Wider than Welfare : industry, infrastructure and eradication

Acting as an Advisor to the Modernist Society (Manchester, UK) since 2011, the threshold between historian and activist is one that I regularly traverse. Similarly, as a member of the Casework Committee of the Twentieth Century Society, my research frequently informs decision making in attempts to conserve architecture and landscapes of the post-war period. I am interested in expanding the discourse of state related construction ‘wider than welfare’ into territories of industry, infrastructure, services and more. In a period of nationalisation in Britain after 1947, vast swathes of the built environment were touched by the hands of the state in a modernisation programme that ran parallel to social reform. Where social housing is irrefutable evidence of ‘socially committed architecture’, I argue that forms of industry and infrastructure are also a demonstrable legacy of a political structure that favoured the citizen. The eradication of much of this built legacy has been drawn into issues of culture and class in the UK and, more than just subject to development pressures, its erasure may be viewed as politically calculated and deliberate. In this paper, I reflect on a ‘wider than welfare’ state and collective efforts to establish a broader understanding of the state’s role in the built environment of the post-war period. I will question the values of mainstream modernism in narrating these wider histories of the state’s influence on the built environment. I shall present primary research concerning county council architecture departments, the design of infrastructural landscapes and higher education institutions to disclose how the research has led to various forms of protection and activism. The idea posited in the session outline, of ‘eliminating evidence’, will be discussed in terms of the UK’s market economy and an apparent subjectivity within current governance that favours certain forms of built heritage and denigrates others.