Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-1939

Front matter

Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-1939

Charlotte Wildman

Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39

Part Three Catholic Urban Culture 6 The Cathedral That Never Was?

Conclusion: The Second World War and the Challenge to Interwar Urban Culture

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

21 49

83 112

143 167

203 208 260 285

Table 3.1

Table 3.2

List of Illustrations and Tables

‘Houses - Old and New’ 32 Source: Manchester Corporation, Centenary Celebration of Manchesters Incorporation: Official Handbook to the Exhibition

of Civic Services May 2-7 1938 (Manchester: Percy Brothers,

1938), 84.

‘A Vision of the Future of Kingsway’ 35 Source: Liverpolitan, January 1935, 15.

‘Modern Manchester’ 41 Source: Manchester Corporation, How Manchester Is Managed (1938), inside cover.

A mannequin parade held aboard the Cunard liner Franconia during Liverpool's Civic Week in 1925 63 Source: Getty Editorial Image 2668798.

Clothing shops, Liverpool 1922-38 87 Source: Kelly’s Trade Directories, Liverpool 1922, 1932, 1938.

Proportion of shops in Liverpool expressed as percentages, 1922-38 87 Source: Kelly’s Trade Directories, Liverpool 1922, 1932, 1938.

Clothing shops, Manchester 1922-38 89 Source: Kelly’s Trade Directories, Manchester 1922, 1932, 1938.

Numbers of advertisements placed by department stores,

1920-38 99 Source: Liverpool Echo and Manchester Evening News,

1920, 1932, 1938.

Number of department store advertisements in the Manchester Guardian, 1920-38 100 Source: Manchester Guardian, 1920-38.

Table 4.1

Table 4.2

List of Illustrations and Tables

Department store advertisements in the Liverpool Echo, 1920-38 Source: Liverpool Echo, 1920-38.

G. H. Lee’s sales and customers, 1925-36 Source: John Lewis Archive Box 180/3/a.

Graph depicting gap between customers and sales at G. H. Lee’s, 1925-36 Source: John Lewis Archive Box 180/3/a.

Window shoppers outside Messrs Kendal, Milne & Co in

Deansgate, Manchester, 27 August 1931 Source: Getty Editorial Image 99174504.

G. H. Lee’s number of customers in relation to department, 1933 Source: John Lewis Archive Box 180/3/a.

Number of participants in the Catholic processions, 1903-34

Source: Salford Catholic Diocese. The Authorised Official

Programme of the Catholic Whit-Friday Procession (Manchester), 1895-1934.

St Michael’s Roman Catholic parish, Ancoats, c. 1910s Source: MCL LIC Ref m69150.

Roman Catholic walk, c. 1918 Source: MCL LIC Ref 1313026.

St William's procession, Angel Meadow, Salford, 1926 Source: MCL LIC Ref N4101.

Children of Mary, Catholic Whit procession, 1927 Source: MCL LIC Ref 905039.

Image of scale model of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, designed by Edwin Lutyens, at Museum of Liverpool.

Copyright, Mike Peel

Temporary altar during the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone, 1933

Source: Stuart Bale Archive, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1613-114.

ix x List of Illustrations and Tables Copyright

Permission for use of Figures 6.1 and 6.2 has been granted by the Dean of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King. Copyright for the image of the scale model of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, designed by Edwin Lutyens, at the Museum of Liverpool is held by Mike Peel.

Material from Chapter 1 appears as “Urban Transformation in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-1939, The Historical Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 119-25 and Chapter 5 appears as ‘Religious Selfhoods and the City in Inter-war Manchester’. Urban History 38, no. 1 (2011): 103-23. Permission granted by Cambridge University Press.

List of Abbreviations

DC Daily Courier

LCR The Cathedral Record: the Official Organ of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, or Liverpool Cathedral Record

LAA Liverpool Archdiocesan Archive

LHC Liverpool Housing Committee

LCL LSC Liverpool Local Studies Collection

LPM Liverpool Post and Mercury

MCL LSC Manchester Central Library Local Studies Collection

MCL LIC Manchester Central Library Local Image Collection

TH CM Manchester Town Hall Committee Council Minutes MEN Manchester Evening News

MG Manchester Guardian

NYT New York Times

PRO National Archives

NW SA OTC North West Sound Archive Oral Testimony Collection

SDA Salford Diocesan Archives

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making and I have relied on the support, assistance and cajoling from many over this period. First, I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded my doctoral thesis, which provided the foundations of this monograph. I have received much support from my intellectual home, the Department of History at the University of Manchester. In particular, I thank Bertrand Taithe and Max Jones who were supportive and kind PhD supervisors. I thank my thesis examiners Frank Mort and Simon Gunn, whose feedback helped to shape the book into its revised form. I have found the History department to be a great place to work and I thank my all my colleagues and students, past and present. Outside of Manchester, Matt Houlbrook and Chris Otter have been kind enough to read and offer invaluable feedback on various forms of my work. Thanks also to the anonymous readers whose suggestions helped to sharpen the aims and scope of this monograph. At Bloomsbury, I thank Frances Arnold, Emily Drewe and Emma Goode for their help and assistance in bringing this book to publication.

