For those familiar with Guy Ortolano's previous monograph, a study of the planning, politics and architecture of that most idiosyncratically British town Milton Keynes may be something of a surprise. As the author notes, Milton Keynes is both the object of endless study and the recipient of the heaped scorn of popular culture. It is (unjustly) a byword for dullness, conformity and planning failure. That Ortolano has produced such compelling arguments in a highly readable book is testament to his own skills, but also reminds us how fertile and paradoxically underexploited a subject of study the New Towns project still is. Here, the planning and governance of Milton Keynes allow Ortolano to scrutinize the trajectories of social democracy and market liberalism through the built (and sometimes unbuilt) environment. This is a decidedly political history, yet written through the production and regulation of lived spaces.

The title might, nevertheless, mislead some readers. Thatcher's Progress is not a Bunyanesque allegory concerning the Iron Lady's career, nor solely an examination of Thatcherite policy per se. Instead, the title refers to a series of vignettes from the new prime minister's 1979 tour of Milton Keynes, that are used as thematic epigraphs to each chapter. Indeed, although there is much here for historians of the 1980s, the book is strongest examining the 1970s. The first two chapters of six – thematically arranged in pairs that proceed along a rough chronology – document a changing planning environment in the 20 years following the war. Here, both plans for a ‘monorail metropolis’ and the model of automobility and dispersal that superseded them reflected the priorities and attitudes of an adaptable social democracy. Chapters 3 and 4 examine modernist architecture and attempts to foster community respectively, demonstrating the dynamism of social democracy's responses to the often hostile political and economic contexts of the 1970s. In the final two chapters, Ortolano shows how the development of an international planning consultancy and approaches to home ownership represented attempts by the public sector to lay claim to the instruments of market liberalism itself. In these last chapters, 1979 emerges as a transformative moment for Milton Keynes, because the peculiarities of its governance rendered it particularly vulnerable to Thatcherite policies. What these case-studies illustrate is the dynamism of social democracy's responses to unfavourable economic conditions and increasingly coherent challenges from the right. Yet, as Ortolano concludes, this very adaptability meant that social democracy's champions increasingly became the agents of the market liberalism they sought to stave off.

The book comes to several important conclusions. First, Ortolano situates a seemingly provincial moment of British planning in a distinctly global context, depicting Milton Keynes enmeshed within transnational networks. It is a strength of the book that such an emblematically British case-study so lucidly shows different state actors reshaping global relationships, rather than retreating from them as Britain's imperial influence collapsed. Second, the book highlights individual agency as a key driver of particular outcomes in Milton Keynes. Ortolano may well be concerned with the fate of the social democratic project, but it is a cast of distinct planners, community workers and managers – often presented with a discernible fondness and no little humour – that interpret and react to the challenges of emerging market liberalism in this study. Third, the book attests to the depth and resilience of the social democratic project that stemmed from the dynamism of its supporters during the 1970s. Ortolano thus presents a convincing challenge to ‘sequential’ histories that imagine a flagging, intellectually depleted social democracy falling to a vital market liberalism, yet also rejects accounts that look for the origins of market liberalism in deep-seated forms of individualism, home ownership or consumerism during the earlier decades of the century. The trademark of Ortolano's work, and what makes it stand out, is how carefully he pulls apart the historiographical structures and assumptions that he seeks to challenge.

There is, thus, remarkably little for a reviewer to criticize in this book, although the label ‘welfare state modernism’ will engender some debate. Ortolano argues that the relationship between modernism and welfarist policies was so symbiotic that as the latter failed, so too the former was discredited. In Milton Keynes, this meant that tenants and mortgage lenders increasingly rejected modernist dwellings due to associations with social housing. Yet, the unpopularity of social housing's often-distinctive style was not restricted to modernist designs. The system-built walls and pebble-dashed finishes, unfenced gardens, uniform colour schemes and ambiguous green spaces of cottage estates attracted similar opprobrium. Indeed, the output of the welfare state was overwhelmingly the cottage estate, made up of mainly semi-detached housing in decidedly vernacular styles. These were as ambitious and historically unique a set of designs for living and class mixing as their modernist contemporaries. Equally encoded in their bricks and timbers were the objectives of post-war social democracy. That modernist housing became emblematic of social democracy's issues in certain areas is convincingly argued here, yet viewed from cottage estates the exact nature of ‘modernism’ embedded within Ortolano's terminology warrants further examination.

In Thatcher's Progress, Ortolano has produced one of the stand-out studies of urban history in the last few years. This is precise, stimulating material that showcases the characteristic thoughtfulness and precision of the author's work. The discussion of how to re-examine the way historians have tackled the period in the introduction has a freshness of approach that should prove grist to the mill of many researchers. Those compiling reading lists for contemporary British history modules might also consider setting the introduction's discussion of social democracy and market liberalism alongside the likes of James Vernon on the welfare state or Jim Tomlinson on deindustrialization. This book deserves to be read widely and will likely find a market beyond the academy, where Milton Keynes and Thatcher both hold a fascination that only polarized public opinion can create.