The Modern British City 1945-2000

Bringing together architectural, urban and social historians, this book charts the extraordinary changes that took place in British cities between the end of the Second World War and the early 21st century. This ambitious volume captures something of their diversity through its multi-disciplinary approach, with a large spectrum of scales, exploring gentrification and multiculturalism, shopping and night life, as well as demography and statistics.

For much of the first two thirds of the 20^th Century, what ‘modern’ meant in the British urban context was the purging of the Victorian past. Even so, much of the terraced housing and the monumental architecture of city centres still dated from the nineteenth century. Disdained by architectural critics in the first half of the twentieth century, structures like Covent Garden’s Market Building, Manchester’s Royal Exchange and Liverpool’s Albert Dock would become pivots of the conservation and restoration movement which accompanied Britain’s ‘urban renaissance’ from the 1970s onwards.

Nevertheless, a series of long-term historical processes combined to transform British cities after 1950. Mass automobility brought with it motorways, underpasses and flyovers. Deindustrialisation left a profound mark on large areas of urban Britain, with enduring consequences for the communities affected. Immigration not only brought more diverse people and voices to British cities than ever before, but with them, a fresh variety of stores, restaurants, places of worship and venues for entertainment. Likewise, urban planning and the fruits of consumerism left their mark in the ubiquitous presence of civic centres, shopping malls and cultural quarters. The book shows how these processes did not operate separately, but in complex inter-relationship with one another, often producing unintended outcomes.

The result was cities where the past and the present were juxtaposed, adding to rather than diminishing their sense of place. This book is intended to enable an understanding of why British cities are as they are in all their messiness and mutability.