The British housing crisis that predated the Second World War was greatly exacerbated by the aerial bombardment of many towns and cities during the Blitz. The post-war situation called for radical measures from the incoming Labour administration in 1945. Key pieces of legislation included the 1946 New Towns Act, which laid the basis for the development of a series of new settlements, initially in a ring outside London to disperse population, and also the wide-reaching 1947 Planning Act, which created a framework for spatial planning, including the nationalization of development rights.  

Whilst this story of post-war urban planning in the UK is well known, the wider context for the transformation of planning and the intricate connections between processes of urban change and Britain’s colonial legacy have received much less attention. The vital contributions of the Windrush generation in the rebuilding of Britain after the Second World War have become increasingly acknowledged in recent decades. These migrants held British citizen or subject status as part of the British empire, which gave them free entry to the UK as part of the 1948 British Nationality Act. We know, however, that the majority of arrivals from the Caribbean and South and East Asia, known as the New Commonwealth, had to endure poor conditions when they arrived in Britain and that they faced significant racism and discrimination. Despite intense labour shortages, many people opposed their arrival and a de facto colour bar operated in many arenas of life. Housing in particular was one of the areas of fiercest public hostility and the slow pace of reconstruction and rebuilding only intensified these sentiments.

My current research explor­­es the post-war planning system that developed as part of the wider incoming Labour Government’s welfare state. I examine how urban planning addressed these contentious racial issues and the ongoing impacts this has had for the spatialization of racial and ethnic minorities in Britain. A key focus is the less explored relationship between post-war urban planning in Britain and its colonial operations as part of imperial development. The lack of attention to the connections between these two fields is surprising when we consider that prominent British planners undertook commissions in numerous overseas colonies that practiced forms of racial segregation. Many others served in colonial administrations before returning to the UK during the era of decolonization.  Geographers Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate, for instance, have described how ten out of the total 28 post-war new towns in the UK were run by former colonial administrators.

The dominant narrative has understandably focused on planning’s role in the urgent post-war reconstruction of Britain as an inclusive and successful project. The discipline of planning has continued to show little interest in questions of race and racism in British cities. As an ISRF Mid-Career Fellow, I am currently completing a book project that brings questions of race to the centre of planning historiography and questions the analytical separation of British planning from the colonial experience. I argue that British and colonial planning discourses are interconnected zones of operation. Whilst there has been a significant critique of imperial planning ideologies in formerly colonized societies from postcolonial and decolonial approaches there has thus far been only limited attention given to this imperial legacy in the shaping of post-war British cities.

In the post-war era inner urban areas of slum housing were being demolished but housing construction was never able to meet the pace of demand. During this period tracts of dilapidated housing became part of what were termed the “twilight zones” as new anxieties emerged over the state of many inner urban areas. The reconstruction of British cities became an increasingly racialized dimension to policy-making which unfavourably contrasted white British populations with Black and ethnic minority communities. Government officials routinely drew on colonial stereotypes to consider that Black and minority communities were more content with lower living standards than the white British population.

Integral to my study is a greater understanding how colonial spatial segregation, underpinned by racial imaginaries of European superiority, did not disappear during formal processes of decolonization but became absorbed or reformulated within post-war Britain. Although the actions of other parts of the state, particularly the police, have been widely explored in relation to the control of urban space, the role of urban planning in the management of immigration and resettlement has received far less attention. Ethnic and racial minorities became uncritically accepted as a key indicator of urban decline by policy-makers by the time the inner city was becoming a focus of attention.

Alongside these policy developments, the academic fields of planning and urban studies were in a state of upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s. Fields such as urban sociology were developing alongside, but often in tension with, the planning discipline, which was in turn increasingly preoccupied with its institutional status within the expanding higher education system. By the 1970s these fields diverged even further as planners turned their attention to thinking about processes of rationalized decision-making to intervene within the inner cities. By the 1980s and the Thatcher era, the planning discipline had undergone a further shift away from progressive ideals. The legacy of British colonial planning commissions in the post-war period by key figures such as Patrick Abercrombie reflected the problematic ideas around ethnic and racial minorities. The prominent planning academic Peter Hall, for example, promoted ideas such as enterprise zones that drew on essentialist conceptions of racialized difference from the colony of Hong Kong wherein some ethnic groups were perceived as being more “entrepreneurial” and better suited to the revitalization of urban areas.

In contrast, postcolonial insights into urban planning, inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty and other scholars, have been increasingly significant in helping us   examine the multiple ways that colonialism has impacted on understandings of racial and ethnic difference in the shaping of British cities. If British planning studies have rarely focused on the influence of colonial planning ideologies on state approaches towards postwar settlement of Black and ethnic minority communities, then a vibrant field of work has emerged within related disciplines. Black British studies emerged with important sociological contributions led by Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and others engaging with the construction of race in Britain, drawing on the experiences of New Commonwealth communities and their descendants. There are also earlier studies from the 1960s onwards that directly research racial discrimination in relation to housing and the operation of a de facto colour bar in British cities. The renowned urban sociologist Ruth Glass, better known for her work on gentrification, considered that the prejudice against Black people in London across multiple spheres of everyday life demanded urgent attention. Yet these studies and insights seem to have developed in parallel to the preoccupations of the British planning discipline that remained tethered to ideas of the public interest as negating the need for specific interventions on race, gender, and other vectors of difference. An important field of new historical scholarship has explored how anti-immigration politicians activated a narrative that new arrivals from the Commonwealth were second-class citizens who should not benefit from the welfare state or how the presence of migrants became an indicator for the inner city itself.

These interventions have more critically analysed the interrelationships between urban planning and how race was represented through the prism of incompatible differences, justifying ideas of de facto segregation. In my ongoing research project, I build on these strands of work in new ways by emphasizing the centrality of urban planning thinking to new patterns of racial and ethnic exclusion in post-war British cities. In particular, I stress the need to understand the dual dynamics of colonial governmentalities within the planning system that connect empire and metropole across a series of architectonic, cultural, political, and ideological spheres. At the same time, people of colour were organising to help build ethnic and racial communities and to tackle forms of racialized disadvantage. These important movements emerged from within the inner city. I look to contrast these important aspects to Black British history with the prevalent government discourses that continue to devalue areas of Black and minority presence. There remains an urgent need for British planning to re-evaluate its own historical legacy within these debates. The postcolonial planning scholar, Libby Porter, writes about unlearning the colonial cultures of planning in the Australian context. Her insights can be extended to the British and wider European context. These new insights challenge the limitations of current thinking about race and ethnic difference in UK thinking. In addition, revisiting Britain’s colonial histories in the light of ongoing racial disadvantage offers further opportunities to develop a critical historiography of UK planning.

My project highlights the question of race within post-war planning. My ambition is to more fully articulate the role that planning has played in facilitating racial disparities within post-war urban Britain.  To do so I am turning to a range of archival sources from national and local government as well as important repositories of histories of racial and ethnic communities such as those held in the Black Cultural Archives and the George Padmore Institute in London.  I draw on decolonial  and postcolonial theory to revisit the negative planning and political depictions of inner urban areas to set out how Black and minority ethnic communities have been pivotal to creating the infrastructure to enable everyday life in Britain and to build innovative forms of anti-racist praxis.