Description
Book Synopsis2 Ennerdale Drive is a memoir of a house and the family that lived there; a work of text and image encompassing architecture, social and personal history, town planning, photography and representation, carving a space within and between new forms of memoir, cultural studies and creative non-fiction. The house in north London, built during the phenomenal interwar wave of suburban development, begins an exploration of public and private lives, architectural and family narrative, charting territory between documented evidence, personal and cultural memory, association and emotional response. 2 Ennerdale Drive questions the veracity accorded to 'documents' produced across institutional, public and private family contexts. Textual analyses of images relating to the house, the family (and its business: theatre) frame each chapter, generating stories and responses to the factual and the remembered. Visits to archives and to other houses document the existence and/or absence of such material. An epilogue locates the author, a family member and sometime narrator, in the frame and offers, perhaps, a final privileged glance into the family archive.
Trade Review2 Ennerdale Drive tells the story of the author's family through the spaces of their lives, weaving the texture of personalities - some touching, many eccentric - out of the well-worn details of London's built fabric. Part social and architectural history, part personal memoir, Rosa Ainley takes the reader on a fascinating journey through her past which is both touching and bright. She digs deep, in search of lost moments, into the intimate corners of her private life. And yet the anecdotes she recounts, the photographs she muses over, and the homes she visits, are not only of interest to a member of the Ainley family, they offer a humorous and intelligent view of London's recent architectural past, suburban and theatrical, and a critical reflection on what it is to write a biography of one's own family. (Professor Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London)
