Publisher: Verso, ISBN: 9781784787400, Author: John Boughton, Format: Paperback, 198 x 129 mm, 366pp
Municipal Dreams offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable housing estates in Britain, and in doing so offers an engrossing social history of housing. John Boughton asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices.
His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the competing ideologies which have promoted state housing and condemned it, the economics that has always constrained our housing ideals, the crisis wrought by Right to Buy, and the evolving controversies around regeneration. He shows how the loss of the dream of good housing for all is a danger for the whole of society – as was seen in the fire in Grenfell Tower.