The early decades of the twentieth century hold a particular fascination for students of housing and housing policy in Britain, for it was then that home ownership began its apparently inexorable growth and local authorities became established as large-scale providers of affordable rented housing. Before 1914, most local authorities had built nothing, but the Great War was to transform the politics of housing and overcome government resistance to key demands for the control of private rents and the provision of subsidies to ensure that affordable houses were built to meet the acute postwar shortage. The war also marked a stylistic boundary in housing design and layout, a boundary that is still inscribed into the urban landscape. Before 1914, urban working-class housing was almost invariably built in long terraces, lining straight streets that were laid out in a rigid gridiron pattern. After 1919, the narrow-fronted terraced house was largely, if not completely, abandoned, and local authorities in particular built wide-fronted houses in pairs, or short rows of four, on low-density estates with sweeping avenues, crescents and cul-de-sacs.

In 1981, Mark Swenarton made a significant contribution to the housing studies literature with his book Homes fit for Heroes, in which he provided an explanation of this stylistic change. It was, he argued, precisely the pre-1914 unaffordability of the low-density layout favoured by the Garden City movement that made this the model for the postwar development of ‘homes for heroes’: it was a demonstration that nothing but the best would suffice for the heroes who had won the war. Swenarton's first book was a valuable account of the lead up to and implementation of the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1919, combining discussion of both architecture and politics. Having enjoyed and learned a lot from that book, I approached this new one with considerable interest, hoping, I suppose, for an analysis that put the 1919 Act into a longer-term historical context. Instead, what we have here is a collection of the author's essays, published between 1978 and 2007, plus a very useful CD containing a fascinating collection of scanned historical documents (including, for example, the whole of the Tudor Walters Report, of 1918, which laid out the guidelines for the postwar development of local authority housing).

The various essays are presented in the order that they were written, with, it would appear, no editing or updating, so that there is inevitably some repetition, although that is a minor problem compared with the failure to engage with research published since the earlier papers came out more than 30 years ago (for example, Darling, Reference Darling2007; Shapely, Reference Shapely2007). In the introduction, which is the only newly written part of the whole book, Swenarton admits that he could have grouped the papers thematically, and I wish he had because that would have required a bit of thought, whereas it is hard to escape the impression that this is a book that has been put together with the minimum of effort. Even the title seems lazy, for the notion of ‘building a new Jerusalem’ has been employed by many others, including for example, Elizabeth Durbin (Reference Durbin1985) and Peter Hennessy (1992), who both locate the project in relation to the post-1945 welfare state. Swenarton fails to provide a convincing justification for using what has become a rather clichéd term in relation to his chosen period, apart from references to the youthful socialist idealism of his hero, the architect Raymond Unwin. Indeed, he fails to explain why his period ends in 1930, the point when, some people might argue, the story of housing between the wars was just getting really interesting. For example, Unwin was soon to be involved in a failed campaign to establish a national body not unlike the Housing Corporation to oversee housing production, because of the perceived inability of speculative builders to meet the needs of lower-paid workers. This, of course, has a very familiar ring to it, but the opportunity to make any comparison between then and now is not taken.

There is a great deal of good and interesting scholarship here, with considerable attention given to Raymond Unwin, who undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping housing policy and the physical form of new houses between the wars. Starting out designing the New Earswick development for Rowntrees in York, he went on to the master plan for the first garden city at Letchworth before being responsible for Hampstead Garden Suburb. Unwin was, as Swenarton says, the leading designer from the garden city movement, although perhaps more credit should be given to some of his collaborators such as Barry Parker and Courtney Crickmer. Unlike them, however, Unwin went on to a career in government, and in 1918 provided the design ideas that informed the Tudor Walters Report, which in turn shaped the way postwar local authority housing estates were built.

The last two essays focus on the early years of the Building Research Station (BRS), which emerged from concerns during the First World War about how to ramp up housing construction levels in a situation of extreme shortage of traditional building materials. The BRS did important work over many years (and still exists as the privatised Building Research Establishment (BRE)), but whether it deserves more than a footnote in the history of twentieth-century housing is open to debate. Clearly, someone at the BRE thinks it does, because they have invested in this expensively produced book and the accompanying CD, which contains a lot more material on the BRS. However, I do not expect many readers of Journal of Social Policy to rush out to buy this collection of recycled essays.