If the observation that modern conceptions of homosexuality were deeply interwoven with the forms and experiences of the modern city is now a commonplace, queer London has emerged as a privileged site of analysis. Cultural and social historians have mapped its contours in impressive detail, drawing on the extensive police documentation of sodomy arrests from the late nineteenth century onward, the numerous high-profile court cases inaugurated by the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde, and the popular press’s apparently unlimited appetite for sexual scandal. The latest contribution to this textured historiography is The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London by Richard Hornsey, a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Based on a series of previously published essays that constitute four of the five chapters, the book offers a novel interpretation of largely familiar events, personalities, and artifacts.

The Spiv and the Architect takes as its purview a relatively small slice of London’s history: the two decades between the end of World War II and the new possibilities for queer men presaged by the 1957 Wolfenden report, the document officially recommending the decriminalization of male homosexuality that was ultimately implemented a decade later. Hornsey argues that the new ethos of civic order, bureaucratic management, and national consensus that emerged from the ruins of war renewed social anxieties regarding queer men, who were perceived by many as a pressing urban problem. Indebted to a 1985 article by Gavin Owen and Andy Lowe, the book’s title, The Spiv and the Architect, refers to this tension between so-called deviants and urban reformers. Hornsey’s study, like Owen and Lowe’s, hinges on the critical juxtaposition of the spiv—a popular 1940s term for an extravagantly dressed, opportunistic young criminal, understood here as the quintessential outsider—and the architect, broadly conceived in this study as a representative of the postwar expert. Through this pairing, the book charts new territory by re-examining the postwar history of queer London in relation to the discourse of urban planning.

Hornsey’s account begins with Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 and 1944 plans for London and the Council of Industrial Design’s 1946 “Britain Can Make It” exhibition. It concludes in 1962, with the trial of the playwright John (Joe) Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell, who were accused of stealing and defacing library books. Focusing on the intervening period, The Spiv and the Architect argues that advocates of homosexual reform were influenced and legitimated by the moralistic cultural imperatives and rigid prescriptive geographies of postwar urban reformers, as male homosexuality was redefined as a psychic condition rather than as an individual’s behavior. During this period, a new queer subjectivity took shape that Hornsey posits was rooted in emergent “consumerist practices and modes of urban display” (261). The book at once charts these broad developments and aims to give voice to queer men who actively resisted or rewrote such normative narratives through their distinctive urban practices.

Despite Hornsey’s claim that his careful attention to the spatial dimensions of male homosexuality in postwar London sets The Spiv and the Architect apart from earlier accounts, many of his key insights follow upon the work of previous scholars. For instance, Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) analyzes in admirable detail how differences of class, race, age, and place shaped the divergent urban experiences of men who socialized with, had sex with, and fell in love with other men in London during the interwar and postwar decades. The Spiv and the Architect affirms Houlbrook’s earlier argument that in the 1940s and 1950s, “queer urban culture was privatized in the sense of becoming centered on the home, or particular semiprivate sites of commercial sensibility” (270), even as it looks more closely at the role urban reformers played in this change.

Hornsey shifts the emphasis incrementally by insisting that urban decentralization—the hallmark of postwar urban planning—had its echo in the domestication of male homosexuality and in the new, explicitly bourgeois conception of queer self-hood as a psychic, private state. Despite frequent references to the capital city’s status as imperial center, however, the book provides no sense that immigration or ethnic and racial differences had any effect on the discourses of planning and sexuality, an omission that stands in stark contrast to Frank Mort’s sustained attention to these dynamics in Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Hornsey’s London may be defined by diverse conceptions of masculinity and by class differences, but it remains an emphatically white city.

Within this delimited geography, The Spiv and the Architect features iconic urban areas like Notting Hill, Piccadilly Circus, and Soho, in addition to canonical events, including the 1951 South Bank Exhibition, the 1954 establishment of the Wolfenden Commission, and the unsuccessful 1960 obscenity trial of Penguin Books over the paperback publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Hornsey revitalizes this terrain by admirably turning his attention to less obvious sites, such as model home exhibitions, public libraries, Tube stations, photobooths, tabloids, and mass-market paperback book covers. Of these, the London Underground is a recurrent touchstone. For scholars of sex and the city, the Tube and its notorious toilets are common features; Matt Cook’s London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) focused sustained attention on the erotic possibilities this new infrastructure offered. Although the Underground was well established in the 1950s, newly added amenities—most notably the photobooth, and temporary installations, like the 1953 “Register Your Choice” exhibition in the Charing Cross Underground Station—did transform the experience, as Hornsey’s book explores in detail.

In contrast to the received understanding of the 1950s as a period of cultural rigidity and social conformity, Hornsey insists that “a strong connotative queerness bubbles just below the surface” in nearly every corner of postwar London (86). In each chapter, he ties together seemingly disparate sources through analogy, metaphorical association, or sympathetic orientation. Hornsey makes much of the fortuitous juxtapositions he reads into suggestive details, whether found in telling asides, odd turns of phrases, or overlooked snapshots. In one chapter, the immensely popular 1951 film, The Lavender Hill Mob, is read through Douglas Warth’s three-part series of tabloid articles, “Evil Men,” published the following year, while in another, Francis Bacon’s 1949 series of paintings, Heads, is examined in relation to anonymous photobooth images. The central pairing of the spiv and the architect in the book’s title thus signals the underlying logic of the entire study, in which unexpected linkages are the subject of exhaustive interpretation. Although these episodes often feature the experiences of notable individuals, they are repeatedly read as instances of broader “cultural imperatives” that are the real, if more elusive, protagonists of Hornsey’s study (203).

Readers anticipating from the book’s title that architects might appear in its pages are likely to be disappointed. Even Abercrombie—the only postwar urban planner who emerges as a key figure in the text—remains more a monolithic symbol of bureaucratic management than a nuanced actor. While his urban plans form a critical point of departure for the book, they are treated largely as textual documents. A notable exception is a conceptual mapping of the London metropolitan region based on social and functional analyses undertaken by Abercrombie and his colleagues that is discussed at some length (fig. 11). Nevertheless, the information used to generate this intriguing image and its significance within Abercrombie’s proposals are largely overlooked in Hornsey’s interpretation, which understands it as the product of an emergent cultural obsession with cellular structure and the atom. Here, as elsewhere, the connection of the map to these tropes is never considered in relation to the specific circumstances of its creation. More generally, Hornsey’s account of planning and design disciplines remains cursory and often overlooks continuities between prewar and postwar debates in favor of the blanket assertion that the end of WWII marked a radical change in urban planning practice. Whereas Hornsey must be credited for the nuanced texture he gives to the spiv’s many inheritors, the architect—and the culture of experts he represents—is too often cast as the author of a monolithic, internally consistent, universalizing discourse.

Rather than sustained engagement with architectural representations, built landscapes, or embodied spatial practices, the book’s mode of spatial analysis proceeds discursively. Hornsey’s detailed examination of furnished rooms displayed for mass public viewing in the 1946 “Britain Can Make It” and the fascinating 1953 “Register Your Choice” exhibitions are notable exceptions where he grapples directly and substantively with concrete, physical spaces. More typical is Hornsey’s intriguing discussion of Orton and Halliwell’s apartment—used as key evidence in their trial—which focuses almost entirely on the photocollage they created on one wall of their bedroom, curiously reducing their living space to a two-dimensional, photographic surface. Although The Spiv and the Architect offers compelling insights into the shifting topography of queer London, it retreats from an understanding of space and identity as mutually constitutive dynamics to focus more narrowly on the city as text.