Description

2 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.