This chapter examines the unprecedented era of urban rebuilding which took off in the late 1950s and lasted into the 1970s, in which enthusiasm for ‘comprehensive’ town centre redevelopment and modernist urban renewal was at its peak. This was the era when shopping malls were imported from the United States and planted at the centre of British towns and cities, and these developments rested upon an unusual alignment between the modernist planning ideals of urban professionals, the developmental agendas of local authorities and the commercial strategies of a handful of development companies. I stress how important the rhetoric of modernisation was in uniting these different interests, but also how loosely and variably notions of ‘the modern’ were defined and applied. I also highlight the importance of the technocratic enthusiasms of the age, particularly in the early 1960s, when the idea of engineering efficient urban environments came to the fore. Planners, policymakers and property developers adopted a deeply Taylorist, mechanistic idea of urban renewal, in which prosperity, efficiency and growth would be precisely engineered while ‘obsolescence’ would be excised from the modern city with surgical precision. For urban authorities facing darkening economic prospects, these were seductive ideas, and viewed as a means to combat the onset of deindustrialisation.

This chapter examines the politics and the practice of partnership in the urban renewal era. This public-private dynamic was the central political relationship which drove urban transformation; it was codified and mandated explicitly within planning legislation and central policy diktats and pursued energetically by many individual local authorities eager to remake the image and economy of their towns. I show how this hybrid, mixed economy of planning was situated within the wider political economy of post-war Britain, tracking the political influence and connections of the property and construction sectors as well as the attitudes and policy positions of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. I also trace the operation and impact of partnership-based urban renewal on the ground in various cities, focusing in particular on Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham. Local authorities had a range of motivations for working with the commercial development sector and their experiences were not uniform. The chapter shows that some cities managed to navigate the new terrain of public-private developmentalism more successfully than others, but I also stress the basic asymmetries involved in these relationships, particularly for those places that were struggling most economically.

Responses supplied by contributors from North West England recorded by BBC Radio Cumbria, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC GMR and BBC Radio Merseyside

Responses supplied by contributors from North West England recorded by BBC Radio Cumbria, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC GMR and BBC Radio Merseyside

Drawing upon the case studies of Ilford, Epping, Birmingham Moseley and Liverpool East Toxteth, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in suburban, predominantly middle-class constituencies. In the 1920s, as chapter 2 argued, suburban Conservatives rejected Baldwin’s attempts to appeal to voters along apolitical lines and instead urged a robust party stance; however, their own struggle to rehabilitate the conspicuous partisanship that had characterised the civic culture of Edwardian Conservatism – and which they interpreted as apathy among ‘known’ local Conservatives - led many activists to doubt the future prospects of Conservatism in the face of Labour competition. Chapter 5 argues that 1931 proved a turning point. The experience of the general election of that year initiated Conservative activists to the advantages of articulating a non-party variety of anti-socialism that matched the cross-party makeup of the National Government. It also encouraged them to cultivate an ostensibly non-party presence in the associational life of the suburbs, including in the new housing estates. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, the National Government continued to challenge the suburban Conservative activist in some ways: National anti-socialism could be as much a source of competition as cooperation between local Conservatives and Liberals, and the government’s policy of Indian constitutional reform antagonised elements within the party. Even so, by 1935, the Conservatives’ suburban grassroots, so often the voice of diehard Conservatism, remained wedded to the National Government and looked enthusiastically to Baldwin as both the embodiment and facilitator of its ‘national’ appeal.