Abstract

This article retells the history of postwar welfare architecture, as well as its so-called decline, by situating race and empire to complicate historiography at the end of empire in Britain. Using Stuart Hall’s exemplary essay “Race and ‘Moral Panics’ in Postwar Britain” as a scaffold to foreground conjunctural debates about race and immigration, my article is divided into three sections.20 The first focuses on the question of how welfare was conceived for the metropole and the colony. I demonstrate how, as migrants from colonies arrived as British citizens, notions of traditional community and deserving of welfare emerged simultaneously during the heyday of council housing construction. The second section discusses how these migrants became Commonwealth citizens and the areas that they occupied—the inner city and multiple occupancy houses—became sites of opprobrium and regulation, while riots were seen as indicators of immigrants’ failure at integration. The last section focuses on the transposition of racist policies into the logic of pooling of risk, as Commonwealth migrants, without access to systems of credit, failed to make ideal neoliberal subjects. I thereby hope to challenge the conventional wisdom about the periodization of the welfare state and neoliberal decline by presenting a more complex picture of council housing through the lens of race and empire. My evidence is not only the architecture but also ephemera, including pamphlets, books, reports, and other grey literature from the period. If architectural historians in the first decade of the twenty-first century had to save postwar modernism from the preponderance of narratives about its purported aesthetic and social failure, the contemporary architectural historian has a different task: challenging the periodization that the vast literature on postwar welfare architecture adheres to, a literature that fails to critically analyze the significance of neoliberalism’s beginnings in tandem with empire’s so-called end in its postwar history.