This book is a history of outdoor advertising control in Britain between the early-nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1960s. It considers the development of primarily legislative and governmental approaches to controlling commercial signage, billboards, posters and hoardings in rural and urban areas. This study of how the proliferation of outdoor advertising was dramatically curtailed serves as a means to examine how the understanding and governance of lived spaces developed over a century and a half. In the early-nineteenth century outdoor adverting was just another material nuisance to regimes of improvement; by the turn of the century it was reframed as a threat to architecture, rural beauty and codes of moral self-governance. In the twentieth century it disrupted visual amenity and destabilized the civilizing influence of modern planning. More than merely a history of a radical and largely overlooked change in the visual environment, this is the story of how the modern state saw and regulated the lived spaces of Britain.

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism and sheds new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of planned urban renewal in twentieth century. It examines plans and policies designed to produce and govern lived spaces- shopping centers, housing estates, parks, schools and homes - and shows how and why they succeeded or failed. It demonstrates how the material space of the city and how people used and experienced it was crucial in understanding historical change in urban contexts. The book is aimed at those interested in urban modernism, the use of space in town planning, the urban histories of post-war Britain and of social housing. -- .