Why do British towns and cities look the way that they do? Catherine Flinn's Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities explores the complex landscape within which postwar planners, architects, and politicians sought to reconstruct Britain's blitzed cities and towns in the aftermath of the Second World War. The modern landscape of so many contemporary British cities, with their flyovers, underpasses, concrete shopping centers, and ring roads existing alongside older buildings and neighborhoods, is often a direct result of attempts to rebuild Britain after the war and the economic and legislative constraints that shaped them.

Moving between an examination of national level policy and the experience of three individual cities in the immediate postwar era, Flinn argues that architectural and landscape historians need to pay greater attention to the political and economic underpinnings that drive the creation of our lived environments. Of course, many studies of postwar reconstruction already take this approach, and there are a wealth of books and articles that explore the social, cultural, political, and economic forces that shape the lived environment. But with her background in architectural history and her eye for the details of planning legislation, Flinn is able to cast an expert eye on not only the forces that drive planning decisions and rebuilding programs, but also the products and outcomes of these decisions and programs.

At the end of the Second World War, Britain, as did many other nations, faced the daunting task of social, political, and physical reconstruction. The war had unleashed devastation on a scale never seen before, and planning for reconstruction began long before the war had ended, even long before victory for the Allied nations was assured. The rebuilding of Britain at every level was at the heart of the “new Jerusalem” promised to “the people” as a reward for their participation in a second global war, just twenty-one years after the end of “the war to end all wars” in 1918. As Flinn shows, this rebuilding was not simply the preserve of politicians and professional planners. Instead, a wide array of publications, films, radio programs, and exhibitions discussed the future of British towns and cities and provided a space for debate and for contributions from those who would live and work within these redesigned spaces. While planners and architects undoubtedly held positions of authority within these debates, publications like those produced by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs discussed planning and the postwar environment in terms easily accessible to the nonexpert, inviting their readers to debate key points and to consider the kind of homes and cities they would want to live in after the war. The optimism that informed the debates of the war years, however—the belief that through central planning reconstruction could create a new egalitarian society in which slum housing and the other inequalities that had marked the interwar period would be a thing of the past—rapidly faded in the postwar world, buried beneath the rubble of austerity, complex planning regulations, and the conflict between the need to rapidly rebuild and the desire to develop a comprehensive and workable system through which to create livable towns and cities.

Organized into six chapters, Flinn's study carefully traces the story of reconstruction, from hopeful planning in the war years to the reality of attempted reconstruction during postwar austerity. Although there are some missteps, such as the concluding claim that historians (and critics) tend to overlook the context of the period under investigation, the study of which seems to this reader to be a basic definition of history, there is much to admire and much that historians both of the Second World War and of mid-century Britain more widely will find of interest. The book is meticulously researched and detailed; at times the minutiae of planning legislation and the institutional infrastructures that it was created within, threaten to distract from the bigger picture of utopian hopes and their more workaday outcomes that are the main story. However, for the most part Flinn marshals her careful and thorough research within an overall narrative of grand plans meeting the reality of economic, political, and organizational constraints.

One of the most interesting chapters moves away from the story of a centralizing bureaucracy to examine the postwar reconstruction of the cities of Hull, Exeter, and Liverpool. Making excellent use of local authority archives, all too often bypassed by British historians, these three case studies remind us of how important the local is to any social and political history. Policies may be created at the level of national or international governance, but it is at the local level that people experience and live with—and, in this case, within—the successes and failures of these policies.

Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities is a superbly researched and useful addition to the existing body of work on reconstruction. Its focus on the physical environment, often strangely absent from this field, is to be welcomed. More widely its linkage of wartime dreams with postwar realities reminds us of the need to develop a social history that works across the traditional chronological divides of wartime and postwar.