Conclusion: Thatcher in Space, or the Spaces of Thatcher

Abstract

This book has examined textual representations of public and private urban spaces in late twentieth and early twenty first-century Great Britain in the context of the shifting tensions that arose from the Thatcherite shift away from state-supported industry towards private ownership, from the welfare state to an American-style free market economy. I have examined representations of public and private urban spaces through the following research question: how did the textual mapping of geographical and cultural spaces under Margaret Thatcher uncover the transforming connections of specific British subjects to public/private urban space, national identity, and emergent forms of historical identities and citizenship? And how were the effects of such radical changes represented in post-Thatcher British literary texts that looked back to the British city under Thatcherism?