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'[Her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama 'Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest writers of our time' Sunday Times 'Jack is the fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet' Observer Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction. Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne'er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher's child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will. Their fraught, beautiful story is one of Robinson's greatest achievements.
Introduction -- 'How to provide housing for the people': origins -- 'The world of the future': the interwar period -- 'If only we will': Britain reimagined, 1940-51 -- 'The needs of the people': council housing, 1945-56 -- 'Get these people out of the slums': 1956-68 -- 'Anti-monumental, anti-stylistic, and fit for ordinary people': 1968-79 -- 'Rolling back the frontiers of the state': 1979-91 -- 'Thrown-away places': 1991-7 -- 'A different kind of community': 1997-2010 -- 'People need homes; these homes need people': 2010 to the present
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This new book explores Britain's intensely urban and increasingly global communities as interlocking pieces of a complex jigsaw; they are hard to see apart yet they are deeply unequal. Jigsaw Cities examines these issues using Birmingham, Britain's second city, as a model of pioneering urban order and as a victim of brutal Modernist planning.
Lynsey Hanley was born and raised just outside of Birmingham on what was then the largest council estate in Europe, and she has lived for years on an estate in London's East End. Writing with passion, humour and a sense of history, she recounts the rise of social housing a century ago, its adoption as a fundamental right by leaders of the social welfare state in the mid-century and its decline - as both idea and reality - in the 1960s and '70s. Throughout, Hanley focuses on how shifting trends in urban planning and changing government policies - from Homes Fit for Heroes to Le Corbusier's concrete tower blocks, to the Right to Buy - affected those so often left out of the argument over council estates: the millions of people who live on them. What emerges is a vivid mix of memoir and social history, an engaging and illuminating book about a corner of society that the rest of Britain has left in the dark.
A captivating exploration of Britain's most iconic contemporary buildings, from the Barratt home to the Millennium Dome.***TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK*** 'A punchy polemic ... Highly readable.''A love letter to contemporary buildings and a fantastic account of recent British history, rich in humour.' NINA STIBBE'Brilliant, encyclopaedic, funny and often cutting.' DANNY DORLING'An eloquent, witty, passionate tour of Britain since the 1980s.' JOHN BOUGHTON'Recounts the stories of our lived landscapes with wit, passion and a shot of anger.' TOM DYCKHOFF'Grindrod has spoken to everyone and his observations are humane and acute.' OWEN HATHERLEYWimpey homes. Millennium monuments. Riverside flats. Wind ...
The emergence of Britain as a home-owning society has implications for how people think about housing. Housing is used: as a pension fund; to give resources for care needs; and to sponsor access to private education. This text argues that housing is at the forefront of public policy and as a pillar of post-industrial welfare state.
What are the major housing problems in contemporary Britain, and how effective are the policies designed to tackle them? Since the second edition of Understanding Housing Policy was published in 2011, political and financial circumstances have transformed the answers to these questions. In this fully updated third edition, Brian Lund both explores how these policies developed and were implemented under the UK Coalition Government and looks ahead to the possible revisions under the new Conservative Government. Integrating the previous edition with new discussions of such subjects as the austerity agenda following the credit crunch, the impact of the Coalition Government's housing policies, and new policy ideas, Lund offers keen insight into the pervasive impact of need, demand, and supply as applied to the housing market and austerity policies.
A profound collection of interviews with residents of a 1980's South London housing estate; a human symphony of the everyday, in all its courageous diversity.