Established in Manchester in the 1890s, Trafford Park was Britain's first and largest industrial estate. By the 1950s, forty thousand people worked there in firms that included engineering giants such as Rolls Royce, Metropolitan Vickers, and—in the first half of the century—the Ford Motor Company. Trafford Park was an integrated industrial complex with its own workers’ housing, known as “the Village,” banks, workingmen's clubs, and shops. By the 1980s, however, it had become an industrial wasteland, the object of an urban development corporation that engaged in transforming it into a business park, attracting high-tech firms and finance institutions. In the words of a publicity brochure of the 1990s, it had become necessary “to put the Porsche before the cart” (185–86).

Sam Wetherell's Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain is about the nature of this transformation. Despite its subtitle, Wetherell's study is neither an urban nor an architectural history; rather, it is a political history recounted through an analysis of built forms like the industrial estate and business park. Specifically, Foundations is about the political rationalities that underpinned Britain's built environment. In Wetherell's words, the book “tells a story about the rise of a developmental infrastructure and its privatization, demolition and rearticulation under a new neoliberal consensus” (3). The chronological and analytical arc of this history, therefore, hinges on the transition from the developmental state of the period between the 1930s and the 1970s to the neoliberal polity of Britain's late twentieth century, identified here with “free-market fundamentalism” (11) but amply revealed by Wetherell to have generated a much wider and richer repertoire of built forms and behavioral norms than purely economic.

Using this transition as its lodestar, Wetherell analyzes six types of built form, each examined in successive chapters: the industrial estate, the shopping precinct, the council estate, the private housing estate, the shopping mall, and the business park. There is a symmetry here, as each built form has its developmental and neoliberal dimension as with the industrial estate and the business park. Thus, the mid-century shopping precinct is distinguished from the late-century shopping mall; while the first, like Coventry's precinct, was a government-directed initiative predicated on the idea of the citizen as having calculable needs that could be catered for, malls were American-inspired and reliant on private finance and developers. Malls like Merry Hill outside Birmingham or the Metro Centre at Gateshead jettisoned the idea of calculable human needs in favor of shopping as fantasy. In such cases, the built forms were distinct—although a makeover was always feasible, as in the case of Trafford Park's transition from industrial estate to business park. Here, of course problems often arose, as in the privatization of council estates from the 1980s, when individualizing what had been originally designed as shared utilities like heating or electricity represented a stumbling block to the full autonomy of the new homeowners.

Given that the narrative outlines of British planning and institutions like the council estate are readily familiar to historians, it is in the details of the rationalities behind such institutions that the chapters are most interesting. They encompass ideas such as defensible space, the concept embedded in new urban housing developments from the 1980s and whose logical outcome was the gated community; and the conditions of greenery and sociality designed to produce the idealized flexible and creative worker in new suburban environments such as Cambridge Science Park and Stockley Park, sited on the western fringes of London, conveniently close to Heathrow airport. The American influences behind many of the new forms are skillfully delineated. Wetherell notes the pioneering ideas of Austrian émigré, Victor Gruen, in sowing the seeds of the shopping mall in North America during the 1940s and 1950s, while the origins of the science park are traced to Stanford University in the 1960s. California seems to have been especially generative of new urban forms in this period, and their impress was to be felt in Britain in the last third of the century, at least partly displacing in this account the more socialist-inflected impulses deriving from Scandinavia and the Continent. Nor, in turn, were the forms restricted to Britain: after 1945 industrial estates, for instance, were planned across Britain's dwindling colonies, including rural Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria.

How far does Wetherell's Foundations supply a new interpretation of urban Britain (or perhaps of urban England given that the overwhelming majority of the case studies are drawn from here)? This is difficult to judge. The argument that British cities provide an exemplar of the turn from the developmental state (a term also favored in David Edgerton's history of twentieth-century Britain, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History [2018]) to neoliberalism is far from novel; it has long been a staple of the urban policy literature and forms the critical cornerstone of Guy Ortolano's forensic study of Milton Keynes, Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism Through an English New Town (2019). Moreover, the research of Alistair Kefford and others has brought to light the very substantial role of private developers in postwar urban renewal, in alliance with planners who emerge in many cases as the junior partners. In short, the free market was not suddenly rediscovered in the 1970s. A larger historiography is very present in Wetherell's footnotes but is largely absent in the text itself, which consequently appears solipsistic, in need of reengagement with the current lively debate about Britain's turbulent twentieth century. Nevertheless, Wetherell's Foundations is a fascinating contribution to that debate, illuminating fluently and engagingly the still-hidden history of the mundane spaces that Britons have inherited, many of which they continue to inhabit.