The Roadhouse Comes to Britain

During the inter-war years, Britain experienced considerable social change, not least with the development of the motor age which transformed the social relationships of the road and offered increased opportunities for leisure. This book by David W. Gutzke and Michael John Law deals with one, almost forgotten, aspect of such changes, the emergence of the roadhouses, which offered an American-type institution to Britain, and particularly London, from about 1925 until the 1950s, although their heyday was from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, going out of fashion with London high society in the mid-1930s. It is a pioneering work, being the first book to examine the phenomenon of roadhouses and their impact upon leisure in Britain, something which I was barely aware of despite having researched the policing of the road. It argues that roadhouses had their antecedents in river clubs but that they emerged as a result of the suburbanisation of Britain during the inter-war years and the increasing use of the motor car which, until the mid- and late 1930s, was essentially confined to the wealthy classes before being purchased increasingly by the middle classes in the post-war period. Roadhouses gained an image of sexual licence and decadence through their depiction in novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), with its accounts of sexual petting in American roadhouses, and Eleanor Early’s novel Whirlwind (1928) of downing cocktails and making love in roadhouses; such accounts invoked them as places of sexual licence, where flappers and prostitutes were to be found, and numerous sexual transgressions occurred. Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929) became an American movie ‘Roadhouse Nights’ (1930), which opened in London in 1930, popularising American roadhouses as disreputable. In Britain, Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock (1938) uses the Queen of Hearts roadhouse on the London to Brighton road as the location for a night out for the racecourse gang, and sex in the car park with a roadhouse good-time girl

Political science · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law