renewal of post-war Manchester

Richard Brook is an architect, historian and Professor in Architecture at Lancaster University. He has dedicated more than two decades to understanding the post-war development of Manchester and cities like it. His core interests lie in the relationships between space, politics and society, as manifested through the built environment.

Shortlisted for the SAHGB Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2025‘Richard Brook’s holistic approach to the narration of Manchester’s mid-twentieth-century history is refreshingly novel and derived from the dual experience of the practising architect and the architectural historian. His decades-long engagement with, interest in and love for the city is manifest in this comprehensive volume. His sensitivity towards the values and heritage of mainstream modernism sheds a more nuanced light on the city’s development and the networks and individuals who transformed it. At a time when understanding and valuing our everyday heritage in its complexity becomes more and more crucial, and valuing what is already there a key tenet for all the built-environment professions, this empathy and understanding unfolds a new way of researching and writing about our shared urban space.’Luca Csepely-Knorr, University of Liverpool‘The urban histories of Manchester – both early and recent – have been often narrated in terms of the extraordinary, shocking, heroic, ruthless, generous, innovative and visionary. Richard Brook’s history of Manchester between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s offers a different scholarly sensitivity and a fresh generational voice that favours what was moderated, phased, delayed, constrained and reconstructed in the city’s development. In so doing, he offers a new way to consider post-war urban renewal as a networked and negotiated practice.’Lukasz Stanek, University of Michigan'Although based on the author’s PhD, it is also the result of half a lifetime’s careful deliberation and immersion in Manchester’s messiness. This includes not only national and local archives, but interviews with some of the chief protagonists... So, with Brook in hand we can look, and sense as we walk, at a city of postwar possibilities that were only partly realised. Hopefully its lead will encourage similar serious studies and a greater historical understanding of the lengthy process of renewal, not only the political expediency of ‘quick-fix’ reconstruction.'Julian Holder, Architectural History

• Introduction 1 The shape of the city: power and planning2 Computing and the Cold War3 In advance of progress: higher education and technology4 Intractable investment: the Crown Agents and Central Station5 Bookended by bombs and drawn out development: Market Place6 The redoubtable resilience of the Ring RoadConclusionIndex