The renewal of post-war Manchester

Shortlisted for the SAHGB Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2025

'Richard Brook's holistic approach to the narration of Manchester's mid-twentieth-century history is refreshingly novel and derived from the dual experience of the practising architect and the architectural historian. His decades-long engagement with, interest in and love for the city is manifest in this comprehensive volume. His sensitivity towards the values and heritage of mainstream modernism sheds a more nuanced light on the city's development and the networks and individuals who transformed it. At a time when understanding and valuing our everyday heritage in its complexity becomes more and more crucial, and valuing what is already there a key tenet for all the built-environment professions, this empathy and understanding unfolds a new way of researching and writing about our shared urban space.'
Luca Csepely-Knorr, University of Liverpool

'The urban histories of Manchester - both early and recent - have been often narrated in terms of the extraordinary, shocking, heroic, ruthless, generous, innovative and visionary. Richard Brook's history of Manchester between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s offers a different scholarly sensitivity and a fresh generational voice that favours what was moderated, phased, delayed, constrained and reconstructed in the city's development. In so doing, he offers a new way to consider post-war urban renewal as a networked and negotiated practice.'
Lukasz Stanek, University of Michigan