In a first for the blog, there are going to be two posts this week – the next instalment of the Bow Cinema Murder series will be published on Wednesday but I wanted to mark the occasion as we are now at 150 posts in total! I started this blog at the beginning of 2021 and have managed to put a post out every week since then. Last year, for the 100th post, I shared some stats about the blog. Those haven’t changed much (although my dive into interwar car ownership has overtaken the Amami shampoo ad as the most popular post) so I thought I’d do something a bit different this time around, and share some great interwar history resources that I draw on a lot. When I have used source materials for a particular posts I’ll always reference them at the bottom, but hopefully this list is useful if you want to explore the period more broadly.

Academic books

As is probably evident, I’ve studied interwar popular culture in an academic context, so I do reference academic sources quite a lot. I appreciate these are not always accessible, but if you are lucky enough to have access to an academic library or similar resource, I would recommend the following:

D.L. LeMahieu – A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Clarendon Press, 1988)

Judith Walkowitz – Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (Yale University Press, 2012)

Robert James – Popular Culture and working-class taste in Britain, 1930-1939: A round of cheap diversions? (Manchester University Press, 2010)

Jeffrey Richards – The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (I.B. Tauris, 2010)

Matt Houlbrook – Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Lawrence Napper – British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (University of Exeter Press, 2009)

And I’d be remiss not to include my own book: Mara Arts – Interwar London After Dark in British Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Popular books

These books are published by generalist publishers and are therefore easier to get hold of:

Martin Pugh – We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (Penguin, 2008)

D.J. Taylor – Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918-1940 (Vintage, 2008)

Marek Kohn – Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (Granta, 2003)

Roy Porter – London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994)

Lucy Lethbridge – Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Films

Accessing British films from the interwar period can be tricky, and a large number of them are only available by accessing film archives. There are however some good online resources:

The Internet Archive usually has copies of films that are out of copyright.

Youtube can also be a good resource, although the quality of films can be variable.

Within the UK, the British Film Institute has films available on their BFI Player (some free, some paid for) and if you are able to travel to London, you can view lots of films for free in their Mediatheque on the Southbank.

Additionally, there are quite a few films which have been issued on DVD. Naturally, well-regarded or famous films such as Hitchcock’s early works are readily available on DVD. Now-defunct film distributor Network on Air used to supply a wide range of British films on DVD, including many films of the 1930s. Second-hand copies of these should still be in circulation.

Podcasts

The BBC History Extra podcast puts out new episodes nearly every day, and there are a number of past episodes which discuss elements of interwar Britain’s culture and history. Likewise, the Rest is History podcast has some episodes relating to interwar Britain.

A more specific podcast is Shedunnit, which is an independently produced podcast devoted to interwar crime and crime fiction.

For a more academic take, the Institute of Historical Research has a back catalogue of podcasts in which academics discuss their research. A number of them touch on interwar history, such as an episode on the 1926 General Strike.

I hope these resources can provide a good starting point for anyone interested in learning more about interwar Britain. Thank you for your continued support!