Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century by Leif Jerram

'...an enjoyably idiosyncratic and provocative journey...

excellent at showing how space matters.'

Financial Times

'Brilliant and provocative, Streetlife is a compelling history of Europe's cities in the twentieth century. This is urban history for the twenty-first century - passionate, political and a pleasure to read.' Simon Gunn

The twentieth century in Europe was an urban century: it was shaped by life in, and the view from, the street.

Women were not liberated in legislatures, but liberated themselves in factories, homes, nightclubs, and shops.

Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini made themselves powerful by making cities ungovernable with riots rampaging through streets, bars occupied one-by-one.

New forms of privacy and isolation were not simply a by-product of prosperity, but because people planned new ways of living, new forms of housing in suburbs and estates across the continent. Our proudest cultural achievements lie not in our galleries or state theatres, but in our suburban TV sets, the dance halls, pop music played in garages, and hip hop sung on our estates.

In Streetlife, Leif Jerram presents a totally new history of the twentieth century, with the city at its heart, showing how everything distinctive about the century, from revolution and dictatorship to sexual liberation, was fundamentally shaped by the great urban centres which defined it.

Read the full review here...

Here's an extract from the opening chapter...

There is a familiar history of the twentieth century—almost comforting in its familiarity, despite its triumphs, drama and tragedy. There is a well-known history of ‘great individuals’—Adenauer and Lloyd George, Curie and Pankhurst, Clemenceau and Gorbachev, Stalin and Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. And there is a history of the great movements of nameless individuals, invisibly harnessed to some profound evolving truth: the rise of democracy, of women, of rationalism, of capitalism, of socialism, or of secularization; or the fall of communism, child mortality, or of empires.

But the real drama of history happens where the two worlds collide—where the nameless individual in the crowd meets the great man (or woman). What did the tsar care what the workers of No 6 Shop,

Trubochnyi Metal Works in St Petersburg thought? Not much, perhaps. But he would certainly come to care, when they went on strike in 1916 and 1917, destroyed his world, and transformed global politics for our times. As for the people dancing wildly to ‘black’ jazz in the cellars of wartime Hamburg and Berlin, what did they care about the racial policies of Hitler, Goering, and Heydrich being decided in Berlin in the summer and autumn of 1941? A great deal, it would seem, for dancing to ‘black’ music in a racist state was a clear rejection of a certain set of ideas—a rejection expressed in the movements of their bodies and the smiles on their faces, but not in the ballot box. We need to tell a different story of a messy continent in a messy century. We have to give up our familiar tidy frameworks and neat narratives. If we want to find the point of encounter, and witness the rendezvous between big and small, we have to start thinking about where the twentieth century happened. We have to look at its streetlife.

About the Author

Leif Jerram, Lecturer in European and Urban History, University of Manchester, was born in Woolwich in south-east London in 1971, and lived there until he went to study history at Oxford University. After having lived in San Diego, Bremen, Munich and Paris, he settled in Manchester to do his PhD - the first industrial city.

There he has remained, barring a brief stint as a fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

He is currently a lecturer in urban history in the School of Arts at Manchester University, as well as being involved in community politics and activism. He has published widely in the field of cultural and urban history, including most recently Germany's Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895-1930 (2007).
 
Interested in contemporary cultural history? Listen to Dr Jerram on Streetlife - Performing politics in the square (OU/BBC Radio 4) part of the Thinking Allowed series...
 
In 1905 Russians gathered at six different points to march on the Winter Palace and the streetscape of St Petersburg contributed enormously to their success. The Russian poor were cheek by jowl with the rich and this inflamed a class consciousness which - despite industrialisation - the poor suburbs of Europe did much to dissapate. How does urban geography effect the way societies develop? What have streets given to politics? As street protests continue to challenge authority across the Middle East and violence characterises the marches in our own capital, Laurie is joined by Leif Jerram and John Clarke from the Open University to discuss the role the street in the history of politics. Also on the programme Jeffrey Alexander discusses how the revolution was 'performed' for Egypt and for the rest of the world from Cairo's central square. That compelling drama provided a powerful symbol which was enough to bring down the government.

Click here to listen to the Radio 4 programme

A house is so much more than a home - Real estate may dominate dinner-party talk, but few people think clearly about how the buildings they live in shape their lives. Leif Jerram surveys their domestic and social roles...click here to read the full article...