2 - Cities in the Age of Affluence

Summary

This chapter considers how Britain’s developmental, retail-oriented models of planning played out in individual cities across the 1940s and 1950s. It shows that many councils viewed planning as a tool of proactive economic management and enthusiastically bent their powers to the task of promoting valuable new retail development. These activities coincided with a spectacular shops boom in most cities as large retail chains reaped the benefits of full employment and rising wages to embark on major programmes of shop-building and expansion. Councils and retail chains worked in tandem to erect huge new stores all over the country and refit urban centres for the affluent age. At times urban authorities even played the part of commercial developer themselves by putting up shops and collecting business rents. I relate these practices to councils’ energetic pre-war activities in the field of municipal enterprise and show that post-war planning powers offered a new outlet for these long-standing traditions of civic entrepreneurship. The chapter also shows how central government promoted the nascent commercial property sector in British redevelopment from the 1950s.