Introductory description

This module explores urban change in the twentieth century through a close analysis of the built form of towns and cities of the West Midlands. It gives students the skills to interpret and trace historical processes in the everyday built environment. Much of the teaching will be done ‘on the ground’ in places easily accessible from the University – asking how their architecture and urban form were responses to intellectual ideas about urban development, as well as being shaped by more abstract forces including the welfare state, social polarisation, deindustrialisation, narratives of crisis, and changing patterns of mobility and energy usage. Teaching in the cities will be student led, augmented with provided material from planning literature: maps, surveys, reports, movement studies, perspective drawings - helping students to understand the range of materials used by planning and architectural professionals in understanding cities, and using built form to try to mould society.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Introduction
2. The Victorian Legacy
3. Transport
4. Planning
5. Leisure
6. City Centres & Shopping
7. Conservation
8. Suburbs
9. The Inner City
10. Industrialisation and Deindustrialisation

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the historical processes which have shaped urban form
• Demonstrate an understanding of the vocabulary needed to contextualise and analyse architecture
• Demonstrate a familiarity with a variety of practices and critical issues related to the urban history of the English Midlands
• Present an argument, initiate and sustain group discussion through intelligent questioning and debate at an appropriate level
• Ability to undertake research and to write up the results in the form of a well-structured argument at an appropriate level
• Familiarity with essential ICT skills
• Ability to collaborate effectively with others
• Show understanding of diverse viewpoints
• Ability to find, select, organize and synthesize evidence
• Ability to formulate a sustained argument
• Think conceptually and independently at an appropriate level
• Sophisticated visual analysis
• Bibliographical skills at an appropriate level
• Critical analysis of cultural artefacts in their context

Indicative reading list

Briggs, Asa. Victorian cities. Univ of California Press, 1993
Clark, Peter, and Martin J. Daunton, eds. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: 1840-1950/Edited by Martin Daunton. Cambridge University Press, 2000
Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (1998)
Darley, Gillian. Factory. Reaktion Books, 2003
Dyos, Harold James, and Michael Wolff, eds. The Victorian City: images and realities. Vol. 2. Taylor & Francis, 1999
Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. WW Norton & Company, 2018
Girouard, Mark. The English town: A history of urban life. Yale University Press, 1995
Gold, John R. The practice of modernism: modern architects and urban transformation, 1954–1972. Routledge, 2007
Gunn, Simon, and Susan C. Townsend. Automobility and the city in twentieth-century Britain and Japan. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019
Simon Gunn, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Urban Modernism: Planning Bradford, circa 1945–1970’ Journal of British Studies, 49:4 (2010) 849-69
Hatherley, Owen. A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain. Verso Books, 2011
Lesley Hanley, Estates: an Intimate History (2007)
Mandler, Peter, ‘New Towns for Old’ in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing
Britain 1945–1964 (London and New York, 1999)
Meller, Helen. Towns, plans and society in modern Britain. Vol. 31. Cambridge University Press, 1997
Moran, Joe, ‘ “Subtopias of Good Intentions”: Everyday Landscape in Postwar
Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 4.3 (2007)
Morrison, Kathryn, English Shops and Shopping: an Architectural History (London
and New Haven, 2004)
Nairn, Ian. Britain's changing towns. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1967
Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: people, streets, and images in nineteenth-century London. Yale University Press, 2000
Ortolano, Guy. Thatcher's progress: from social democracy to market liberalism through an English new town. Cambridge University Press, 2019
Saumarez Smith, Otto. Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain Oxford University Press, 2019
Todd, Selina, ‘Phoenix Rising: Working Class Life and Urban Reconstruction, c.
1945-1967’, Journal of British Studies, 54.3 (2015), pp. 679–702
Wetherell, Sam. Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain. Princeton University Press, 2020

Subject specific skills

• Demonstrate an understanding of the historical processes which have shaped urban form
• Demonstrate an understanding of the vocabulary needed to contextualise and analyse architecture:
• Demonstrate a familiarity with a variety of practices and critical issues related to the urban history of the English Midlands
• sophisticated visual analysis
• critical analysis of cultural artefacts in their context

Transferable skills

• present an argument, initiate and sustain group discussion through intelligent questioning and debate at an appropriate level
• ability to undertake research and to write up the results in the form of a well-structured argument at an appropriate level
• familiarity with essential ICT skills
• ability to collaborate effectively with others
• Show understanding of diverse viewpoints
• ability to find, select, organize and synthesize evidence
• ability to formulate a sustained argument
• think conceptually and independently at an appropriate level
• bibliographical skills at an appropriate level