![]() Despite all this, there is currently very little research on the nature of everyday social interaction and meaningful activity inside cars. By implication, the ways in which people live their ordinary everyday and non-exceptional lives in cars seem less worthy of focus and too trivial to make the news. Headlines and stories almost always encourage the perception of the car interior as a site of exceptional activity and marked emotional behavior, and as a place in which technology use can become problematic and increase the likelihood of accident. News items, in different forms of media, regularly report on the negative impact of passengers on driving, or the use of cell/mobile phones and GPS navigators in cars, or sometimes even unusual behavior inside cars. The special issue is concerned with talk and activity inside cars, with examining the interior of a car as socially rich and meaningful. This paper is the editors' introduction to the special issue. The thesis demonstrates the significance of cars in suburban life, while also showing that there were marked geographical differences in their adoption between different types of suburbia. It also argues that English suburban historiography has largely downplayed the role of the car in inter-war suburban social history, through a particular focus on suburban housing and the effects of the extension of public transport. The thesis argues that the new closed-bodied form of the car coupled with the new arterial road changed the embodied experiences of driving, producing a new form of motoring as early as 1925 much earlier than commonly suggested in the literature on motoring history. These findings contribute to a wider reappraisal of suburbia of this period. This automobility produced a distinctively modern, in some senses Americanised, suburban roadscape and practices of leisure and consumption. The thesis demonstrates that an emergent system of automobility was formed in London before the war. It considers the embodied, sensory and systemised aspects of driving, but again positions these recent perspectives on automobility in the particular historical and geographical context of London’s expanding suburbs. The research for this thesis builds on the work that has considered the influences of class and gender on motoring, but crucially ‘places’ these changes by connecting them to the development of London’s suburban arterial roads. Motoring in the inter-war period is often portrayed as a glamorous pastime for the wealthy, reducing the visibility of its influence on middle class life. Automobility can be defined as a system of people, cars, roads and supporting enterprises that together has had a profound impact on our way of life. This doctoral thesis examines automobility in and around inter-war London. ![]()
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December 2022
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