Imperial visions of healthcare: Public health infrastructure and the shaping of the urban environment in England, 1920-1955

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The research will critically examine how discourses of public health and imperialism intersected to shape urban space in England between 1920-1955. Existing scholarship on the links between public health, the built environment and the British empire has focused predominantly on the interwar period and the role of modernist architecture in creating "a new landscape of health" (Darling, 2007) at a time of imperial and industrial decline. These analyses tend to rest on well-known modernist buildings such as the Peckham Health Centre and Finsbury Health Centre (Darling, 2007; Gruffudd, 2001; Overy, 2007), forgoing a wider consideration of how imperialist public health discourse shaped and renegotiated urbanspace in England in these years. While scholars of the post-war period have addressed how migration from former colonies was assumed to threaten the moral and urban fabric of Britain (Betts, 2020; Bivins, 2015; Waters, 1997), this work could be extended by examining visual representations of the lived spaces of ex-colonial migrants in popular publications during post-war reconstruction. I will build on David Gilbert and Felix Driver's contention that understanding the influence of cultures of imperialism on the urban landscape forces scholars to address the "architectural, spectacular, representational and lived" dimensions of urban spaces (Gilbert and Driver, 1998). I will offer fresh perspectives on the figuring of imperialism through these spatial forms by exploring the extent to which public health became a vehicle for the expression of a more domestic, inward-looking vision of empire in the first half of the twentieth century. My thesis will entail sustained consideration of therole played by photography in naturalising imperial sentiments and ideologies through the benevolent paternalism of public health provision. Historic England's Topical Press Agency (TPA) collections and the Picture Post and Illustrated London News archives will be used askey sources to frame this exploration.