The Alienation Effect

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of people fled fascism in continental Europe for the safety of the British Isles. These refugees - many of them Jewish - brought with them a set of revolutionary ideas and practices about art, politics and architecture which were to change the face of modern Britain. Exiles is the little-known story of their lives and work. In its teeming pages we meet artists from Weimar Germany, psychoanalysts from Freud's Vienna, communists from Russia and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, all trying to make their way in a cold and foreign land. Some were enchanted by the quaintness and eccentricity of traditional England; others were repelled by its rigid class hierarchy, repressed national character and resistance to change. In all of these encounters, cultural conflict gave rise to new artistic and political movements, from Brutalism to neoliberalism, as the exiled Europeans took the cornerstones of British culture and reimagined them. In doing so, this refugee generation created the world we live in today, and achieved that most British of feats: a quiet revolution.