In our current climate, historians of urban redevelopment are spoiled for contemporary parallels. The politics of urban boosterism, in particular, are alive and well in our age of nationalist populism. From Donald Trump's self-lauded infrastructure plan to the Brexit vote's disqualification of British cities from bidding for European Capital of Culture, the stakes of competitive redevelopment are high on both sides of the Atlantic. I enthusiastically read Charlotte Wildman's Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 with these contexts in mind. Wildman's study takes the histories of competitive redevelopment seriously, asking how urban leaders harnessed mass culture and a mass electorate in two cities – Liverpool and Manchester – undergoing profound socio-economic change in the inter-war period. Working within this field of ‘regional modernities’ (p. 14), Wildman writes against the portrayal of north-west English cities as the losers during the global realignment of urban-industrial power in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather, she maintains that ‘post-1918 cultures of civic pride reflected the context of the period and were part of an effort to engage with the electorate that reflected a wider culture of “civics”’ (p. 11). In Wildman's analysis, this ‘wider culture of “civics”’ encompassed not only metropolitan affiliation, but a sense of belonging within its commercial and religious built fabric. She joins a growing cohort of British urban historians who have focused on the inter-war period not as a moment of crisis for localized citizenship, but as a moment of shoring up pre-existing communities and forging new ones through building programmes that demanded active or reciprocal citizenry engagement. Whether in reference to the cathedrals to municipalism (a town hall extension in Manchester), cathedrals to consumerism (the modern retail high street) or an actual cathedral (the proposed Lutyens’ Liverpool Catholic Cathedral), Wildman shifts our attention away from conventional planning histories and towards the rhetorical and material roles of the ordinary citizen in the redevelopment of the provincial urban landscape.

The book proceeds in three sections of two chapters each focusing on the aforementioned realms of the civic, the commercial and the religious. Wildman uses the explosive amount of promotional print culture from the period – city handbooks, yearbooks, guidebooks, trade directories and community-specific journals and newspapers – to reconstruct how urban elites and urban constituents ‘talked to each other’ in the modern urban landscape. The author also makes effective use of regional newspapers to interrogate how place and publication affected the language of civic engagement across lines of city, class and gender. For example, in what I found to be the stand-out second chapter of the monograph, Wildman dissects the competitive boosterism of ‘civic weeks’ in Liverpool and Manchester during the 1920s. As each conurbation battled over the title of ‘Second City’, urban commercial elites focused not only on promoting their trade and industrial prowess to national and international investors, but also on engaging their own citizenry in the culture and amenities available in the new modern urban landscape. The Liverpool Post and Mercury and the Manchester Guardian traded backhanded compliments concerning their rival cities; Wildman's close textual analysis propels her argument that urban redevelopment was as much about communicating and instilling a new language of cross-class civic pride as it was about the actual building of new estates, tramlines or public buildings (p. 25).

The final two sections focus on how changing shopping and religious environments of the north-west were navigated by the new ‘classless’ citizen, in particular the ordinary housewife. Wildman switches methodological and geographical gears in chapter 4. She delves into the Mass Observation Archives for evidence of working-class women's consumerist self-fashioning, and moves beyond the city centres of Manchester and Liverpool to the surrounding conurbation towns. In the introduction, Wildman stresses her goal of transcending the narratives of ‘deprivation and decay’ that we so readily associate with Mass Observation (MO), George Orwell, J.B. Priestley and Walter Greenwood (pp. 3–5). Indeed, she turns a carefully revisionist eye to Mass Observers in chapter 4, highlighting why MO's ‘followers’ became frustrated by the class ambiguity of their research subjects (pp. 138–9), or how Co-operative stores remained out-of-step with their newly fashionable clientele (pp. 135–6). These passages underscore Wildman's assertion that as class boundaries blurred in the inter-war period, there was an immanent tension in commercial citizenship. However, the shift to ethnographic ‘followers’ in conurbation towns fits uneasily with the promotional ‘insiders’ in Liverpool and Manchester who make up the empirical core of the monograph.

Overall, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity makes a vital methodological intervention in the field of twentieth-century British urban history. Wildman takes her readers beyond policy debates in Westminster and Whitehall and off of the drafting tables of modernist architects and designers; she focuses our gaze on the networks of civil society and mass culture that emanated from the local outwards. This book will be essential reading for audiences interested in the histories of citizenship, retail and consumption and urban modernity.