ABSTRACT
Constructing dwellings was one of the characteristic activities of twentieth-century Britain, but not one in which it was customary to take pride. 1 Building houses on land once used for agriculture was seen as the ‘destruction’ of the romantic fantasy known as the countryside, and the new creations of the century – curving verge-and-tree-lined avenues of semi-detached houses, the New Towns of the post-Second World War era, the tower blocks of the 1960s – were rarely praised. Scunthorpe, an attractive steel-working town built in the Garden City style, and Milton Keynes, which includes some of the most imaginative housing of the second half of the century, were unthinkingly regarded with derision by the metropolitan media. Conventional wisdom asserted that suburbia is monotonous.
One road or one suburb is to the eye of a stranger identical with another road or another suburb…. Ruislip is indistinguishable from Cowley; Mapperley might just as well be in Bristol as in Nottingham.
