Introduction

Abstract

The introductory chapter discusses the history of twentieth-century Britain told through the transformation of its built environment. It narrates a story about the rise of a developmental social infrastructure, and its privatization, demolition, and rearticulation under a new neoliberal consensus. The chapter reveals the types of subjects and visions of society that emerged alongside these transformations as well as the new relationships between Britain and the wider world that they entailed. It does so by charting the emergence and spread of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, the shopping precinct, the council estate, the private housing estate, the shopping mall and the business park. Although the chapter opens in the skies above London, it draws up a similar index of almost every British town or city at the millennium using the six urban forms whose histories the book charts. Ultimately, the chapter outlines the fascinating histories of each of these spaces — hopefully showing the historical fragility and downright weirdness of places that have come to feel mundane and familiar to so many of us.