In the last two decades, space has gained importance as an explanatory factor in historical research. Historians have emphasized the importance of space not only as the background against which history took place, but also as a valuable and important point of research in itself. In detailed studies they have shown the importance for minority groups of receiving access to public space, and analysed the distribution of social inequality in a specific geographical area.Footnote 1

In Streetlife: An Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram takes this “spatial turn” a step further. His point of departure is the observation that while twentieth-century history has been written from many perspectives, little has actually been written about “where” this history took place. Although the “crime scene” of history can tell us much about how changes actually came about, the location is only seldom a point of historical research. Jerram argues with enthusiasm that the success of female emancipation or political revolution depends not exclusively on ideas or laws, but just as much on events on the street. Therefore, to better understand how political, cultural, and social changes took place we have to look at the physical locations and reconstruct what actually happened. According to Jerram, the crucial location of important cultural, political, and social developments was the city, or more precisely the streets, bars, and homes of the quickly expanding metropolis. He argues that both the city and physical locations are inadequately studied in the literature on twentieth-century history. Jerram is not the first historian to use this perspective, and not all his results are new, but he is the first to employ it so widely, and he makes this theoretical viewpoint accessible for a wider audience. Based on Russian, French, German, and English historiography and sociological reports, he successfully integrates a number of large themes analysed at street level. The result is an appealing, personal, and provocative book.

In his chapter on the “cultured metropolis”, Jerram detects two central changes in the way people experienced culture: the separation of cultural consumer from cultural producer, and of cultural consumers from each other. According to him, the changing behaviour of the audience formed one of the largest and most important changes in European cultural life in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the music hall was a place for people to get together with friends, to meet prospective partners, and, while doing so, occasionally to watch the stage. But the idea that audiences should either be silent or stand still would have been considered bizarre in this period. Even the artist walked around, trying to attract the attention of their public. This changed at the end of the nineteenth century. Sociability and mobility were removed from culture, and audiences started to sit in rows facing the stage. Jerram suggests a number of reasons for these developments, namely the financial benefit of having as many people in a hall as possible, and the introduction of brighter electric lighting, but his focus is on the actual situation in the music hall. The introduction of cinema had a similar effect. A few decades later, the developments in music halls and cinemas reached the living room. The introduction of the television reorganized family life: people were no longer sitting at a table talking to each other, but facing the television, a revolution in the micro-geography of the home.

In his chapter on political revolutions Jerram argues that one of the defining factors in the success or failure of a political movement is its ability to take control of or to penetrate important places in the city. He studies this hypothesis by analysing a wide variety of political movements in the twentieth century, ranging from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the Parisian student riots of 1968. His exclusive focus on the streets of the city makes it exciting reading. Italian fascists in the 1920s had great difficulty controlling the streets of Turin, even after Mussolini had been elected prime minister and a fascist police chief installed, because communists were dominant in the streets and bars. There was no place left for this new movement. The National Socialists in Germany had less trouble seizing power in the city, while important spaces controlled by the dominant German social democrats – the factories and the workers’ clubs – lost their significance in the unemployment of the 1930s. Jerram switches easily from the Russian Revolution to the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s and to the student riots of 1968. He successfully defends his view that the mechanisms by which political movements came to power operated at street level and had little to do with theories or politicians.

Jerram claims that, to a large extent, the emancipation of women and gays was a matter of getting access to space. He does not hesitate to make some bold statements and suggests, based on sociological reports and on a vast historiography, that the acquisition of a place of their own was equally important for the freedom of European women as their right to vote. The large majority of women in the twentieth century were not primarily focused on political, economic, or social rights, but on their wish to live in a home that guaranteed privacy and consequently freedom. The home was a locus of liberation for generations of European women. But it was not the only space in which the changing position of women was visible. His creative choice of subjects leads Jerram to the importance of the dancefloor. In the 1950s, a new generation of girls danced in an entirely new way, breaking through generations of custom: “In using their arms outstretched to dance, they stated a claim to physical freedom. By insulting men as clumsy, they humiliated them in public, and refused to be demure and deferential. By dancing with the other girls, and taking the ‘male’ role in the dance, they were indicating that men were superfluous and women sufficient” (p. 165).

Jerram shows how women, completely outside the legal, political, and economic realm, claimed access to more and more spaces. In his chapter on sexuality Jerram follows more or less the same line of thought. He analyses the places where homosexuals were able to meet, and shows the fluctuating freedom of gay practices in the course of the twentieth century. His leading argument is that, influenced by the varying spatial possibilities, sexuality changed from being something people did to something they were, from a practice to an identity.

The last chapter of the book is dedicated to the city itself. “Building Utopia” describes the origins and outcomes of town planning, and of planning as a general tendency in the twentieth century. Jerram elaborates on the various consequences of the idea that all problems in society could be solved by the government. For the city, he claims, the vision of modern planners to provide all residents with a warm and well-constructed house delivered great results. More than in the other chapters, Jerram takes a clear position, especially when he defends the postwar high-rise estates built across Europe. From the 1970s onward, he claims, the suburbs had a bad reputation among intellectuals and in the media. But it was not the estates that formed the problem; it was the policy of the city that allocated the houses almost exclusively to poor people, underinvested in education, and neglected health care. For decades, Jerram claims, residents were happy to live in the suburbs. His defence of suburbs contrasts with a large discourse on city planning that originates with the work of Jane Jacobs. She claimed that a high concentration of residents and the unplanned nature of older city neighbourhoods were essential to creating a successful city, with entrepreneurship, social control, and social contact.Footnote 2 Jerram criticizes this idea, without mentioning Jacobs's work.

Leif Jerram has written an outstanding book on the street level of European history, and convincingly showed its importance for the course and understanding of the twentieth century. Especially in the last few chapters, he has adopted a very personal style and showed his deep affection for the modern metropolis. This makes his book a joy to read, but it will also raise some eyebrows concerning the academic basis for some of his statements. As an argument for his idea that poverty is not necessarily synonymous with disintegration, he mentions the nicely decorated alleys of the poorer residents in his home city, Manchester, contrasting them with the alleys of the wealthy yuppies. But is every space that easy to interpret? On the whole, however, this personal approach is not at all problematic; indeed, it challenges us to look more closely at our own surroundings. With his ability to combine many different themes and subjects in a clear and comprehensive way, Jerram has written both an important historical study and a real page turner.