Matt Houlbrook

'Queer London' explores the underground gay culture of London during four decades when homosexual acts between consenting adults remained illegal. The author discovers how queer men made sense of their sexuality and how their lifestyles were affected by and in turn influenced the life of the metropolis.

Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957

Queer London

The untold story of a remarkable neighbourhood and the battle to define modern London. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Seven Dials was one of London’s most diverse neighbourhoods, home to migrant and working-class communities, bohemian clubs and cafes. But business leaders and city planners had other ideas. Beginning with a rancorous libel trial of 1927, in which a Sierra Leonean café owner and his wife confronted the racist newspaper that destroyed their business, Matt Houlbrook reveals the surprising history of this remarkable neighbourhood. He traces how tensions that simmered on the streets and finally exploded in court betrayed the politics of urban ‘improvement’ and the ‘colour bar’. Underlying the trial was a series of troubling questions that would define Britain in the twentieth century – about race, class and the boundaries of belonging, gentrification and the kind of city London would become. Imaginative, powerful and deeply moving, Songs of Seven Dials is an important new history of London in the 1920s and 1930s.

An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London

Songs of Seven Dials

Sarah Newman

This collection shows the importance of a comparative European framework for understanding developments in the popular press and journalism between the wars. This was, it argues, a formative and vital period in the making of the modern press. A great deal of fine scholarship on the development of modern forms of journalism and newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has emerged within discrete national histories. Yet in bringing together essays on Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland, this book discerns points of convergence and divergence, and the importance of the European context in shaping how news was defined, produced and consumed. Challenging the tendency of histories of the press to foreground processes of ‘Americanisation’ and the displacement of older notions of the ‘fourth estate’ by new forms of human interest journalism, the chapters draw attention to the complex ways in which the popular press continued to be politicized throughout the interwar period. Building on this analysis, the book examines the forms, processes and networks through which newspapers were produced for public consumption. In a period of massive social, political and economic upheaval and conflict, the popular press provided a forum in which Europe’s meanings and nature could be constructed and contested. The interpersonal, material and technological links between newspapers, news corporations and news agencies in different countries served to define the outlines of Europe. Europe was called into being through the circulation of news and the practices and networks of the modern mass press traced in this volume. This publication is highly relevant to scholars of the history of journalism and cultural historians of interwar Britain and Europe. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

The Press and Popular Culture in Interwar Europe

Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making. The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics. Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.

The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook

Prince of Tricksters

Harry Cocks

This book offers an overview of approaches, methods, recent work and major debates in the history of sexuality. The two decades since the publication of Michel Foucault's seminal History of Sexuality have witnessed both a proliferation of empirical and theoretical historical studies and an increasing divergence in approaches to the writing of histories of sexuality in Europe and North America. Yet while these centrifugal trajectories have been identified in many edited collections, there has been no coherent attempt to address, or draw together, this diversity of practice and methodology. This collection aims to do just this, drawing on contributions from a range of scholars, each examining the past, present and future of the exploration of sex, as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon.

Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality

Rowena Hillel

Victoria Iglikowski

Rachael Lennon

For much of the twentieth century being openly gay would frequently lead to prosecution and imprisonment; this guidebook seeks to tell the important story of some of the clandestine LGBTQ+ spaces that were raided and closed by police in London during this time. Photographs, court reports, police papers and witness statements on five different clubs of the era were selected from The National Archives' extensive collection to tell the story of these places and the people that inhabited them. The documents reveal great detail and insights into club culture and the everyday prejudices facing the homosexual community at the time.This guidebook is part of the National Trust's and The National Archive's programmes to explore and celebrate themes of gender and sexuality in 2017 as part of the nation's commemoration to mark 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality.

London Club Culture 1918-1967

Queer City

Cooling Out: Has the World Changed, or Have I Changed? -- Notes -- Index

Matt Houlbrook

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