I benefited from the rich expertise from many archivists and librarians throughout the country. I spent a great deal of my time researching this book at Manchester Central Library and Liverpool Central Library, and my gratitude goes to all their archivists and librarians. Major programmes of refurbishment have transformed both of these libraries in recent years and they are certainly wonderful places to work now, although I do not quite have the same ‘colourful’ stories from my early days of research. Elsewhere, I am grateful to Judy Faraday at the John Lewis Archive, Father David Lannon at the Salford Diocesan Archive and Meg Whittle at the Liverpool Archdiocesan Archive, along with staff at the University of Manchester Library, British Library, University of Liverpool Library, the National Archives, University of Sussex Special collections, Getty Images and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

Thanks to all my friends who have kept me entertained and distracted, particularly Justine Gordon for her kindness and her British Library hospitality, and Katharine Melvill whose friendship continues from afar. Katherine Davies, Lucinda Matthews-Jones, James Mansell and Jo Laycock have understood the

Acknowledgements xiii privileges and pressures of academic life and remain great sources of advice. My family, Margaret, Jim, Tommy and John, first fuelled my interest in history through frequent trips to Birkenhead Library (along with an illicitly acquired copy of a Kelloggs history book...) and have remained supportive of my academic career, many thanks to them and also to my extended family. The memories of my grandmothers, Veronica Cruikshank and Irene Wildman, two fashionably dressed young women in 1930s Liverpool, undoubtedly sowed the seeds of this project. Finally, I dedicate this book to Daniel and Daphne, Mario and Metta, who have kept me company, reminded me that there is more to life than academia, and continue to cheerlead me through the tough times with tea and cake, the NBA and the occasional mug of wine - thank you for standing close by.

Introduction: Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39

In 1924, architectural expert Sir Charles Reilly proclaimed that ‘Liverpool, like New York, is soaring skyward. In all parts of the city splendid new buildings, such as the Adelphi Hotel, reflect the influence of the best modern American architecture. The face of some leading shipping streets is thus being gradually transformed, and the city’s business houses bear witness in stone to the stability of their trade.’ Reilly referred to the new commercial architecture, which included the Adelphi Hotel (completed 1914) and the shipping and business buildings under completion, such as the India Buildings (1924-32), built by Liverpool architect Herbert Rowse, who had studied under Reilly. In Manchester, civic leaders made similar declarations that emphasized the city’s vibrancy and in 1926 the Lord Mayor, Sir Miles Ewart Mitchell, argued that Manchester was ‘more than the “cotton metropolis,” as some like to call it. Instead, he claimed, ‘it is a city into whose being are knit threads as diverse and coloured as go to make up the like of any city. In it are practised almost all the trades and industries ... it draws the material of its staple industry from the Far West and sends its finished goods to the Far East, and deals indifferently with all that lies between.”

By drawing attention to the vitality of the cities’ architecture and commercial stability and diversity, these depictions are at odds with the generally negative images of both Liverpool and Manchester between the two world wars. More familiar images of interwar Liverpool, for instance, stress the city’s ‘dampness, the dilapidation, the darkness.’ The city’s experience of poverty and unemployment as a result of severe challenges to its port trade marked it out as one of the worst suffering between the two world wars. By 1929, 597 per 10,000 people in Liverpool received poor relief, ‘a higher percentage than in any other city.* By implication, living standards were notoriously poor in parts of the city. In 1931, a survey on poverty and housing by Liverpool University Settlement Society found dwellings with ‘defective roofs ... decayed windows were common features. The ceilings of the windows were stuffed with rags. The furniture was

