Book
My first book, Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain tells the story of modern Britain through the transformation of its built environment focussing on housing, workplaces and spaces of shopping and consumption. More specifically it shows how enclosed wholesale markets became out of town shopping malls, how philanthropic and later modernist council estates became private gated communities and how government-backed backed industrial estates became suburban office parks. Along the way the book charts the rise social democratic planning and how it came to be displaced by a new, market-driven neoliberal settlement in the last third of the twentieth century. It was released in October 2020 with Princeton University Press.
Reviews, Prizes and Publicity:
Winner of the Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period
Shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize for an outstanding contribution to the study or knowledge of architectural history
"Engaging and erudite, Foundations looks at the evolution of the everyday, taken-for-granted places of modern Britain. With Sam Wetherell, we walk the corridors of shopping malls, drive past industrial parks, and explore high-rise housing developments from the ground up to thirty thousand feet. More than just a history of architecture and planning, Foundations reflects on the public and private, the state and capital, and liberalism and neoliberalism, and in the process, links local and national histories to the global."―Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis
"British spaces for living, shopping, and working were thoroughly transformed from the 1930s to our day. In this trenchant analysis, Sam Wetherell probes how and why government-sponsored and socially inspired council estates, shopping precincts, and industrial estates turned into privatized and profit-oriented housing estates, suburban malls, and business parks. Foundations powerfully illuminates how the neoliberal revolution remade urban Britain."―Lizabeth Cohen, author of Saving America’s Cities
Featured in the Financial Times, The Enduring Attraction of Cities
"[A] brilliant new history. . . . A highly convincing book, with the sort of clarity and panoramic scope that is too often, in books on this subject, lost in architectural and decorative minutiae."---Owen Hatherley, Tribune Magazine
Named one of the best books of 2020 by The Morning Star
Journal Articles
Reviews
Victor Gruen, Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America, Urban History, 2019
Wendy Webster, Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two, Twentieth Century British History, 2018
Appearances
Interview on Irish radio with Patrick Geoghehan for his show ‘Talking History’ on Newstalk FM
Brexit Before and Beyond, a discussion with Susan Pedersen, Adam Tooze and John Lanchester at Columbia University's Hayman Center for the Humanities, November 2016.