This book is about 1930s writing and photographs of London; in particular, it is about the ways in which the decade's writers and image-makers represented the spaces of leisure and home that came to define the capital during the decade. Central London in the 1930s boasted an inclusive and exuberant leisure culture that became central to the period's notions of what it meant to be a Londoner and of how this London identity was shaping modern life. London was by no means the only prominent setting in the 1930s, but it was the one that most closely aligned with some of its most urgent preoccupations – namely class, mass democracy, the changing modes of sociability, and gender.

The central areas of West London are deliberately given priority as settings in the chapters that follow. The women and men whose leisure hours were spent out in the West End and the nearby areas of Soho and Fitzrovia became synonymous in the cultural imagination of the decade with the places they visited or occupied, such as the cinema, the teashop, the café bar and the bedsit. These leisure pursuits were sometimes equated with uncomplicated escapism. Yet, as the readings in this book will demonstrate, this was not the only, or even the dominant, interpretation of such milieus in the period's literature. Instead, insecurity and anxiety colour many literary versions of teashop encounters and nights out at the cinema.

The geographical focus of this book is firmly on central London. It is true that by the mid-1930s suburban Londoners could enjoy metropolitan pleasures such as the cinema and the café locally, significantly reducing the crowds out in the West End. This study's last chapter does explore the relationship between central London and the suburbs, focusing on representations of domestic spaces. However, a full consideration of the 1930s suburban milieu is beyond the scope of this book. Local and suburban London and its representations have been the subject of several studies of London literature and culture, and the routines of commuting are central to those analyses. I, on the other hand, am interested in the compact culture of central West London where everything is easily reached either on foot or by bus.