ABSTRACT
This is a chapter about building construction. The sharp end of the public disaffection with Britain’s period of mass reconstruction in the 1960s is the straightforward, technical failure of its housing. It leaks. The scale of Britain’s rebuilding means we will continue to pay the economic price of these buildings’ failure well into the future. Huge amounts of literature have been devoted to accounting for this failure. They situate it, in the main, in a technical context – poor supervision, cost-cutting, inappropriate components.
