Phoenix Rising: Working-Class Life and Urban Reconstruction, c. 1945–1967

Abstract

Between 1945 and1967, England's town and city centers were reconstructed. This article argues that this process of civic redevelopment transformed working-class people's experience of urban life. Frequently represented as a social problem or simply ignored by prewar planning and political rhetoric on civic participation, working-class people were treated as vital to civic life in postwar England. This change had profound implications for people's experience of civic life and for class identity. However, historians of urban change have focused on planners and politicians, while the few histories of postwar working-class life that exist concentrate on selfhood, home, and neighborhood life. Drawing on personal testimonies, press reports, and planning documents this paper argues that working-class people were active agents of change in England's civic centers. Moreover, the experience of civic reconstruction encouraged the development of a sense of entitlement for a more secure and fuller life than earlier generations had experienced. The rebuilding of the civic centers was widely recognized as an achievement of ordinary working-class people, and the rebuilt centers were understood as places that should and could provide for their needs.Selina Todd is associate professor of modern British history at the University of Oxford and fellow and vice principal of St. Hilda's College, Oxford. The author is grateful to Simon Gunn for the invitation to present an earlier version of this paper at "The Transformation of Urban Britain since 1945," a conference at the University of Leicester in 2013, and to Professor Gunn and other conference participants for their helpful comments.

Review of periodical literature published in 2015

“…He argues that instead of accepting contemporary sociological portrayals of this period as one in which working‐class community dissolved into individualism, historians need to engage empirically with patterns of local social life and to explore a greater range of urban settings. Drawing on personal testimonies, press reports, and planning documents, Todd argues that working‐class people were active agents of change in England's civic centres between 1945 and 1967. She argues that working‐class people were treated as vital to civic life in postwar England.…”