yes.
this book is not bad - don't think i paid anywhere near full price, and must get round to reading it through
some of the ideas that got re-hashed for 'ringway' had been floated before the 1939 war - there was a fairly large scale highway development survey for greater london published in 1937 (published by the ministry of transport, as the then london county council went out as far as today's lambeth / southwark / lewisham / greenwich boroughs, and even less far out in north london)
yes, the broad intentions post-1945 and for a good few years after that were largely honourable and for the public good. and broadly part of the post-war consensus - there was some criticism from the tories in the 1950/51 elections that the attlee government hadn't built enough council homes, and councils of all colours showing a pride in their new estates in council guide books of the era.
although i get the impression that there was to some extent at least an element of (metaphorical) willy waving over grand schemes rather than rebuilding at what's sometimes described as 'a human scale', and often not having much regard to existing communities, with a culture of people being 'put' on an estate rather than having a lot of say. and a focus very much on getting cars from A to B rather than
there is a fault in public spending principles, as demolish + rebuild is 'capital spending' and can be on the never-never, but repairs and maintenance are 'revenue spending' and have to go on the rates even if it's a lot more cost effective in the long run.
and in the later years of council housing, many estates / schemes were built down to a price rather than up to a standard, and some were put in remote places with limited access to facilities and transport (that in many cases got promised and not delivered (thamesmead), or went to shit after bus services got privatised.)
some councils were just starting to get it a lot more right when council housing (more or less) stopped -
this was one of lewisham council's last estates, built c. 1979/80 - of course many have been bought under 'right to buy' since then.
and then 'society' was declared not to exist, along with a lot of working class jobs disappearing, and spending cuts that reduced housing maintenance, cut resident caretakers and so on.
and successive governments that regard social housing and its tenants as a problem to be got rid of, usually by giving the land away to their property development chums and 'decanting' the tenants to 'somewhere else'.
www.livingstreets.org.uk
www.brixtonbuzz.com
