The Threshold of the state: civil defence, the blackout and the home in Second World War Britain

This article re-considers the way that the British state extended its control of the home during the Second World War, using the implementation of air raid precautions and the blackout as a lens through which to view the state’s developing attitudes to domestic space. Presented here is not the familiar story of pitch-dark, dangerous streets or altered cityscapes of fear and destruction; instead, by examining personal testimony the article inverts traditional treatments of the blackout to look at the interior of dwellings, demonstrating how the realities of total warfare impinged upon the psychological elements that constituted the home. What emerges not only expands historical understandings of the wartime experience of civilians, it also shows civil defence measures as highly-visible points on an often antagonistic trajectory of state interactions with citizens concerning the privacy and security of the dwelling in the modern city. The requirements of civil defence, I argue, were not merely the product of exceptional war-time circumstances, but symptomatic of long-standing attempts to open up dwellings to state scrutiny. These attempts had both a significant pre-war lineage and, crucially, implications beyond the end of the war in private homes and on social housing estates.