Abstract: | ABSTRACTThis article investigates the cultural and political meanings of everyday landscapes in postwar Britain. Public discussions of these landscapes have moved beyond relatively narrow questions about the aesthetics or design of public space to consider broader issues of land use, national identity, historical tradition and the management of social change. They have fed into anxieties about postwar reconstruction and the spread of ‘subtopia’, national decline, and more recent concerns about conservation and heritage. The article argues that the recurrent fear that Britain is being colonized by standardized subtopian clutter has tended to ignore more subtle historical shifts, produced by changing relationships between government and commerce, public and private space, urban centre and suburban periphery. |