Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 is an ambitious volume which seeks to illustrate the richness and great potential of historical investigation exploring and explaining women's relationship with their environments. The book builds upon over 30 years of endeavour across many disciplines including history, sociology and geography, to return women to the historical record. Extending from conventional biographical studies concerned with giving due prominence to those rare and exceptional women who have played a leading role in shaping the built environment through design, professional and political activities or through patronage, researchers have increasingly begun to engage with the more diffuse influence and experience of women's social movements and the anonymous or unknowable woman: the factory worker, the shop clerk and the housewife. Associated with this shift, there has been much methodological experimentation. This has included explorations of new types of documentary evidence and use of different theoretical perspectives to produce alternative gender readings of spaces and things. In bringing together a series of contributions from across the span of the discipline and focusing on England between 1870 and 1950, Darling and Whitworth aim not only to present new material and illustrate the layering and developmental nature of women's experience, but also to reinvigorate debate about gender and space more generally. In particular they propose, and illustrate through the content of the book, a new broad definition of the subject area which they prefer to term ‘built space’. By this they mean any material or spatial form which may be understood as playing a part in the production, reproduction or contesting of gender identities, including buildings and artefacts, texts, speeches and living practices.

The book is organized into ten chapters, arranged in roughly chronological order, which encompass contributions from authors with interests in urban, literary, labour and social history as well as architecture and design. A number of the early contributions chart the ways in which educated women, in the years that spanned the beginning of the twentieth century, were able to forge a public role for themselves in the built environment based around society's acceptance of their presumed biological predisposition to nurturing and good citizenship. So, for example, Helen Meller in ‘Gender, citizenship and the making of the modern environment’ highlights the work of Anna Morton, the wife of Patrick Geddes, and a number of her female associates in organizing the Geddesian Civic Surveys which were so influential in shaping the emerging profession of town planning. Similarly, Anne Anderson and Elizabeth Darling's chapter ‘The Hill sisters: cultural philanthropy and the embellishment of lives in late nineteenth-century England’ and Ruth Livesey's chapter ‘Women rent collectors and rewriting of class and gender in East London’ provide close insights into the mixed experiences of well-intentioned middle-class women committed to improving the living conditions of the working classes during this period. Women's engagement with design and built space at this time is explored by two contrasting contributions. Trevor Keeble, in ‘Everything whispers of wealth and luxury – observation, emulation and display in the well-to-do late-Victorian home’, reveals the wide-ranging influences that fashioned domestic interiors of the day. Emma Ferry, in ‘A novelty among exhibitions: the loan exhibition of women's industries in Bristol, 1885’, again picks up the theme of women and philanthropy, this time in relation to a public exhibition of the skilled creative craft work of mainly middle-class women in an empty villa in Bristol.

The latter part of the book moves to the first half of the twentieth century and provides a series of insights into some of the ways in which women sought to improve the design of housing, particularly social housing, and domestic space and objects during this period. Here we see increasing public concern about easing the burden of women's ‘domestic duties’ and the engagement of ‘ordinary’ women in related initiatives. Such developments reflect the growing political organization and involvement of women with a focus on domestic space as the environment in which they spent much of their lives. Highlighting the work of overlooked women designers is a major aspect of both Elizabeth Darling's chapter ‘The house that is a woman's book come true: the all-Europe house and four women's spatial practices in inter-war England’ and Jill Seddon's account ‘Part-time practice as before: the career of Sadie Speight, architect’. Political involvement in terms of women's organizations and the role of women in the machinery of the state are important themes in Karen Hunt's ‘Gendering the politics of the working woman's home’, Gillian Scott's ‘Workshops fit for homeworkers: the women's Co-operative Guild and housing reform in mid-twentieth-century Britain’ and Leslie Whitworth's account of ‘The housewives’ committee of the Council of Industrial Design: a brief episode of domestic reconnoitring’.

A key strength of the collection is that it can be read in a number of different ways and it has interest for a variety of audiences. Most obviously it has value in presenting a timeline of women's shifting and multifaceted interaction with built space in England between 1870 and 1950 and bringing into sharp focus the challenges to women's emancipation during this time. In doing so the book provides a useful source of understanding and inspiration for those with an interest in built environment and gender studies, particularly those with an historical bent. In this respect Darling and Whitworth's introduction and suggested broad definition of ‘built space’ is helpful in illustrating the vast canvas of research that could be explored in the future. Beyond this, the book also has merit in illustrating diverse approaches to historical research more generally and provides a useful ‘reader’ in research methodology. All the authors illustrate a meticulous attention to evidence and demonstrate imagination in their identification and use of primary sources and craft in their analysis. However, more could have been done to draw out this dimension of the book for it is only through close reading that the variety of materials accessed and styles of interpretation used becomes evident.