In a single generation after the Second World War, the British state built thirty-two towns and cities across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In this prize-winning book, Guy Ortolano depicts these new towns as the spatial dimension of the welfare state. In an age of imperial retreat, Britain’s approach to urban development improbably spread throughout the world.

Thatcher’s Progress narrates the rise and fall of the new towns program. It follows the journey of a driving tour that the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, took through the UK’s largest new town of Milton Keynes on September 25, 1979. Each chapter alights with Thatcher at successive stops along her tour, lingering to explore the broader histories of public transport, urban planning, modernist architecture, community development, international consulting, and social housing on either side of her election victory in 1979.

Ortolano captures the dynamism of social democracy amid its decade of crisis, while at the same time explaining how neoliberalism nevertheless secured its eventual triumph.

CUP | Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews

The inaugural volume in Cambridge’s Modern British Histories series, Thatcher's Progress has been hailed as a “wide-ranging, elegantly written, deeply serious, forcefully argued book, with an impressive command of multiple historiographies.” — Otto Saumarez Smith, Reviews in History

“Ortolano shows us how the government policies of the 1980s - never repudiated - prefigured the terrible housing crisis in Britain today.” — Susan Pedersen, London Review of Books

“This book should be required reading for all undergraduate and postgraduate students of planning. [It] will help to rebuild our confidence in British town and country planning.” — Lee Shostak, Former Chair of England’s Town and Country Planning Association, Town and Country Planning.

“Ortolano’s book has wide implications for Britain’s post-imperial history[,] for changes in urban form and architecture, for notions of community and affluence. It is a pleasure to read.” — Martin Daunton, Journal of Modern History

“[An] important and highly erudite book. [It] makes an original and largely persuasive case, one less about Milton Keynes alone than about how later twentieth-century British and intellectual history is too one-dimensionally periodized, as is the enduring vitality of progressive ideas.” — Jeremy Nuttall, American Historical Review

“Ortolano situates a seemingly provincial moment of British planning in a distinctly global context. [He] has produced one of the stand-out studies of urban history in the last few years.” — James Greenhalgh, Urban History

“Ortolano succeeds in his mission: [Thatcher’s Progress] provides a way for scholars to rethink the features and fortunes of other political orders, such as New Deal liberalism, at every scale.” — Daniel Wortel-London, Journal of Urban History

“Ortolano not only gives us a strikingly rich account of a key state investment, but also contributes to a wider discussion about how we frame post-war British history. . . . This book is a key text within the ‘New Urban Political History’.” — Tom Kelsey, English Historical Review

“Thatcher’s Progress is a story of unintended consequences, unrealised futures, and historical change from the perspective of history’s losers, charting the complex relationship between the two rival ideological formations that dominated the latter half of the twentieth century.” — Freddie Meade, Contemporary British History

“Thatcher’s Progress will be essential reading for a diverse range of scholars - from those interested in the history of urban space, architecture, and housing to those concerned with questions of identity, transnational intellectual politics, or the legacies of empire.” — David Civil, Journal of British Studies

“[An] insightful approach for those interested not only in British and urban history, but also in terms of revealing the dynamic and shifting nature of ideologies from a historical perspective.” — Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz, Journal of Contemporary History

“Modern British political history is coming to be written through urban history. With great deftness, and a nice sense of irony, Guy Ortolano tracks the transition from social democracy to neo-liberalism through the history of Milton Keynes.” — Simon Gunn, Director of the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester