This paper examines the impact of gender on planners’ knowledge of the home in the decade between the Blitz and the Festival of Britain.  As the home became a key location for postwar reconstruction, experts increasingly focused attention on men’s use and experience of domestic space and the possibility of changing masculine practices through planning and design.  Science and technology, sociology and interest in people’s everyday lives shaped planners’ own masculinities, their attitudes towards other men and ideal visions for modern living.  Yet, in reality, planning projects struggled to bring together middle class planning knowledge and working class domestic practices, raising a number of questions about gender, class and the home in mid-twentieth century England.

Kevin Guyan is in the final year of a PhD in History at University College London.  His research explores how planning experts, including architects and sociologists, used the design of domestic space to produce new performances of masculinity in England in the 1940s and 1950s.  He is from the North East of Scotland and works as the Student Engagement Coordinator for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department, a project that provides a platform for PhD students to share their research with non-academic audiences.  Kevin tweets @kevin_guyan.

With introduction and comment by:
Mark Micale
IHS Fellow, University of Texas at Austin
and Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Profile: www.history.illinois.edu/people/msmicale

Sponsored by: Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History; Center for European Studies