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Traces the transformation redevelopment of Britain's cities from post-war reconstruction and modernist urban renewal to the present day.
Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of California, Berkeley, 2016, under the title: Pilot zones: the new urban environment of twentieth century Britain.
'Colonization through a process of affection', wrote the London-based Barbadian novelist George Lamming in 1960, was 'the worst form of colonization'. Lamming's London was marked by the violent currents of racism--some seen, many disavowed. But the operations of race, the putting-in-place of its hierarchies, the destructions of the self that its logics entailed, exceeded only expressions of violence and hatred. It was in 'affection', too, that colonialism's racial visions operated. It was not only among the illiberals, but among the liberals, that colonization continued its hold on metropolitan culture. This was colonization, as Lamming would also put it, by humanity. Colonized by Humanity i...
A comparative and trans-national study of urban culture in Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century
The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Shifting attention from the "People's War" to the "People's Peace," this book shows that literature returns to the historic transition from warfare to welfare to narrate its transformative social potential and darker failures. The welfare state envisioned that managing individuals' private lives would result in a more coherent and equitable community, a promise encapsulated in the 1942 Beveridge Report's promise of care from the "cradle to the grave." The postwar novel reveals the intimate effects that follow when in...
This book is a history of outdoor advertising control in Britain between the early-nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1960s. It considers the development of primarily legislative and governmental approaches to controlling commercial signage, billboards, posters and hoardings in rural and urban areas. This study of how the proliferation of outdoor advertising was dramatically curtailed serves as a means to examine how the understanding and governance of lived spaces developed over a century and a half. In the early-nineteenth century outdoor adverting was just another material nuisance to regimes of improvement; by the turn of the century it was reframed as a threat to architecture, rural beauty and codes of moral self-governance. In the twentieth century it disrupted visual amenity and destabilized the civilizing influence of modern planning. More than merely a history of a radical and largely overlooked change in the visual environment, this is the story of how the modern state saw and regulated the lived spaces of Britain.
In London in 1984 two very different cities came into conflict, one rooted in radical politics and the other shaped by Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative government. This was a city poised between two eras and identities, remoulded in conflicting ways by social democracy and neoliberalism. Using a wide array of sources, many of which have never been used before, London, 1984 explores the radical history of the capital in this tumultuous era, from a major anti-Apartheid march in central London to an alternative childcare centre in Dalston, a protest staged on the Thames against Docklands development to tensions on housing estates in the East End and Tottenham around racial violence and po...
Throughout the twentieth century architectural models served as the miniature playgrounds in which the future of Britain’s built environment was imagined, and in drawing from the evidence provided by those models today, this book considers how architects, planners, and civil engineers thought about that future by presenting a history of yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow, told through architectural models. Focused not on the making of architectural models but rather the optimistic and utopian visions they were made to communicate, this book examines the possible futures put forward by 120 models made by Thorp, the oldest and most prolific firm of architectural modelmakers in Britain, in orde...
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal ...