ABSTRACT
The war had an immeasurable impact on home conditions. Building stopped, as in the First World War, but there was the additional burden of rebuilding bombed cities – London, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester all had flattened areas. The private building industry was in disarray because of the wartime agenda, whereas government and local authorities, which had played the dominant role throughout the war, were geared up. The new towns satisfied one kind of need, housing maybe three-quarters of a million households in twenty-two designated new towns, mostly in the south-east, over the post-war period. The desire for a new start was married with the clean-sweep ideas of modernist architecture and in 1956 a major new slum clearance and demolition programme was announced, fitting neatly with both the political commitment to rebuild and the post-war technocratic approach to ‘machine living’. The combined effect of slum clearance programmes and rapid immigration was immense.
