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Municipal Dreams:The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
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A narrative history of council housing – from slums to the Grenfell Tower
Traversing the nation, Municipal Dreams offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable of our housing estates, and in doing so offers an engrossing social history of housing in Britain. John Broughton asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices. His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the competing ideologies which have promoted state housing and condemned it, the economics which has always constrained our housing ideals, the crisis wrought by Right to Buy, and the evolving controversies around regeneration. He shows how the loss of the dream of good housing for all is a danger for the whole of society – as was seen in the fire in Grenfell Tower.
Reviews
The book celebrates an era during which dreams of shelter and security for all—not just those who could afford to purchase it—were in large part made a reality, and asks us if we oughtn’t to consider reviving that dream before it gets destroyed completely … There couldn’t be a better time for this book.
Required reading … provides a comprehensive history of Britain’s council estates [that] challenges the well-worn narrative.
This serious, heartfelt book makes a convincing case that publicly provided homes have to be at least part of the response to the dysfunctional state that British housing has now attained.
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A fine survey of an astonishing achievement.
, Financial Times -
Boughton’s book works as a gazetteer of public achievement—from Arts and Crafts cottages to modernist monuments to ordinary streets, from Hammersmith to Hull—and a nuanced but polemical tale of how the municipal idea was destroyed, revealing the caricatures and pseudo-history that were used to convince us that the places built to swindle us were better than the places we built for ourselves to live in.
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Follows the epic story of British council and social housing, from its Victorian origins to Twentieth Century estates, the right to buy and the Grenfell fire. While every page is rich with fascinating detail, Boughton also tells the grand narrative of how modern housing was created for millions, and how that dream has been cynically and carelessly undermined. This is an inspiring read and a necessary corrective to the myths that seek to destroy one of the most important struggles of our times – the drive for decent housing for all.
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A well-written, humane and even-handed appraisal of the successes and failures of municipal and national housing programmes from the 1890s to the present.
Blueprint -
A deeply informed account of the ways in which local and national governments in the U.K. have or have not sought to provide affordable housing for their citizens.
, The New Yorker, Favourite Nonfiction Books of 2019 -
Despite the crowded field, Boughton’s book has quickly established itself as a landmark text in the reevaluation of the legacy of council housing, a sober, thorough work that reminds us of some of the most significant achievements of Britain’s postwar 'social democratic moment.
, Public Books