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.

This chapter revisits the 1940s moment of urban and national reconstruction when the modern planning system emerged out of a tumult of ideas for the reformation of state and society. The 1940s saw the production of a wave of ambitious civic reconstruction plans, and these were often inspired by collectivist visions of social renewal, but the material presented here shows that reconstruction as it was actually practised focused overwhelmingly upon repairing the most valuable commercial districts of blitzed cities—the central shopping districts. I relate this pattern to the intensely productivist vision of reconstruction planning that emanated from central government at this time, as well as an engrained liberalism and administrative economism on the part of central officials. The new Planning Ministry placed supreme emphasis upon business growth and developmental needs while making strenuous efforts to rein in local planning ambitions and public spending commitments. The upshot of these agendas was a mode of reconstruction which aimed to grow the value and enhance the performance of central shopping districts, and planners worked closely with a range of commercial experts and interests to develop planning principles and policies that would maximise the efficiency of local retail environments.