2 Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39 often completely unsuitable for the rooms, and .... (the) mattress served as a general ground by day and a ... resting-place by night Liverpool was not the only city to suffer from problems of deprivation and The Times highlighted the ‘grave position’ of both Liverpool and Manchester in 1921, where unemployment ‘grows steadily worse’ as a consequence of the decline of the cotton industry.® In Manchester, the inability to revive its ailing cotton industry ensured the city’s unemployment problem remained ‘extremely grave’ throughout the 1920s.’ There, the unemployment rate of insured workers hit 18.7 per cent by 1931.8 Again, living conditions were significantly low in parts of the city and in 1923 even the city’s Town Clerk admitted ‘it would be difficult to find worse houses in England’

Such images of urban decay and poverty remain associated with Liverpool and Manchester’s interwar experience and overshadow the level of innovation and redevelopment that occurred in these cities between the two world wars. Although poverty, unemployment and social divisions persisted in both cities, a focus on these problems neglects the level of dynamism and civic ambition displayed by local politicians, planners, businessmen and religious leaders. Rather, the statements by Reilly and Manchester’s Lord Mayor reflect a wider culture of boosterism and investment in urban redevelopment. Local politicians responded to economic, political and social turbulence by investing in ambitious programmes of urban redevelopment. Urban transformation reinvigorated civic, consumer and religious local cultures and this book stresses the overall ambition, modernity and vitality of interwar Liverpool and Manchester. Liverpool and Manchester witnessed pioneering developments in civic design and architecture; in retail and shopping; and in cultures of religion and popular worship. Their analysis draws out the complexities of local and regional modernity more generally in interwar Britain.

Historicising Liverpool and Manchester's twentieth-century experience

A reassessment of interwar urban culture challenges historical accounts of Liverpool and Manchester’s twentieth-century experience, which emphasize these entrenched narratives of urban decay and deprivation. Writing in 1982, economic historian Sheila Marriner suggested that Liverpool was ‘synonymous with vandalism, with high crime rates, with social deprivation in the form of bad housing, with obsolete schools, polluted air and a polluted river, with chronic unemployment, run-down dock systems and large areas of industrial dereliction. Similarly, Manchester's image ‘is invariably gloomy’ as ‘twentieth-century changes have created a sense that the city and its people have been deserted and abandoned" In particular, Liverpool and Manchester’s interwar experience remains central to this image of their twentieth-century demise. This period of British history remains indelibly associated in both popular memory and scholarship as being as an era of contradictions, contrasts and disunity, placing these cities firmly on the negative side of a prosperity versus poverty debate. In his classic English History, for example, A. J. P. Taylor wrote, “The nineteen-thirties have been called the black years, the devil’s decade. ... Yet, at the same time, most English people were enjoying a richer life than any previously known in the history of the world ... the two sides of life did not join up.”

These historical accounts reflect contemporary representations of the period, which contrast unemployment marches and dole queues, especially in northern industrial towns and in South Wales, with flappers and glamorous mill girls in ‘cheap artificial stockings, cheap short-skirted frocks, cheap coats, cheap shoes, crimped hair, powder and rouge.” In contrast, the writings of J. B. Priestley were key in shaping perceptions of the affluent South and famously depicted ‘the England of arterial and by-pass roads, filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.'* By implication, northern industrial towns and cities, including Liverpool and Manchester, remain overly clichéd as sites of urban decay.

Central to these stereotypical images of interwar Britain is the emphasis on an economic north-south divide. Seminal accounts by economic historians such as Derek Aldcroft, John Stevenson and Chris Cook, and Tim Hatton stress the higher levels of unemployment in northern towns and cities in comparison to the prosperous South and the North's relative inability to recover from the economic depression of 1929-31. Perhaps more long-lasting in influence, however, is the notable work of contemporary left-wing intellectuals who used Lancashire, in particular, as a canvas with which to engage readers with important contemporary issues relating to class and poverty. Most famous is

George Orwell and his depictions of working-class life in Wigan remain indelibly

4 Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39 linked with Northern England’s interwar experience. Orwell’s descriptions of Wigan stressed a place of filth and poverty, hunger and deprivation, such as, ‘As you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dustbins and lines of granny washing and half ruinous W. C.s?* Yet Orwell was not the only left-wing intellectual to use Lancashire as a way to communicate wider social problems to their audiences. The research movement Mass Observation, like Orwell, charted working-class life in Lancashire by undertaking an in-depth study of Bolton and attempted, with mixed success, to infiltrate daily life and with the aim of using their findings to bring about political reform.” As we shall see, Mass Observation often misinterpreted or misunderstood working-class culture. In doing so these commentators helped to manifest the perceived ‘otherness’ of the northern working classes, which shapes wider historical discourse about a north-south divide between the two world wars.

