Peter Scott presents in this book a revisionary history of the genesis of the modern British suburb which concentrates especially on how, in the decades between the two world wars, large sections of the British working classes became suburbanites. The author dismantles the often-heard opinion that modern suburbs were primarily a middle-class phenomenon. As such, they were financially beyond the reach of even the upper layers of the working classes even if developers, politicians, real estate agents, and building societies tried to recklessly impose the suburban way of life onto them. Eschewing any a priori dismissive or appreciative attitude toward suburbs, Scott relies instead on datasets like, for example, 600 returns from “Britain's first detailed national household expenditure survey, conducted by the Ministry of Labour over the year beginning October 1937” (p. vii). Other sources include personal testimonies, such as interviews, biographies, and contributions to oral history projects, from migrants who moved into suburbs. The main thesis of the book is that the interwar years were characterized by a process of suburbanization that allowed approximately 25 percent “of non-agricultural British working-class households [to] move to suburban estates … with around 13 per cent taking the municipal housing route to suburbia, around 9 per cent taking the mortgage route, and perhaps 3 per cent renting privately developed suburban housing” (p. 10). Even more, the end of the Great War brought with it the end of terraced housing, until then one of Britain's favorite types of building for housing the working classes and sections of the middle classes. Drawing on prewar garden city ideas, the new suburban housing was mostly low-density, short terraces, and especially “semis,” or semi-detached houses. Finally, Scott traces in great detail the manifold social changes that came with swapping urban housing for suburban homes. “[A] new form of working-class respectability emerged, based around maintaining minimum accepted standards of dress and other visible markers of consumption, restrained speech and behaviour, high standards of personal and domestic hygiene, ‘privatized’ family- and home-centred lifestyles, and an increased commitment of resources to the welfare and material advancement of the next generation” (p. 11).