Dulwich Village Area Guide

British architecture has always been a battle of styles. For a thousand years it has been romanesque versus gothic, gothic versus renaissance, palladian versus baroque, classical versus gothic revival. The greatest battle came in the 1960s, when modernists took control of British planning and plotted the demolition of large swathes of the centres of Britain’s cities. Most of London’s West End was to be destroyed. Piccadilly Circus, Whitehall, Nash’s St James’s, Covent Garden and Soho were to disappear. Urban Britain was to be transformed into a uniform townscape of concrete and glass. Yet by 1974 almost all these plans had been abandoned. It was one of the most dramatic U-turns in British social history. How did it happen? Simon Jenkins tells the turbulent history of Britain’s built environment. He shows how the battles of the past live on today, in arguments over tall buildings, over what should be preserved and what form new buildings should take and where they should stand. ‘Provocative, elegant, intriguing – Jenkins is a bold, imaginative writer, brilliant at challenging old assumptions and encouraging you to look at British architecture in a new light’ Rory Stewart, author of Politics On The Edge