Ina similar vein to the writings of Orwell and Mass Observation on Lancashire more generally, contemporary autobiographies and popular literature set in interwar Liverpool and Manchester also stressed narratives of deprivation and urban decay. Helen Forrester’s autobiographical novel, Tuppence to Cross the Mersey, recalled the horror she felt arriving in Liverpool in 1930 after her middle-class family fell on hard times. “How terrified I had been!’ she wrote, ‘How menacingly grotesque the people had looked ... grim and twisted, foulmouthed and coarse ... I had to make what I could of this grimy city and its bitterly humorous inhabitants and share with them their suffering during the Depression years"? Forrester’s account presented the impact of unemployment on Liverpools already precarious port and shipping trades, exacerbated by wider economic problems and the Wall Street Crash. In 1932, 44 per cent of Liverpool’s insured labour force in shipping was unemployed and, along with underemployment and low wages, unemployment caused widespread problems

19 ¢ throughout the city.” Trish Slummy, Pat O’Mara’s account of life in the Scotland Road area of Liverpool, a section of poor housing between the city centre and docks associated with the city’s Irish migrants, described the poverty and deprived living conditions inhabitants faced because of these problems. Homes were ‘like cells in a penitentiary, he wrote, where ‘the customary domestic procedure ... was to drink and fight?”

Depictions of Manchester also stressed its social problems. The city’s reputation as the ‘shock city’ of the industrial revolution ensured many commentators and writers charted its poor living standards from the early nineteenth century, perhaps most famously in Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class (1845) and the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, including North and South (1854) and Mary Barton (1848). Such depictions of Manchester and the surrounding area continued after 1918 but became especially impactful following the decline of the cotton industry, which had ‘made’ Manchester. In 1835, for instance, 90 per cent of the British cotton industry was concentrated in Lancashire and Cheshire and the Manchester's weekly trade rose from £1 million in the 1850s to £10 million by the 1880s.” Yet the collapse of Lancashire's cotton industry after the First World War was sudden, catastrophic and irreversible and by 1939, cloth exports amounted to only one-fifth of their 1913 levels.” After 1918, foreign competitors were able to provide cotton at far cheaper prices and Lancashire not only lost its monopoly but struggled to compete in the global cotton market. Whereas Manchester exported 1,500 million pounds of cotton in 1912, by 1930 this fell to just 450 million and continued to decline until 1950.”

The decline of Manchester’s cotton industry provided an important background to literature set in the city. In his 1932 novel Love on the Dole, Walter Greenwood’s influential tale of poverty and frustrated ambitions, highlighted the problems of unemployment faced in neighbouring Salford. Greenwood describes streets ‘where blue- grey smoke swirls down like companies of ghosts ... jungles of tiny houses cramped and huddled together ... where men and women are born, live, love and die and pay preposterous rents for the privilege of calling grimy houses “home”’.** Similarly, Howard Spring’s 1934 novel Shabby Tiger depicted Manchester as a lifeless, dark and lacklustre city. It described ‘the black facades of Portland Street warehouses, grim and strong as prisons, silent, at that hour, as the grave ... the University’s inky mass piled against the last of the sunlight like education's redoubtable Bastille ... a street of mean houses and mean shops.” These contemporary writings are important because they helped to nurture a powerful image of a north-south divide and contributed to an overly stereotypical image of poverty and urban decay in Liverpool and Manchester. They drew attention to the problems they faced without addressing the steps taken by the local government to address them, leaving a strong influence on historical debates.

Key historical debates

This book offers an alternative interpretation of Manchester and Liverpool's interwar experience than the narrative usually presented by contemporary

6 Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39 novels and autobiographies and most historical scholarship. The re-examination of Liverpool and Manchester’s interwar experience offered here contributes to a number of key scholarly debates relating to twentieth-century British history. First, although class is not utilized as the main organizing category, its centrality to twentieth-century British history ensures its relevance here, and, indeed, many existing studies of interwar Britain are organized around class experiences.” Secondly, although issues relating to class and living standards in interwar Britain have particularly attracted significant scholarly attention, historians’ interpretations remain divided. For instance, a number of studies emerged in the late 1970s that stressed the interwar period as one ofa rise in living standards and general prosperity for the working classes.” This scholarship sought to locate the roots of the post-war age of affluence in the 1930s and, in doing so, stressed the rise of mass consumer culture and a general increase in living standards during the period 1918-39.

