Overview

Through the analysis of surviving archival traces, this book constructs a history of the imagination and memory of the town of Peacehaven. Built as a speculative development atop iconic chalk cliffs on the Sussex Coast and marketed as a garden city by the sea, the estate quickly attracted adverse publicity. Influential voices such as the Bloomsbury group’s Virginia and Leonard Woolf, architect and writer Clough Williams-Ellis and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England soon began to criticise it as a blot on the rolling, pastoral downland. Instead of reading and appraising Peacehaven’s story in a polarized way, this book breaks new ground by critically interpreting visual representations and commissioned photographs of the Estate and re-evaluating propositions from its inception, which aspired to secure improved public health and home ownership in direct response to the negative impact of industrialization and WWI. Focusing on the interwar period and tracing mutating agendas, the book investigates contested marketing and construction narratives through Histoire Croisée methodology and its intercrossings with memory and the imagination. By combining visual and creative research methods with oral history, multi-layered narratives of place come into focus. The study tracks the visual programme of the developer’s in-house magazine, Peacehaven Post, alongside previously underexplored blueprints, photographs, postcards and promotional guidebooks, and considers the garden city narrative as a form of social Utopia. Garden city ideals are once again evoked in debates as a potential solution to the ongoing national housing shortage, giving this research additional urgency as new large-scale redevelopment erases many of the few and fast disappearing original landmarks.

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9783110735208

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Reviews

Interview with the author Julia Winckler for Latest TV. Fabricating Lureland is a fascinating journey through the history of Sussex's pioneering Garden City. It draws on a wealth of archive material and personal recollections to uncover the development of the town from its post-WW1 origins through to the present day. It is generously illustrated, and conveys both the hopes and fears which this bold experiment prompted among residents, campaigners--and even celebrities. - John Leaman, Brighton, author and data analyst Die Autorin hat eine persoenlich-biographische Beziehung zu Peacehaven. Davon ausgehend gelingt es ihr - mit eindrucksvollem und uberaus vielfaltigem Archivmaterial, in Kombination mit Oral History - das verandernde Image der Stadt nachzuzeichnen und greifbar zu machen. Es ist eine grandiose Microstudie, die wissenschaftliche Massstabe setzt. Dabei kommt vor allem zum Ausdruck, wie fruchtbar Bilder als Primarquellen in der ethnografisch-historischen Forschung sein koennen - wenn man sie methodologisch sinnvoll im wissenschaftlichen Kontext verwendet. Die Arbeit ist deshalb ein Paradebeispiel fur die Visuelle Kulturwissenschaft: Ohne Beruhrungsangste und Animositaten folgt sie transdisziplinaren Massstaben und halt insofern ein grosses Spektrum an wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven bereit. Sie ist eine Bereicherung fur alle, die sich in fachubergreifender Hinsicht mit dem Phanomen der Visualisierung im Kontext der kollektiven Erinnerung und des kollektiven Vergessens beschaftigen. Damit ist die Arbeit wissenschaftlich-methodologisch ebenso im Kontext der ethnografischen Forschung uber die modernen sozialen Netzwerke und medialen Echokammern zu sehen. Sie liefert hierzu wertvolle forschungspraktische Grundlagen. - Dr. Ulrich Hagele, Center of Media Competence - ZFM, Universitat Tubingen

Author Information

Julia Winckler, Principal Lecturer, University of Brighton, United Kingdom.

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