Sam Wetherell. Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain.

Abstract

I can still remember my first visit to the Bullring in Birmingham in the latter years of the twentieth century; the endless dark walkways, the disorientating absence of windows or natural light, the almost-unplaceable music, the down-at-heel shops. I have also returned as an adult to the new, shiny, bubble-wrapped Bullring. What I didn’t understand then, and what Wetherell’s book draws out so persuasively, is the way that these evolving urban forms—from shopping precinct to shopping mall—have epitomized, spatialized, and constituted the interlinked shifts in ideas of society, politics, and the individual in twentieth-century Britain. Through examples like this and many more, Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain makes a series of arguments about the relationship between the spatial forms of the built environment and the political forms of twentieth-century Britain. Wetherell’s foundational premise is that Britain’s neoliberal political formation has been characterized by the uneasy interplay between old and new. Here he describes the built environment as a “giant museum, exhibiting the decrepit and shabby remains of prior means of capital accumulation along with obsolete visions of society” (5). Indeed, he argues that neoliberalism should be understood as a type of market fundamentalism layered on top of the ruins of mid-twentieth-century developmental projects. Building on this, Wetherell calls for a more nuanced understanding of British neoliberalism that is located in the things and spaces that make up the landscapes of Britain. Moreover, he foregrounds the way that these new spaces made material the networks between the island of Britain and the world, through finance, spatial forms, and these places’ designers, builders, and inhabitants.