ABSTRACT

It is 150 years since the problems of Britain’s cities first began to arouse public concern. For another half a century they continued to grow and fester, before serious attempts were made to address urban squalor. Regulation and social architecture-philanthropic housing, schools, social facilities-brought some relief. But the greatest efforts went into decentralization-the flight from the hated cities, which robbed them of the better off and most enterprising people. With the growth of the suburbs and dormitory towns, and the relocation of many working people into vast peripheral estates, the Victorian city became “inner city”—concentrations of the worst housing and the poorest people. The post-war drive of urban planning and housing policies attempted to solve the problem once and for all. But it ended in the housing disasters of the 1960s and created more problems than it solved. Much of the inner city areas has been redeemed by the public and private rehabilitation of the 1970s and 1980s, and by the renovation of the social estate. But serious, and perhaps intensifying, problems remain, a seemingly perpetual hangover from the ill considered urban industrialization of the past.