“Things have changed, but history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited.”
— Zadie Smith, “On Optimism and Despair” (2016)
THATCHER’S PROGRESS
“An instant classic in urban history.” — Rosemary Wakeman
Named the “Best Book in Non-North American Urban History” by the Urban History Association
In a single generation after the Second World War, the British state built thirty-two towns and cities across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In Thatcher’s Progress, Guy Ortolano labels this project the spatial dimension of the welfare state. As its empire collapsed, Britain’s distinctive approach to urban development improbably spread across the world.
Thatcher’s Progress explores this history by following the path of a driving tour that Margaret Thatcher took through England’s most notorious new town, Milton Keynes, in 1979. Each chapter alights with the Prime Minister at another stop on her tour, lingering to explore the broader histories of public transport, urban planning, modernist architecture, community development, urban consulting, and social housing in modern Britain.
Ortolano deftly conveys the dynamism of social democracy amid its decade of crisis, while showing how neoliberalism nevertheless secured its eventual triumph.
Prize
Thatcher’s Progress was named the Best Book in Non-North American Urban History by the Urban History Association. “Thatcher’s Progress stands out for its inventive structure, crisp prose, and wry humor,” wrote the committee. “It is methodologically sophisticated, analytically and theoretically complex, and engaged with wide-ranging historiographical debates. [Ortolano] situates Milton Keynes and the colorful characters who built it in multiple spatial scales, some supranational and others hyperlocal. This allows him to explain national trends in their global context without confusing that context for causation. In doing so, Ortolano offers us a new model for writing local history.”
Reviews
The inaugural volume in Cambridge’s Modern British Histories, Thatcher's Progress has been hailed as a “wide-ranging, elegantly written, deeply serious, forcefully argued book, with an impressive command of multiple historiographies.” — Otto Saumarez Smith, Reviews in History
“Ortolano shows us how the government policies of the 1980s - never repudiated - prefigured the terrible housing crisis in Britain today.” — Susan Pedersen, London Review of Books
“This book should be required reading for all undergraduate and postgraduate students of planning. [It] will help to rebuild our confidence in British town and country planning.” — Lee Shostak, Former Chair of England’s Town and Country Planning Association, Town and Country Planning.
“Ortolano’s book has wide implications for Britain’s post-imperial history[,] for changes in urban form and architecture, for notions of community and affluence. It is a pleasure to read.” — Martin Daunton, Journal of Modern History
“[An] important and highly erudite book. [It] makes an original and largely persuasive case, one less about Milton Keynes alone than about how later twentieth-century British and intellectual history is too one-dimensionally periodized, as is the enduring vitality of progressive ideas.” — Jeremy Nuttall, American Historical Review
“Ortolano situates a seemingly provincial moment of British planning in a distinctly global context. [He] has produced one of the stand-out studies of urban history in the last few years.” — James Greenhalgh, Urban History
“Ortolano succeeds in his mission: [Thatcher’s Progress] provides a way for scholars to rethink the features and fortunes of other political orders, such as New Deal liberalism, at every scale.” — Daniel Wortel-London, Journal of Urban History
“Ortolano not only gives us a strikingly rich account of a key state investment, but also contributes to a wider discussion about how we frame post-war British history. . . . This book is a key text within the ‘New Urban Political History’.” — Tom Kelsey, English Historical Review
“Thatcher’s Progress is a story of unintended consequences, unrealised futures, and historical change from the perspective of history’s losers, charting the complex relationship between the two rival ideological formations that dominated the latter half of the twentieth century.” — Freddie Meade, Contemporary British History
“Thatcher’s Progress will be essential reading for a diverse range of scholars - from those interested in the history of urban space, architecture, and housing to those concerned with questions of identity, transnational intellectual politics, or the legacies of empire.” — David Civil, Journal of British Studies
“[An] insightful approach for those interested not only in British and urban history, but also in terms of revealing the dynamic and shifting nature of ideologies from a historical perspective.” — Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz, Journal of Contemporary History
“Modern British political history is coming to be written through urban history. With great deftness, and a nice sense of irony, Guy Ortolano tracks the transition from social democracy to neo-liberalism through the history of Milton Keynes.” — Simon Gunn, Director of the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
Interview
Read an interview with Renewal about Thatcher’s Progress.
Blogs
I discuss the problem of scale in urban history in the Global Urban History Project. I relate the history of Britain’s new towns program to today's housing crisis at fifteeneightyfour. Put to the Page 99 Test, I was lucky that my book’s 99th page featured an American futorologist predicting that medical advances would extend the careers of future Winston Churchills to more than a hundred years.
Podcast
A discussion with archivist Chris Low at the Buckinghamshire History Festival, with remarks by Patrick Hogan of Bucks Council.
Cycling tour
. . . highlighting a number of themes ofThatcher’s Progress.
London launch | 10 July 2019 | King’s College London | with Otto Saumarez Smith and Simon Gunn | Photo by Sarah Hanck
New York launch | 18 September 2019 | Heyman Center for the Humanities | Columbia University