This week sees the publication of The Modern British City 1945-2000, edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith, also published, like John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, by Lund Humphries. It consists of nearly 500 pages of articles on all aspects of the post-war city from a social, political and planning perspective, hard to summarise, although Peter Mandler does a good job in doing so in his ‘Afterword: The Five Phases of the Modern British City’: less about the utopian grand plans for new cities and more about cities as they actually were; constrained by restrictions on new development during the 1950s; only really undergoing radical redevelopment in the 1960s; already subject to a new interest in conservation and heritage in the 1970s; developing post-2000 through the rise in the number of students who attended the new universities and then often stayed. There is a lot about the ambiguities of gentrification, particularly in the 1960s.

It’s a rich read:-