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Reviewed by:
  • The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London by Richard Hornsey, and: Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society by Frank Mort
  • Stephen Brooke
The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London. By Richard Hornsey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pp. 320. $75.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society. By Frank Mort. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 528. $40.00 (cloth).

The Spiv and the Architect and Capital Affairs explore the history of sexuality and space in post-1945 London. Building on the work of Matt Houlbrook and Judith Walkowitz, both map the asymmetrical and uneven dialectics that helped produce new social and sexual worlds by the 1960s. [End Page 535]

Richard Hornsey's The Spiv and the Architect is a fascinating study in the tensions between those who wished to forge a "socially cohesive nation" (64) in the metropolis (the "architects" of the title) and those literal or metaphoric "spivs" who continually undercut this effort. Using a dazzling array of subjects and sources, including nuclear physics, film, do-it-yourself magazines, photo booths, lending libraries, and computing, Hornsey shows how a "managed social order" (15) in postwar London was always being subverted not only by the actions of queer men but also by the way urban culture encouraged "antisocial zigzags" (107), ways of thinking about and moving through the city that confounded the staid designs and programmed rhythms laid out by urban planners. Hornsey offers some brilliant explorations of this tension in chapters on Francis Bacon's use of the photo booth, interior design, and struggles around book publishing and lending and a chapter highlighting the wonderfully mischievous imagination of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton. Hornsey's book is a highly original contribution to our understanding of sexuality and the city after 1945, not least in the way it shows how the unruly provided a central dynamic to social change.

There are many strengths to Frank Mort's Capital Affairs. The first is its attention to the relationship between space and sexuality in London. Mort argues that "sexual selfhood was . . . profoundly influenced by place as well as society" (11). His nuanced and deeply researched work on areas like Notting Hill and Soho shows how the physical environment facilitated particular sexual cultures. Capital Affairs is also persuasive on the link between consumer culture and sexual change in the 1950s. What Mort calls the "triple engines of domestic consumption"—advertising, marketing, and retail—"played a major role in restructuring sexual attitudes and personal life" (6), not least in meeting an increasing demand from a younger generation of men and women for "individualized, eroticized pleasure" (7). In these ways, Capital Affairs is a major contribution to the cultural history of London.

But some of its larger claims are less convincing. The book seeks to challenge our understanding of the "permissive society" of the 1960s. Mort characterizes this understanding as the "progressive version," which "stresses that the rise of the permissive society was a linear and directed force that erupted in the late 1950s . . . modernizing sexual behavior in ways that were socially beneficial and qualitatively different from the system of public morality that preceded it" (3). Mort attributes this view to Arthur Marwick, Jeffrey Weeks, and Lesley Hall (4), but only the idiosyncratic Marwick really offered such an unqualified version of permissiveness. Mort's argument for a longue durée of sexual change, in which permissiveness is "an extremely uneven acceleration of shifts that had a much longer period of incubation" (4), is less innovative when placed in the context of the existing literature on twentieth-century Britain, thinking of the work of Marcus Collins, Hera [End Page 536] Cook, and Claire Langhamer. Capital Affairs usefully adds to rather than transforms our understanding of permissiveness.

Other aspects of Capital Affairs invite critical questions. Mort suggests that it was not "self-consciously liberal champions of enlightened moral influence" who were the principal engineers of the permissive society but rather a "reprobate and shady cast of characters" such as "predatory sexual rakes, sophisticated pimps and manipulative young women" (5). Mort makes a compelling...

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