What connections existed between governance and misrule in 1940s and 1950s London? Who defined those relationships, and what social and sexual consequences did they generate? Why did the masculine protagonists of unruly urban life appear center stage in so many contemporary debates about the condition of England, and what resources did they themselves draw on to fashion their own identities and desires? This is the ambitious bundle of questions that Richard Hornsey brings to his wide-ranging cultural history of the postwar metropolis, a study that is symbolized by the twin figures of the spiv and the architect, two linked icons of English urbanity.

One of the most productive features of Hornsey’s take on London is the fields of society and culture that he brings together in suggestive and often surprising relationships. Although his account of spivs and professionals reviews some well-documented and often-studied material, it also tracks some much less familiar urban encounters as well. The book opens by reexamining how the doyens of the English planning profession, Patrick Abercrombie and John Forshaw, defined the metropolitan built environment as a legitimate object of public management in the influential County of London Plan (1943) and in related policy documents. Abercrombie’s wartime intervention into the urgent problems of social reconstruction—quite literally in the heat of the Blitz—is well recognized by historians of London and social geographers alike. What is commendable about Hornsey’s analysis is the way he explores the specific moral project at the heart of the planner’s vision for the city, which lasted well beyond the moment of Luftwaffe bombing and the political pressures of the 1940s. Literally and figuratively, the County of London Plan projected a distinctive morality of everyday life in the capital by defining people and matter in and out of place. Its ground rules were civic participation and communitarian responsibility, a form of soft power that was echoed and reinforced in related ventures such as the Britain Can Make It exhibition staged by the Victoria and Albert Museum three years later. Urban space was used at once imaginatively and prescriptively to lay down particular “choreographies of compliance,” as Hornsey aptly terms them (57). Planners offered London’s population a principled if austere vision of city living, based on a mix of rational design and social welfare. Such policies touched a chord in many parts of the metropolis: among a cross-party alliance of national and local politicians, among the crowds who flocked the exhibitions and displays presenting a future vision for the capital, as well as in local working-class communities bombed out in Bermondsey and Stepney.

The subsequent chapters of the book track the way that a wide variety of masculine social actors—principally homosexual men, but also wide boys, bachelors, creative artists, and even potentially husbands in newly valorized companionate marriages—negotiated these civic routines and, more important, explored their irregular and disruptive possibilities. Hornsey’s chapter on the “perversity of the zigzag” nicely describes the spatial dynamics of this process, which frequently involved men hijacking London’s official or commercial spaces for transgressive purposes. It should come as no surprise that the impetus for this alternative reading of the city is the growing body of cultural and historical scholarship that has recently opened up the English capital to queer readings and mappings. Queerness, in its usage by Hornsey (following historians Matt Houlbrook, Matt Cook, and Chris Waters), not only describes the way that homosexual men became a major object of national anxiety in 1950s Britain via the press, the metropolitan police, and official inquiries like the Wolfenden Report (1957); it also carries more expansive and ambitious connotations. Characters and settings that were defined as socially marginal became symbolically central to forms of governance and public culture. Hornsey’s interconnected figures of the spiv and the pervert (set against the high-minded austerity of the architect) encapsulate the expansive possibilities and dangers of queer London in the 1950s. Both characters were media-produced icons, both were defined as antisocial in their consumption habits, and both were seen to disrupt class boundaries by their cultural and sexual liaisons. Yet postwar English popular culture reveled in the suggestive and alluring possibilities presented by these urban types. Hornsey provides a series of insightful readings of pulp fiction, consumer advertising, and the quintessentially English film genre of Ealing comedies to reveal how queers and perverts shadowed mainstream culture and at times disrupted its dominant messages and meanings.

But the spectacular cultural cuts, jumps, and homologous readings that Hornsey makes in arguing his case throw up some unresolved problems. At key moments, the empirical historian in me wanted a greater sense of verification for the claims that he was making. For example, when Hornsey argues that strong connotations of queerness bubble below the surface of the film The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), I wanted to know how this can be substantiated: solely via a subversive textual reading of the comedy or by discussing the film’s production context or audience responses? Similarly, when Hornsey uses illustrations from the do-it-yourself magazine, the Practical Householder, to reveal the homosocial delights of the laboring male body, I remained skeptical about assertions that were confined to glossing images on the page.

Much more convincingly argued are the twists and turns whereby homosexual men such as Peter Wildeblood, Francis Bacon, Joe Orton, and Kenneth Halliwell forged distinctive versions of sexual selfhood in the public and private arenas. Moving from the languages of civic responsibility favored by Wildeblood, through Bacon’s efforts to represent himself in his own photo booth portraits, to Orton’s pornographic defacing of books in Islington public library, Hornsey provides a telling account of the resources that these men drew on to verbalize and visualize their sense of sexual difference. This is Hornsey’s most significant contribution to the history of London’s unruly life because he raises key questions about how sexual identities are made and lived. Spivs and their partners in crime provide a valuable way into exploring these issues.