This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
In an anecdote that is suspiciously Dickensian in flavour but apparently true, William Wordsworth once wrote a letter to the first inspector of schools in England advising him that children in the country “must not only have knowledge but the means of wielding it”.
The poet insisted that “the imaginative faculty” was the means by which facts might be organised, something he admitted ran counter to prevailing opinion. It is an episode described by the great historian Asa Briggs in his essay compiled in the 1973 book The Victorian City: Images and Reality, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff.
The story shows how the extremes of that period’s cultural attitudes — the Gradgrindian inspector and his Romantic nemesis — were in communication. It also provides Briggs with a model for how the balance between the qualitative and quantitative should not only exist in historic writing (the collection of essays, published in 1973, is remarkably poised in this regard) but across culture as a whole.
So it is to be commended that the editors of The Modern British City 1945–2000 have attempted, by their own repeated declaration, to do for the post-war city what Dyos and Wolff did for its 19th century incarnation. And there is much rich work here. Top writers in the field of urban history are brought in, such as Guy Ortolano and Krista Cowman. William Whyte’s essay on the The Faith in the City report of 1985 emulates work in The Victorian City: a meditation on the relationship between values, institutions and urban living, bolstered by new research.
It is clearly good to work towards goals. If this book edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith comes up short, then it is partly because they chose such a noble model to emulate.
They are certainly less fortunate in the moment when they write. Part of what makes The Victorian City a great work is the way different contributors share an idea of their historical moment. Architect and critic John Summerson suggests it is the “irredeemable monotony” of existing architectural culture that allows the heterodoxy of the Victorians, so recently thrown off in revulsion, to finally “strike the imagination”.
There is a sense throughout that earlier book of a society in the business of modernising, having an image of the suppressed past rearing up in the collective subconscious and becoming impossible to ignore any further — of history making itself heard. The analysis in it shows that, yes, the historic condition is being neglected but interestingly it also explores how degraded Victorian cities were and how far society had come, for example in housing the working class in something other than abject squalor.
The Modern British City finds itself in a different place. It is born of an academic need to reassert the city itself as a site of research and revive the idea of urban history as something that is more than architecture and planning. However, even if the book is a valuable overview of the best contemporary writing about the history of our cities, it lacks the same immediacy.
This is partly to do with the lag at work in The Modern British City. Otto Saumarez Smith, an historian who has challenged assumptions about post-war planning, explores Telford, Stoke and Middlesbrough. He highlights where architectural jewels can be found amongst the jarring discontinuities, making an excellent case for considering the cooling towers of Telford B as cosmic sculpture. He also gives a clarion call for academic analysis of British cities outside London and the larger northern cities. “Watford, Wigan and Wrexham” end his suggested list.
What is also needed is some sense of the cause of our current predicament, rather than the one that emerged in 2000: the history of churn in the funding landscape, the shortcomings of the service economy and the creative industries models, the circumvention of democracy in development bodies. It’s not the sexiest stuff in the world, but some sense of why the discontinuities have continued is needed.
We are now closer to the centenary of deindustrialisation than the moment it began and we have experienced several different political and administrative moves to address that condition, which have all generally failed.
The ferocity with which the electorate is tearing through existing political parties is directly to do with conditions which this book describes as happening in the 1980s but which have been compounded later. Jon Lawrence warns against nostalgia and asks that we “recognise and value working-class life and culture as it is lived today, in all its rich multicultural diversity”. To which one might reply that what is fuelling the crisis in working-class representation is not starry-eyed memories of leaving doors open in the 1970s, but the acid-etched certainty that, five years ago, you could afford to drink in a pub that still existed.
Yes, things are changing fast, but there is a gap between the subject of history here and today’s urban condition which dilutes the relevance. Sometimes writers will sneak into this ideological no-man’s land, make a tiny point and then run out again. Sometimes they ignore it. Simon Gunn’s essay on the revival of urban nightlife explains how an infrastructure of live venues spread across the country in the 1950s and 1960s, and it ends with the statement that they “helped to revive and reanimate urban nightlife”.
This network has been systematically destroyed since 2008 and increasingly since Covid. In 2023 two nightclub venues closed every week. Even if this is not the concern of the academic, it certainly deflects the punch of the publishing moment not to reflect on it, even in a conclusion (as Summerson did).
There is a little too much flaneuring in this book. As much as it opened up the field, the model for analysing the travails of a nation is surely not to be found in the blogosphere of the 2000s nor in the histrionics of that old soak Ian Nairn. It is to be found in the hard analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, undertaken here by, amongst others, Laura Balderstone in her brilliant essay “The Active Suburb”, an important pushback on the idea of culture-free city hinterlands. John Davis does the hard stuff well in his analysis of urban change in 1950s Chelsea, still managing to produce the laugh-out-loud line, “it is reassuring to find gentrification being practised by real gentry”.
However Peter Mandler’s idea that the hipster went global because of the media is unconvincing. Peter York’s BBC documentary Hipster Handbook showed how they were primarily interested in consuming authentically rather than in self-expression — they’d set up a café rather than start a band — giving insight into a neurosis about their own inauthenticity as gentrifiers and providing a key intersection between urban form and popular culture.
There is much great analysis in this essay selection and a clear sense of academics re-coalescing around a sub-discipline. The writers deserve sympathy for addressing a condition where planning itself is a passive rather than a proactive activity. To tell the story of a process where power has fled into hidden corners is a harder task. Still, this is a noble start.
It is worth remembering that The Victorian City was published in two volumes. We may therefore look forward to an attempt to deal with the growing crises in urban conditions in this country that started before the endpoint of this book and has played out since.
