Picturing landscapes of health: Social welfare, urban reform and photography in Britain, 1901–1948

Levy Gale, Sadie 2025. Picturing landscapes of health: Social welfare, urban reform and photography in Britain, 1901–1948. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This study explores how photography constructed public and professional understandings of social reform during the nascent years of the welfare state in Britain. In the first half of the twentieth century, attitudes towards social welfare in Britain underwent a profound transformation. Between 1901 and 1948, the enduring nineteenth-century belief in philanthropy, self-help and charity was gradually displaced by a collective understanding of welfare provision as part of a new compact between the state, the citizen and mass society. This evolution manifested itself most visibly in the changing landscapes of British towns and cities: throughout the early twentieth century, urban spaces were shaped and reconfigured by slum clearance schemes, metropolitan improvement programmes and the emergence of new urban forms. Funded through a mixture of public and private investment, these changes to the built environment reflected the mixed economy of welfare that characterised Britain in this period. While numerous historians of social welfare have turned to social policy to explain the development of the welfare state, the major part photography played in making complex discourses about social and urban reform legible to a mass audience has been chronically neglected. Analysing visual representations of social welfare published in the popular and specialist press, interwar housing exhibitions, and postwar reconstruction literature, this study interrogates how a variety of actors used photography to shape understandings of social welfare among both non-expert audiences and technocratic elites. Recentring these images within the cultural history of early twentieth-century Britain, this thesis traces how the growth of the mass media in this period saw photography become instrumental in democratising a diversity of ideas about the future of social welfare in Britain. Moving away from a narrow focus on the relationship between social reform and documentary photography, this thesis reveals how multiple photographic genres, representational practices and publications were involved in the depiction and definition of social welfare and urban reform between 1901 and 1948.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 March 2026
Last Modified:	05 Mar 2026 10:09
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/185400

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