Airstrip One
Airstrip One is the province of Oceania in which the action of Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place, with London as its chief city; Airstrip One is itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. It is the renamed territory of the former England or Britain, and it is here that Winston Smith lives out his rebellion and his destruction. The province is defined less by natural geography than by the total apparatus of Party control concentrated in its capital: the four Ministries, the surveillance of the Thought Police, and the decay of a society deliberately cut off from its own past.
Definition and Setting
Airstrip One was not always called by that name. In Winston Smith's childhood, before the Revolution reordered the world into superstates, the territory had been England or Britain; only London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London. By 1984 the military-sounding designation imposed by the Party covers a landscape of rotting nineteenth-century houses shored up with timber, windows patched with cardboard, roofs of corrugated iron, and bombed sites where plaster dust swirls and willowherb straggles over rubble. Looking out from Victory Mansions, Winston tries to recover a childhood memory that would tell him whether London had always been quite like this, but nothing remains of his past except a series of bright-lit tableaux. The renaming is part of a larger falsification: the Party has made the very geography of the province a weapon against memory.
Administrative Heart of Oceania
London is the seat of the entire government of Oceania. Scattered about the city are four enormous pyramidal buildings of glittering white concrete, soaring up three hundred metres into the air, which dwarf all the surrounding architecture and can all be seen at once from the roof of Victory Mansions. They house the four Ministries between which the whole apparatus of government is divided: the Ministry of Truth, concerned with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, concerned with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintains law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, responsible for economic affairs. In Newspeak their names are Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty. Of the four, the Ministry of Love is the really frightening one: a windowless building impossible to enter except on official business, approached through barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests, and patrolled by guards in black uniforms armed with jointed truncheons.
A Society Without Law
Life in Airstrip One is governed not by laws but by the unformulated will of the Party. Nothing is illegal, since there are no longer any laws; yet the diary that Winston opens in his flat, if detected, would bring death or at least twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police, never sure that he is alone: his friendships, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is by himself, even the words he mutters in sleep, are all jealously scrutinised. The purges, arrests, tortures and vaporisations that remove people from the province are not punishments for crimes actually committed, but the wiping-out of persons who might possibly commit a crime at some time in the future. The Party demands not only right opinions but right instincts, and enforces them through an elaborate mental training built on crimestop, blackwhite and doublethink.
Daily Life and the Ministry of Truth
Daily existence in Airstrip One is saturated by the propaganda machinery centred on the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job is to supply the citizens with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays and novels — every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment. For the proles the Ministry repeats the operation at a lower level, producing rubbishy newspapers filled with sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs composed by mechanical means on an instrument called a versificator. Inside the Records Department, Winston's working day is a routine of corrections dictated into the Speakwrite, of pneumatic tubes, the Newspeak Dictionary and the Two Minutes Hate; the department is one cell in a vast bureaucratic labyrinth whose memory holes feed the hidden furnaces that destroy superseded originals.
Narrative Significance
Everything that happens to Winston Smith happens inside Airstrip One: the opening of the diary at Victory Mansions, the meetings with Julia, the room above Mr Charrington's shop, the arrest, and the re-education whose end is the Chestnut Tree Café. The province is not merely a backdrop; its ruined streets, renamed landmarks and watched interiors embody the Party's power and its assault on memory. The renaming of England as Airstrip One is one of the novel's most concentrated symbols, converting the remembered homeland into a functional strip of territory in an endless war, and showing how totalitarianism makes even geography an instrument of domination.
