In October 2019, Trafford Council and Bruntwood Works struck a £50 deal in Stretford, Greater Manchester. The asset on offer was the 1960s enclosed Stretford Mall, built over historic King Street. Development firm Bruntwood proposed reintegrating the street into the landscape by literally unroofing the mall concourse that followed the King Street route. With this public-private initiative, Trafford hoped to join the ranks of nearby Altrincham, recent winner of the Great British High Street Award. But whereas Altrincham had a Grade II listed market hall to anchor its civic bona fides, Stretford was working with a different varietal of municipal infrastructure. For Stretford Mall was an old Arndale, one of the many white elephants whose planning and financing are the subject of Alistair Kefford's The Life and Death of the Shopping City: Public Planning and Private Redevelopment in Britain since 1945. Bruntwood sought to revitalize Stretford by literally undoing the design principles that their forerunners had espoused over the second half of the twentieth century.
Kefford excavates that history over seven chronologically organized chapters, moving from the blitzed shopping district of Bristol to the postindustrial MetroCentre of Gateshead. The main actors are the private shopping interests (large retailers like Marks and Spencer from the 1940s, then commercial developers like Arndale from the 1960s) who learned to do business with the planning system of modern Britain. Kefford argues that public planning was not a redistributive project, let alone a tempering force. Rather, the planning system literally “created [original emphasis] the commercial opportunities and market conditions in which the post-war British property business thrived” (173–74).
By placing retail capitalism at the heart of town planning (the spatial arm of the welfare state), Kefford makes two key contributions to the lively historiographical Venn diagram between social democracy and affluence in postwar Britain. Unusual for this subfield, party politics take a backseat in Life and Death of the Shopping City. Rather, the key political battle is between central government and local authorities. Kefford recreates this tension primarily through the cache of Housing and Local Government records at the National Archives. For example, the aforementioned Stretford earmarked land for social housing as part of their 1962 redevelopment proposals. At the urging of Housing and Local Government, however, this land use was eventually changed from housing to the more lucrative car parking that could underwrite the Arndale project (135). Kefford marshals a range of similar case studies to argue that “central government economism” (54) curtailed the radical visions of local authorities and architect-planners. Margaret Thatcher's disciplining of councils in Liverpool and London does not look so ideologically novel when Whitehall tipped the scales in favor of marketization decades earlier. This retail-focused argument effectively rolls the timeline of Britain's so-called brief urban social democracy back to the 1950s, and arguably to the 1940s.
Kefford's secondary contribution in Life and Death of the Shopping City concerns the agency of affluence. There are classic source bases and frameworks that modern British historians use to understand the postwar affluent society: the Labour Party's internal debates in the 1950s, sociological surveys of embourgeoisement, cultures of advertising, the campaigning of the Consumers Association. Kefford revises the point of entry to these topics by drilling down to the key figure shared across all: the citizen consumer. Unlike previous treatments from Frank Trentmann and Matthew Hilton, Kefford does not find this historical actor present at their own making. Instead, they emerge in Life and Death of the Shopping City as the affluent shopper conjured by property developers, economic geographers, market researchers, consultants, and retail managers. Even one South Tyneside engineer saw “helping people relax” as part of their professional remit (296). Kefford makes a novel conceptual alignment here between affluence and “Taylorism” (104). Scientific management is gaining traction in late modern British urban historiography; Sam Wetherell used similar ideas to understand the business park in Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain (2020). Yet Kefford uses Taylorism's twin mantras of efficiency and functionality to unpack consumption of, rather than production of, landscapes. Comprehensive planning's faith in unending consumer growth—sold to them by the above allied professions—hardwired local authorities into pleasing a hypothetical, single-minded affluent citizen. Who would walk to the Stretford Arndale when driving was objectively more comfortable?
There is no key political juncture in this tale; Kefford's thesis focuses on “evolutionary rather than epochal change” (20). There was at least one place, however, where Kefford could have gestured to when events overtook the hegemonic common sense of public-private partnership. For example, Denis Healey's historic hike in business rates (40 percent to 52 percent) in 1974 goes unmentioned, although this caused at least one private developer to pull out of large-scale contracts. The years around the oil crisis were a key global turning point for public spending and private development across the West, but Kefford largely glosses over this point. The global reach of this economic earthquake leads to a second critique. What is particularly British about “the shopping city”? Kefford would say longevity. Remarkably, Britain resisted US-style shopping sprawl in the name of central redevelopment until the 1980s (283). Yet there are tantalizing threads running throughout Life and Death of the Shopping City that Kefford could have been woven into a more emphatic claim about the Britishness of private-public planning. I was surprised to learn that the Church Commissioners, the financial arm of the Church of England, were the owners and operators of the Gateshead MetroCentre (286). And Grosvenor Estates, the property folder of the Duke of Westminster's financial portfolio, underwrote Bolton's retail-led development in the 1980s (305). More could have been made of the archaic origins of the private financing for these projects, their uniquely British dimensions, and the effects this had on legitimizing property speculation as a new economic base of British regional cities.
Retail-led regeneration is a political, economic, and legal project that needs government sanction as much as financial backing. Kefford adeptly explains how this symbiotic relationship between state and market became ascendent in postwar Britain. Life and Death of the Shopping City is a rigorous and urgent work that will be of interest not only to British historians but also to those in urban studies, geography, and policy.
