'Familiar London': New Zealand travel writing and the imagined metropolis, 1890-1940'

Abstract

For most of New Zealand’s history, its main centre has, arguably, lain some 12,000 miles away from its geographical borders. London, centre of empire and the world’s greatest city, might also be considered New Zealand’s metropolis. This paper focuses on one particular period of the New Zealand/London relationship, using travel writing to interrogate the role London might have played in New Zealand’s cultural imagination. It suggests that London’s heritage, history and modernity could be integrated as part of New Zealand’s cultural landscape, forming an important extension of the sometimes inadequate cultural borders of settler colonies. This redefined relationship, with its cultural borrowings and transferences may help us understand the supercharged transformation of white settler societies from colonies into ‘first world’ nations, a process that conventionally has considered these ties to ‘Home’ as an obstacle to such change. ‘Familiar London’ may instead have been an important constituent in that shift.