By contrast, in the 1980s, accounts of poverty and class experience in interwar Britain emerged in response to the 1979 Conservative victory and the advent of the Thatcher era. For instance, historian Margaret Mitchell made an explicit link between histories of class and poverty in interwar Britain and a broader protest against Thatcher's policy of state retrenchment. Mitchell suggested the political context of the 1980s ensured the study of the interwar period had ‘assumed a new urgency. Mitchell cited the similarities between Britain’s economy in the 1930s and the 1980s, and the emerging evidence that linked unemployment with poor health.” Like Orwell and Mass Observation before them, we can see that accounts of poverty and unemployment in interwar Britain by left-wing scholars remained important as ways to challenge the prevailing political situation.

In the early 1990s, influential scholarship by Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding responded to studies that stressed interwar affluence by highlighting the continued centrality of poverty in working-class life after 1918. Both in their individual research and in their jointly edited collection, Workers’ Worlds, they offer rich analyses and understandings of working-class culture in Manchester and Salford during the early twentieth century.” In his monograph Leisure, Gender and Poverty, for instance, Davies stresses that although retrospective narratives suggest poverty was less severe after 1918, ‘accounts of working-class life during the inter-war decades are still laced with references to poverty, and the visual symbols of poverty, so familiar in accounts of the Edwardian years, such as jam-jars used as cups and raggedy dressed children, still appear frequently in descriptions of the 1930s.*° Davies shows that an examination of poverty and gender roles needs to be central to an assessment of working-class culture and although this monograph is interested in how urban cultures fostered forms of shared identity other than class, Davies’ findings and approach illuminate this study’s interest in urban redevelopment in interwar Liverpool and Manchester. Building on Fielding’s Class and Ethnicity, which examines working-class Irish migrants in Manchester and Salford, for instance, this research is interested in how the transformed urban environment provided opportunities for individuals to express other forms of community identities, including Catholicism, in order to offer a more nuanced and detailed assessment of how other social identities shaped and interacted with class.*!

This monograph also contributes to more recent histories of class, including Selina Todd’s The People, which demonstrates the stress unemployment and poverty placed on working-class communities interwar, but also draws attention to the problems caused by government policy that reflected their mistrust of the poor. Todd highlights the continued importance of class as a conceptual framework throughout twentieth-century Britain and emphasizes its importance as an analytical category for British historians.” Similarly, Ross McKibbin’s Classes and Cultures draws attention towards the continuing divisions and differences between Britain’s class groups in the early twentieth century. McKibbin suggests that the middle classes dominated culture and politics between the two world wars, whereas the working classes remained divided and fractured.” Yet Jon Lawrence's recent research re-examines debates about working-class affluence and, in doing so, points to the gap between official and vernacular understandings of social class in twentieth-century Britain. For Lawrence, the period was one of change for class identities but he emphasizes the agency of working-class people in shaping and changing their worlds: ‘Working people, in their great diversity, remade their lives consciously from the bottom up across the middle decades of the twentieth century. In the process, they dissolved many of the intellectual and political constructions imposed upon them about what it meant to be “working class”.** Examining the way in which civic, consumer and religious urban cultures in interwar Liverpool and Manchester helped to offer individuals different forms of shared identity, my research contributes to wider understandings of how class might intersect with other forms of collective identities in regionally specific ways. An analysis of urban redevelopment and modernity in these cities illuminates the ways in which individuals contributed to a refashioning of their own selfhoods through their participation with a range of urban cultures.

8 Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39

As this rich scholarship attests, class rightly remains the key organizing category in academic scholarship on Britain’s twentieth-century experience. Nevertheless, looking at other forms of identity alongside class divisions offers a different perspective of Liverpool and Manchester’s interwar experience. In particular, the interwar period has received increased scholarly attention over the past decade and there has been a shift towards thinking about connections, rather than differences, between individuals, classes and communities.” Historians of gender, such as Liz Conor in The Spectacular Modern Woman, for example, argue that the rise of mass media, film and consumer culture across Western industrial societies led to a reshaping of feminine identity, closely linked to the emerging visual culture.” Conor also contributed to the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, which claims that the Modern Girl, defined by her apparent disregard of traditional female roles, emerged as a global phenomenon between the two world wars.” This scholarship suggests that the characterization of the interwar period as a divided and fractured one might need further investigation, particularly by thinking about the connections between individuals and communities, and perhaps between women more specifically.

