CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 49 48 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 Book reviews Suburban nation England’s Suburbs 1820–2020 Joanna Smith and Matthew Whitfield, Liverpool University Press on behalf of Historic England, 2025, 308 pages, fully illustrated, hardback, ISBN 978 1 836244 35 6, £40 Most people in England live in suburbs. The authors of this book note that it has been argued that England could be viewed as ‘the suburban nation’. But what is a suburb? You do not often hear developers or housebuilders boasting that their new scheme is ‘suburban’, and the first definition I find when looking up ‘suburban’ online is ‘contemptibly dull and ordinary’. So it seems that most people have ended up living somewhere that is not the sort of place they like. What is going on? The answer is that creating suburbs is a common feature of urban change. Joanna Smith and Matthew Whitfield nail it with the three-part ‘broad definition’ that they use in this book. The features of a suburb are, they write, ‘a peripheral or satellite location at the time of creation; a degree of dependence on an urban centre; and a mainly, but not necessarily exclusively, residential character.’ Those three features are all subject to change. A development may have a peripheral or satellite location when it is built, but subsequent development may surround it. The suburb may have a degree of dependence on an urban centre at first, but in time it may develop facilities of its own that make it more independent. And although it may have a mainly residential character when it is built, later it may be swallowed by a town or city centre and undergo a significant change of character. The new suburban development may itself swallow what was there before. In the 19th century, Smith and Whitfield write, ‘rubbish heaps, made up of a medley of refuse, including household waste, street sweepings and dead animals, were to be found in the suburban outskirts and in the poorer urban districts; in London these sometimes attained great size and notoriety.’ Rising land values might lead to those eyesores being removed. Today, the outskirts of towns and cities may be home to ‘waste disposal sites, water reservoirs, industrial plant, power generation sites, pylons and transport infrastructure, including airports and motorway interchanges, supplemented by retail parks, leisure complexes, business parks and distribution depots.’ The advancing suburbs may incorporate those uses or replace them, depending on the economics of development. And suburbs may be seen as suitable for intensification, with a resulting increase in density and perhaps diversity of uses. So suburbs are often changing, not static, however superficially similar many of them may appear. To plan, manage and protect them effectively we need to understand how they developed and what role they play today. That is why in 2012 English Heritage, now Historic England, initiated a national research project on suburban development that would put it in context, and why Historic England has drawn on that research in publishing this book. England’s Suburbs 1820–2020, meticulously researched, well written and superbly illustrated, will be of enormous value to anyone dealing with historic and not-so-historic buildings in what are or once were suburbs, or to anyone fascinated by urban history. Rob Cowan, editor of Context Causes célèbres Campaigning for Edinburgh: the Cockburn Association 1875–2049 Cliff Hague and Richard Rodger, with DJ Johnston-Smith and Terry Levinthal, Birlinn and John Donald, 2025, 256pp, 131 colour illustrations and tables, ISBN 978 0 859767 28 6, £25 Campaigning for Edinburgh celebrates the Cockburn Association’s 150th anniversary judiciously by explaining, warning and advising us of the significant role that a civic voice plays in protecting the character and culture (and so the economy and social stability) of a place. To this end, the authors A sense of optimism Post-War Homes: mid-century British architecture Dominic Bradbury, RIBA Publishing, 2026, 218 pages, 205 colour and black- and-white illustrations, ISBN 978-1-915722-49-2, hardback, £45 The scale of bomb damage across Britain in the second world war was immense, and together with the need for slum clearance, the loss of dwellings posed a huge challenge for post-war planners and architects. A target of 300,000 houses a year was set by the government in 1945, which was increased in the 1960s. Various methods were used to achieve these figures, from infill homes and small clusters to new satellite communities and ‘new towns’. The result marked a high point in house design, with mid-century British architects applying new ideas and innovation, as demonstrated by Dominic Bradbury in this wellstructured book. To cover the full range of building types, the author divides the book into five chapters. The first features stand-alone houses, which allowed architects to explore different ways of living, introducing varied plan forms, new materials and construction. Peter Womersley’s Farnley Hey and Basil Spence’s own house in Hampshire both have a Nordic flavour, while Peter Aldington’s Turn End is an early example of vernacular modernism. The full-height glass walls of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Upper Lawn Cottage draw the surrounding landscape into the dwelling. Chapter 2, dealing with estates, includes sensitively planned and landscaped Span developments designed by Eric Lyons, as well as large-scale social housing projects at Alton East and West, and Alexandra Road, London. There are also lesser-known schemes such as the Calthorpe Estate, Birmingham, by John Madin, and The Ryde, Hatfield, by Phippen, Randall and Parkes. Chapters 3 and 4 tackle highrise and mid-rise, the former being the most controversial building type up to the present day. For example, Park Hill, Sheffield, by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, and Trellick Tower by Ernö Goldfinger, both influenced by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, have suffered chequered histories, but are now considered to be a great success. Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate, Finsbury, and Frederick Gibberd’s The Lawn, also in Finsbury, both erected at the same time as the Festival of Britain, display a liveliness reflecting the spirit of the time. Stirling and Gowan’s Langham House, Ham Common, went further in moving away from the rectangular forms that were common in housing design. The last of mid-rise projects selected by Bradbury is Robin Hood Gardens, the most contentious of all 20th-century housing schemes. Designed by the Smithsons, on a difficult site alongside arterial roads and the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel, it adopted the streets-inthe-sky concept used at Park Hill. But the public space was much less generous, and the raw surfaces of the concrete structure led to poor management and neglect, and ultimately demolition. The final chapter deals with mixed-use schemes, which are perhaps the greatest achievement presented in the book. These involved not only the relationship between housing and landscape, but from the early 1950s onward, other amenities, such as schools, shops, pubs and libraries. In the best schemes, these amenities were woven into the urban fabric. However, only one of the exemplars featured – Wyndham Court, Southampton – is outside London (the others include the Barbican, the Brunswick Centre and Lillington Gardens). This highlights the planning failures in redeveloping Britain’s other great cities. The book is beautifully illustrated with photographs, mostly from RIBA Collections. Almost all the 30 case studies are listed buildings, several at Grade II*, and are generally well-cared for. Only one no longer exists – Robin Hood Gardens – of which a small section was acquired by V&A East as an important exemplar of post-war
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