The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
already know, and also what I take to be the limitations of those big sweep
historians who think they’ve got this whole twentieth century of ours pretty
well cut and dried already. It is a way of not painting by numbers, and of
demonstrating, I hope, that some of the most telling cultural responses to
modernity within England have been of a kind that many conventional historians
would dismiss as eccentric.
It never occurred to me, although I suppose I could have guessed,
that booksellers and publishers would be inclined to think of this as just another
name for “local history.” But there has been quite a lot of that. You can
be a serious and proper historian of the welfare state or of the postwar city
without ever feeling the need to read a book like A Journey Through Ruins,
which is surely only about a small patch of East London. In their method,
these books also fall short of the expectations of cultural studies, so it is true
to say that they fall between stools, and that is a pity because I think they
have a coherence—even if I’m not trying to suggest that everybody should
write this way. But in the end I can’t think of a category they belong in either,
perhaps because I was trying to find a kind of analytical prose, one that
moves in and out of history, and that seeks to define the cultural fixes of
twentieth-century English life. So the truth is that these books exist in the
publishing equivalent of a “non-place”—although I’m glad to think that
many of the people who do read them don’t find that to be such a problem.
JK: Did you find the fact that A Journey Through Ruins was centered on London
to be a problem?
PW: That book came out at a time when the whole of Britain seemed to
loathe London. Thatcherism was seen as a kind of war on the North because
of the destruction of heavy industry and the general exacerbation of the
north-south divide. Certainly, the book was anything but overwhelmed by interest
in places like Newcastle and Edinburgh. So I think one has to conclude
that the book was pretty heavily defeated by reality—certainly, nothing for
Bill Bryson to worry about.
JK: When we talked earlier about people getting confused by the books, I
was imagining that you take a certain, almost malicious pleasure in confusing
them.
PW: I think there is a case for books that work like little mental mines, detonating
preconceptions as you go. And in one sense I did want to engender a
sense of confusion with A Journey Through Ruins. I wanted to portray how
we think about the inner city in just that sort of way: the concrete reality of
people’s lives being all wrapped up in myths, fantasies, and fictions of the on-