Over the last decade, Peter Shapley has produced a significant body of work concerning the governance of British cities since the end of the 1950s. Although ranged across subjects as diverse as housing, civic pride, public–private partnerships and shopping centres, the unifying characteristics of his work have been a focus on how various levels of the state have approached the distinctly urban problems of post-war Britain. In this new volume, Shapely turns his attention to the policies, community-based projects and administrative reforms that sought to tackle deprivation against the emergent spectre of the ‘inner city’ and a backdrop of repeated urban crises. Although focused on a short period, Shapely demonstrates a significant shift in the way that reformers imagined the causes of and thus the responses to deprivation over the decade. For Shapely, this constantly changing political landscape was characterized by the inability of both policy-makers and the increasingly detached structures of local government to formulate successful approaches to poverty and inequality.

The core of the book is a series of case-studies concerned with specific governmental initiatives. These include Education Priority Areas, Community Development Projects, Inner Area Studies, the Neighbourhood Scheme and the Comprehensive Community Programme. Despite some initial and limited successes, what each study illustrates is that post-war redevelopment policies tended simply to harden and sometimes even to deepen social inequality, and never really challenged class divisions. Key to many of the failures, Shapely argues, was that welfare policies could not account for the individual circumstances of the urban poor, whilst governments across the political spectrum imagined the deprived citizen as a homogeneous subject for whom uniform solutions could be found. The reader is left with the sense that politicians targeted policies at classes and stereotypes that they wanted to exist, rather than deal with the multifarious reality. Alongside this, Shapley shows that inadequate attempts to reform local government placed too much stress on efficiency to be effective, that workable models of participation were too challenging to local governments’ fragile grip on power and that, in any case, the will amongst inhabitants to participate was frequently questionable. This, then, is a familiar story of good intentions and lofty ideals, countered by unrealistic and poorly conceived approaches. Writ large is a combination of incompetence and misunderstanding across multiple levels of government and the incompatibility of views on the causes of poverty with any practical approaches available to governments of all stripes.

These arguments are presented in ten short chapters, of which the first three serve to contextualize the study in longer histories of deprivation and state responses to it, but it is the core of case-study-driven chapters, from 4 to 9, where the book is at its best. Here, detailed work on the intentions and flaws of policies, organizational issues, the limitations of the ever-changing machinery of local government, as well as the difficulties faced at street level by those charged with implementation, all feed into a genuinely illuminating study. The book is shot through with a palpable sense that Shapely is often genuinely angry at the failures and attitudes of the period. He is unforgiving of policy-makers who he argues did too little to alter the attitudes, language and depictions of the poor that maintained a set of damaging prejudices. These arguments, though vehement, remain scholarly and, for this reviewer personally, bring life to a book that deals with some potentially dry material.

There are, naturally, a couple of areas of small criticism that the urban historian might make of this otherwise fine study. The first two chapters, of all of those presented, are perhaps the weakest. Comprised as they are of summaries of secondary material, and despite Shapely's diligence in his historiographical work, they cover areas in which he is often less sure-footed than in the more substantive chapters. Shapely has a good understanding of housing policy and the social consequences of it, but he is on less secure ground when he talks about design of estates or the production of space. He is also prone to wandering a little too closely to some of the less critical perspectives on the so-called failures of social housing. We are told that ‘architectural choices reinforced’ (p. 41) the isolation of inhabitants – a concept that has generated much debate – and that housing projects replaced slum land with something physically similar (p. 320). Here, he seems to fall into the trap of having his eye drawn by the emblematic and frequently experimental high-rises or quirky system-built disasters. The cottage estates that formed the lion's share of post-war social housing had many issues, but it is debatable the extent to which these were rooted in architecture or building quality. This leads him, particularly in chapter 2, to come dangerously close to the cliff-edge of nostalgia for the semi-mythical community of the working-class terrace. He is aware and remains mindful of this, but does rather peek over the precipice at times.

In addition, when talking about the inter- and immediate post-war periods Shapely struggles for a touch of precision. How, for example, might we claim that suburbia was, as he does, for many the epitome of community life when it faced such criticism from planners and politicians alike who saw it as one of the roots of anomie and community collapse? Discussion of post-war reconstruction is similarly marred by some confusion and Shapely's use of the secondary material on housing and planning occasionally collapses the periods between 1930 and the 1960s into a single-note attempt at urban renewal. These are, however, not the crux of the study and do not detract from the central arguments that Shapely makes, which are detailed and convincing. The considerable strengths of his work remain invested in the types of analysis of poverty, deprivation and the details of policy and organization contained in the six substantive chapters. These are a fine addition to a field and period that deserves more studies of this nature.