Domestic Dislocations: Home-loss and the Second World War in Urban Britain

The urban home in Second World War Britain was a space increasingly exposed to disruption and destruction. Most obviously, this period saw an extension of aerial warfare, which shook domestic lives out of their routines and often threatened to dismantle them entirely. At the same time, emergency powers of requisitioning gave the state unprecedented control over private property and allowed the government to take possession of dwellings, therefore constructing another means for citizens to be dislocated from their homes. This thesis examines how the threat or reality of losing one's home in either - or both - of these ways was understood and navigated by urban citizens between 1914 and 1960.

Antecedent experiences of air raids and requisitioning during the First World War are explored first, highlighting the ways in which this conflict laid the groundwork for later understandings of wartime home-loss. The central chapters of the thesis are concerned with the Second World War itself, considering how the arrival of this conflict disrupted the domestic sphere more broadly; how affective responses to the loss of this site were constructed and policed; and how different experiences of loss were understood in relation to one another. Finally, the postwar legacies of home-loss are traced up to 1960, the point at which requisitioning came to a legal end. Throughout the thesis, emotional and spatial methodologies are employed in order to elucidate the relationship between citizens and their dwellings.

It is argued that the loss of home - whether at the hands of the enemy, or of one's own state - mattered deeply in wartime Britain. Practically, economically, politically, and emotionally, this was an event with significant ramifications for both individuals and wider society. Accordingly, it was also an experience which bled into broader social and political debates, and in particular those that dissected the shifting nature of citizenship. This thesis thus highlights the utility of using the home - and its loss - as an interpretive lens through which to examine the urban experience of war on the British home front. In so doing, it charts a path by which we might better understand how individuals, communities, and governments prepare themselves for the possibility of conflict and violence, and how they navigate the inherent vulnerability of intimate, everyday spaces to modern forms of war.