Corridors: Passages of Modernity

Roger Luckhurst explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.

We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors and gangways, yet they do not feature in architectural histories, monographs or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building’s infra-structure rather than ‘architecture’.

Roger Luckhurst has written the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals and asylums, to the ‘corridors of power’, bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century.

Luckhurst takes in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film and television, to explore how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.

Roger's is the author of Corridors: Passages of Modernity which will be available on the night.

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He books include Corridors: Passages of Modernity, Zombies: A Cultural History and Alien (BFI Film Classics).

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