This article examines the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's work on culture and cultural capital can be applied to the study of the English middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide historical literature, the article argues for the significance of culture as a constitutive element of middle-class identities in England since 1800. It goes on to examine Bourdieu's ideas of 'objectivated', 'instutionalized' and 'incorporated' cultural capital, in the context of family, inheritance, education and the body. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which cultural capital has taken and emphasizes the importance of analysing family processes of intergenerational transmission.

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Traffic congestion in Britain's towns and cities grew with the exponential rise of car ownership in the 1950s and 1960s. The Buchanan Report, Traffic in Towns (1963), was a pioneering response to this problem, advancing a series of radical solutions for how cities could be adapted to mass car ownership. This article examines the contemporary debate about traffic among planners and politicians in the 1960s and considers both short-term responses to the Buchanan Report and its longer term effects in cities such as Leeds and Leicester. The legacy of Buchanan was ambivalent: while many of its prescriptions favoured a new, environmentally sensitive approach to the historic fabric and urban living, the report's arguments for radical reconstruction pointed to the building of urban motorways. Paradoxically, the growth of environmental awareness in 1960s Britain was linked to the endeavour to modernize the nation's towns and cities and to create the conditions for a car-owning society.

Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the 'motor revolution' was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s.