An interest in the relational connections between individuals, alongside a focus on urban redevelopment, urban culture and experience as a way to understand identities reflects a broader shift in urban history. Traditionally, urban historians concentrated on understanding the mechanics of the city, like transport, public health and governance.” However, the ‘spatial turn’ asks historians to think of space not as a passive background but as an active actor.” Key texts by Edward Soja, David Harvey and Denis Cosgrove highlighted the importance of landscape and environment in understanding the relationships with social identities, but also contributed to rich debates about the use of ‘space’ over ‘place, which continues among urban historians.“ The influence of Michel Foucault, in particular, significantly reshaped approaches to urban scholarship and encouraged historians to think about the city as a site of power, leading to a number of accounts that considered the use of light, architecture and mapping as tools of governmentality in the mid-Victorian city.“ Similarly, the work of Henri Lefebvre remains influential, especially as his 1974 work, The Production of Space, distinguished between spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces.” These texts ask historians not only to consider the relationship between identities and urban space but also to think carefully about the conceptualization of urban space itself.

The book develops ongoing debates about spatial analysis and applies a cultural urban history lens to the case studies of Liverpool and Manchester as two of Britain’s most important provincial cities. It provides a counterpoint to recent influential cultural histories of London, particularly those by Frank Mort, Lynda Nead, Judith Walkowitz and Matt Houlbrook. Influenced by these theoretical approaches, their scholarship has woven together material relating to images and representations of the city with sources concerned with urban experience as a way to consider broader social and cultural change and the dialectal relationship between individuals and the city. In Queer London, for example, Houlbrook writes: ‘Male sexual practices and identities do not just take place in the city; they are shaped and sustained by the physical and cultural forms of modern urban life just as they in turn shape that life?“ This book offers a much-needed shift away from a focus on the metropolis and applies the cultural-historical framework utilized by Houlbrook et al. to assess the experience of two of Britain’s key cities. It shows that Manchester’s and Liverpool's redevelopment changed the way people used the cities, which, in turn, reshaped the urban environment. Investment in comprehensive public transport systems, for example, physically altered the urban fabric and changed the parts of the cities people visited, drawing in increasing numbers of people into the city centres for leisure and pleasure, as well as for work.

In doing so, it suggests that Liverpool and Manchester's transformed urban environments became important for individuals, especially women, to perform a range of shared identities that obscured class divisions. Like the men who frequented Houlbrook’s Queer London, there was a reciprocal relationship between identity and urban space in Liverpool and Manchester. Linked to its contribution to urban history more generally is the book's interest in planning and regeneration. It builds on recent literature that highlights Britain’s vibrant cultures of urban planning, particularly during and after the Second World War. However, by drawing attention to the innovative approaches to planning and civic design in interwar Manchester and Liverpool, it demonstrates continuities between post-war trends, which undermines the narrative of the ‘New Jerusalem and of post-war ‘reconstruction* At the same time, the ambitious programmes of urban redevelopment that emerged in interwar Liverpool and Manchester drew on international approaches to design and cutting-edge trends in urban planning that reflected a wider international culture of planning that emerged in the early twentieth century.” Urban planning and civic design were, from its formative years, international and collaborative. For example, the Town Planning Conference in London in 1910, credited as a seminal moment in the development and professionalization of planning, was ‘a self-consciously international’ meeting.** The conference brought together 1,400 planners and architects and papers delivered in French, Dutch, German, Italian,

10 Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-39

Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, to audiences from most European countries, Australia, the United States and Canada. At the conference banquet, Daniel Burnham, famous for building one of the first American skyscrapers and as the designer of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the City of Chicago Plan (1909), heralded the international spirit of the town planning movement. Burnham declared: ‘Men have come all over to realise a universal thought. This town planning has spread all over the world. In America there are hundreds of city planning commissions, in Germany there are hundreds of them. ... We hear of them in Japan, in Australia. The idea has become universal?” Yet historian William Whyte stresses the ‘international indifference’ towards the conference, arguing that architects were driven by national concerns rather than transnational issues and suggests that ‘the 1910 Conference was big news - and of immediate importance - almost nowhere outside Britain.*? Nevertheless, its significance lies in the openness of planners in Britain to ideas and trends pioneered abroad and the international conversations that took place between civic designers during the early twentieth century. British and American planners made frequent visits across the Atlantic throughout the period, which contributed to a dynamic culture of international exchange.” As we shall see, planners and architects in Liverpool were especially enthusiastic about engaging with wider trends and approaches, which shaped the nature and style of the city’s redevelopment. Nor were international trends limited to the redesign and regeneration of the urban fabric, and urban transformation produced new forms of consumer and religious cultures that were similarly outward-facing and drew on wider trends, particularly from across the Atlantic.