This is the first in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary study to mobilize and interrogate a vast amount of underexplored vernacular and public archival material relating to the construction of Peacehaven, a speculative development built atop chalk cliffs, straddling the Meridian Line on the Sussex coast, South East England. While the estate was marketed as a garden city development, public voices such as the Bloomsbury group’s Virginia and Leonard Woolf, architect and writer Clough Williams-Ellis, historian Nikolaus Pevsner and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England soon began to criticise it as a blot on hitherto pastoral downland. Focusing on the interwar period and tracing mutating agendas, this book investigates the hidden and contested inception and construction histories of this town through Histoire Croisée methodology and its intercrossings with memory and the imagination. By combining visual and creative research methods with oral history, multi-layered narratives of place come into focus. The study tracks the visual programme of the developer’s in-house magazine,　Peacehaven　Post, alongside blueprints, photographs, postcards and promotional guidebooks and explores the garden city narrative as a form of social Utopia. The study foregrounds the visual and reconstitutes a historical perspective, revisiting propositions of the time, which aspired to secure improved public health and home ownership in direct response to the negative impact of industrialization and WWI. This research has been given additional urgency because the town is currently undergoing large-scale redevelopment and any remaining original landmarks are fast disappearing. The garden city narrative is once again being evoked in debates as a potential solution to the ongoing national housing shortage. weiterlesen