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Exploring the politics of housing during 1890-1990, this fascinating study examines the interaction not only of national and local politics but also of local factors such as civic culture, key local players, local discourse and geographical and demographic problems. This book argues that increasingly, tenants acted as consumers of a public service, and it questions the way in which notions of consumerism shaped responses to the housing debate. An analysis of the impact of legislation on housing policy in different cities is provided, as well as a more detailed account of the politics of housing in Manchester, including the Victorian legacy, the emergence of local government intervention, post-war overspill estates, new system-built flats and their rapid deterioration, rising tenant anger and protests, and the beginning of a new approach based on consultation and partnerships. The book will be of value to anyone studying urban history, politics, governance, civic culture, social policy and society.
Modern Playhouses is the first detailed study of the major programme of theatre-building which took place in Britain between the 1950s and the 1980s. Drawing on a vast range of archival material--much of which had never previously been studied by historians--it sets architecture in a wide social and cultural context, presenting the history of post-war theatre buildings as a history of ideas relating not only to performance but also to culture, citizenship, and the modern city. During this period, more than sixty major new theatres were constructed in locations from Plymouth to Inverness, Aberystwyth to Ipswich. The most prominent example was the National Theatre in London, but the National w...
The Skeffington Committee was appointed in 1968 to look at ways of involving the wider public in the formative stages of local development plans. It was the first concerted effort to encourage a systematic approach to resident participation in planning and the decision-making process, in contrast to the entirely top down process created by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The origins of the Skeffington Report lay in the 1965 publication by the Planning Advisory Group of The Future of Development Plans, which recommended changes to the planning system to include much greater public participation. It called for all plans to be publicly debated in full, with the opportunity for represent...
Focusing on a series of policy initiatives from the late 1960s through to the end of the 1970s, this book looks at how successive governments tried to address growing concerns about urban deprivation across Britain. It provides unique insights into policy and governance and into the socio-economic and cultural causes and consequences of poverty. Starting with the impact of redevelopment policies, immigration and the rise of the ‘inner city’, this book examines the pressures and challenges that explain the development of policy by successive Labour and Conservative governments. It looks at the effectiveness and limits of different community development approaches and at the inadequacies o...
The history of the voluntary sector in British towns and cities has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Nevertheless, whilst there have been a number of valuable contributions looking at issues such as charity as a key welfare provider, charity and medicine, and charity and power in the community, there has been no book length exploration of the role and position of the recipient. By focusing on the recipients of charity, rather than the donors or institutions, this volume tackles searching questions of social control and cohesion, and the relationship between providers and recipients in a new and revealing manner. It is shown how these issues changed over the course of ...
Like many UK cities Birmingham was heavily bombed during the Second World War and as with so many bombed British cities, and many un-bombed ones that jumped on to the re-planning bandwagon, there was a clear imperative to reconstruct. But Birmingham was atypical in how it went about this. The city had begun planning in the mid-1930s, principally to replace vast quantities of slum housing – and there had been suggestions about ring roads even from the time of the First World War. So plans were available virtually ready to go, and were approved by a private Act of Parliament in 1946. Yet within Birmingham there were individuals and organisations with a great interest and influence in plannin...
This book addresses the increasing regionalisation of urban governance and politics in an era of industrialisation, suburbanisation and welfare extension. It provides an important reassessment of the role, structure and activities of urban elites, highlighting their vitality and their interdependence and demonstrating the increasing regionalisation of municipal politics as towns sought to promote themselves, extend services and even expand physically onto a regional level. Moreover, it explores the discourses surrounding space in which gender, class, morality and community all feature prominently. How urban space and its uses were defined and redefined became key political weapons across the...
Whilst most historical investigations of ethnic and religious minorities concentrate on a single town or particular group, this volume offers a much broader geographical and chronological view. Looking at towns across western, and particularly, eastern Europe from the late antique period to the fifteenth century, these papers illustrate the changing nature of questions of identity, perception, legal status and relations between groups, together with the ways in which these elements were affected by the external political regimes and ideologies to which towns were inevitably subjected.
Thomas Sharp was a key figure in mid-C20 British planning whose renown stems from two periods in his career. First, he came to attention as a polemical writer in the 1930s on planning issues, including as a virulent opponent of garden cities. His prose tempered over time and this phase perhaps culminated in Town Planning, first published in 1940 and reputed to have sold over 250,000 copies. Subsequently the plans he produced for historic towns in the1940s, such as Oxford, were very well known and were influential in developing ideas of townscape. Started as an official manual on village planning, The Anatomy of the Village followed on from the Scott Report, for which Sharp had been one of th...
This collection of eleven essays looks at issues of corruption in urban Britain from 1780-1950. The contributions are drawn from a wide range of scholarly and disciplinary backgrounds and provide a broad analysis of the phenomenon of corruption, assessing how debates about corruption arose, the narratives used to criticise established modes of public conduct and their consequences for urban leadership.