road. And I think, I think what struck me, what really interested me about Lumber Court is that on the one hand, it gives us a different way of thinking about the modern woman of the 1920s. The flapper isn't just about fashion and consumerism and hedonism. And we can see that in this boarding house. There's a story here of, of young women moving to London to take advantage of new opportunities to work in the service industry, in the manufacturing industry and looking for somewhere, looking for somewhere cheap and safe, central to find accommodation. And there's that kind of story in here, but there's also a sort of story of the, of the hardships that go along with that. When the 1921 census is taken, it's June and it's. This is the moment at which the post war economic crash is at its deepest. When we think about post war unemployment, we usually think about the industrial north and South Wales and Scotland. But the same thing happens. Unemployment increases among service workers in central London this time. And at least three of the young women who live in Nellie Ruggiani's boarding house are running record their employment status as unemployed or out of work in 1921. I think where this takes us is to a different story of the making of modern London, the making of modern Britain, which isn't about pleasure and hedonism, but it's about the exploitation of the labor of young working class women and migrants like those who find their way to Seven Dials. And it's also about the expropriation of property, businesses, places of home and work in these kind of neighborhoods on the margins of the West End. And I think my answer's taking me back into Seven Dials, Dave there. But I think, I suppose what I'm trying to say is I feel like I've still got unfinished business trying to find new ways of telling the story of the 20s and 30s and their significance in modern British history.