The post-war redevelopment of British cities has, over the last 20 years, received considerable attention from historians and town planners alike. However, attempts to replan the same, often increasingly decrepit cities in the inter-war period have had a far lighter treatment. Here, in this fine debut monograph, Charlotte Wildman sets about drawing attention to largely overlooked attempts during the 1920s and 1930s to reshape the industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester. Confronted with economic decline, severe unemployment and alarming forms of political extremism, Wildman shows how the two cities responded with ambitious attempts to radically improve the built environment. This reconsideration of the extent of urban redevelopment, she argues, challenges ‘New Jerusalem’ narratives of post-war ‘reconstruction’ (p. 9) that present the war as a caesura in approaches to the built environment. In doing so, she contributes to a growing field that has reconsidered inter-war redevelopment through the lenses of modernity and urban modernism as part of a longer continuity of urban renewal that lasted into the 1970s. The book is not, though, concerned chiefly with planners and local corporations, but spends much time in the examination of urban cultures between the wars. Indeed, it is in the conjunction of redevelopment and urban culture that the book's real strengths lie. Attempts to encourage trade and boost the local economy in both cities were fundamentally socio-spatial projects that aimed to revitalize civic identities. They provided opportunities for inhabitants to express distinct selfhoods, especially those rooted in Catholicism and emerging forms of working-class consumerism. Wildman's Liverpool and Manchester thus come alive not through plans and maps, but through the lives of fashion-conscious young women, in civic parades and Whit walks, and via the changing habits of shoppers. The consequences of the ambitious, though often piecemeal, attempts at urban regeneration she presents are always considered in terms of their implications for and interactions with the lives of the inhabitants. As a result, in pulling apart the reciprocal relationship between identities, behaviours and urban space, Wildman's work brings to mind Matt Houlbrook's London or Dan Healey's Moscow, whilst her focus on young, working-class women is happily reminiscent of Selina Todd's work on the same period.
The book is divided up into three sections, each made up of two short chapters that proceed at a brisk pace. The first section deals with civic culture by way of an examination of the promotion of urban redevelopment and demonstrations of civic pride. Here, Wildman shows that, contrary to popular perceptions of degradation, the two cities embarked on housing schemes, infrastructural improvement and some impressive architectural projects that placed the cities ‘at the centre of [a] shared communication network and commercial culture’ (p. 86). In section two attention turns to shopping and here Wildman, following similar arguments made by Andrew Davies, shows the active role of shopkeepers and the local state in promoting a ‘geographical shift in the location of shops’ (p. 85) that provided women with the ‘opportunities to perform fashionable identities in ways that obscured class divisions’ (p. 113). What is striking though is the extent to which local corporations pursued strategies that ‘celebrated and encouraged women's engagement in shopping culture’ (p. 113). Whilst all three sections are well judged, the final chapter's focus on cultures of religion is perhaps the most original, especially in two cities with such profound ties to Ireland and Catholicism. The importance of local religious selfhoods and their recasting against more ‘modern’ urban identities does much to challenge ideas that the two were fundamentally incompatible. Here, in particular, you suspect the author's personal knowledge of both cities – Wildman hails from Merseyside, whilst she studied and now works in Manchester – has provided insight that might have eluded an author less familiar with the cities. The breadth of different topics covered means that, at times, the coverage can seem a touch thin, but it is testament to how interesting the book is that the reader is left wanting to know more. Scholars in the field will certainly find this a worthwhile contribution, but it should also prove a valuable resource for tutors looking for accessible, thematic chapters to set for undergraduates.
The study thus presents a convincing reassessment of inter-war cities that does much to add to our understandings of the development of urban cultures and identities with the framework of distinctly local modernities. However, it will give more sustenance to urban historians interested in those social-cultural perspectives than those seeking a detailed treatment of redevelopment from a town planning angle. Wildman is, for example, convincing in her argument that ‘investing in ambitious programmes of urban transformation…fostered a rich culture of civic pride’ (pp. 22–3), but we are not made privy to an examination of the more prosaic reasons behind attempts to redevelop the cities. There are, of course, deeply practical concerns behind urban redevelopment, but these are only touched upon lightly. Local corporation minutes are often frustratingly short of the kind of penetrating insight into the decision-making process that historians might desire, but the decision to create a new library in Manchester passes here without any sense of how the decision was made or where it fitted in the grander ambitions to reshape the city. At times, Wildman tantalizes with snippets that hint at quite comprehensive town planning schemes evident in attempts to holistically replan large areas of the central cities (p. 39), which suggest the emergence of some sort of pragmatic, municipal urban modernism, yet chooses not to follow these threads. Given the implications for depictions of post-war planning with which Wildman engages (pp. 193–5), this evidence would have greatly enhanced an already important contribution to our understanding of the trajectory of urban modernism. Yet, it would be churlish to mark any of these issues as true flaws, since it is clearly not Wildman's intention to produce a planning history as such; rather, other historians might (and in my view should) push harder at the door Wildman has begun to open here.
