Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age Book

This fully illustrated survey of the 20th century's most exciting decade examines the art, design, fashion and architecture of 1920s London alongside wider social and political ideas about Britain, modernism, mass democracy and popular culture. London was at the heart of all the 1920s debates about Britain's future. What was the London of the future to be in a world shaken by catastrophic wars, revolutions and scientific miracles? Was the British capital to be a Babylon of unrestrained capitalism, American-style; a mechanistic machine for living, Soviet-style; or a global Imperial capital? The book discusses these debates in terms of how they were manifested through London's streets and buildings, the clothes, material goods and creative works produced, worn and used by Londoners. It shows London emerging from the decade as a city for the modern world, British-style, newly democratized, a unique mix of international modernism and distinctly post-modern diversity, irony and pragmatism.