ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the range of media through which modernity and urban change were constructed during the twentieth century. Yet the ways in which material urban change was narrated to children, and children’s roles as participators in the transformation of the city, have been overlooked. This chapter explores how a children’s cartoon, ‘Casey Court’, published in the weekly comic Illustrated Chips, intervened in debates about housing and urban change in East London during the 1930s. Housing and planning were key concerns for Britain during the inter-war period. Urban public policy focussed on slum clearance and the re-housing of working-class residents, but, in East London in particular, this became increasingly linked to the broader transformation of the city. This chapter analyses the structure and content of the text-image narrative of the cartoon, supported by newspaper archive. These include representations of political protest, such as rent strikes, and utopic impulses, such as the Ideal Home show, centring on housing. In doing so it demonstrates that the cartoon offered a positive yet ambivalent response to urban change and constructed a critical and informed child audience.
