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Introduction
In 1985, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher personally drove the bulldozer that inaugurated the demolition of the Victorian Broad Street Station in the City of London, making way for new modern office development. In a speech on the occasion, she lamented that ‘we live in an era of conservation’ and hoped that we might come to ‘build the best of our own time to match the achievements of Adam and Inigo Jones’. In the very same week that she was driving a bulldozer into the 1860s ironwork of Broad Street Station, Thatcher also purchased a new neo-Georgian Barratt Home in Dulwich, described in the Spectator as ‘vulgar and incompetently designed’.1 What to make of these two seemingly opposed actions by the same woman in the same week? Perhaps nothing but philistinism links these two events. Then again, perhaps this dichotomy of capitalist ruthlessness and bumptious nostalgia is revealing of an uneasy synthesis of the ideals of heritage and enterprise at the heart of Thatcherism.
That cities might provide the key to understanding Thatcherism was a driving force behind three of the most illuminating observers of Thatcher's Britain. Patrick Wright's Journey through Ruins, which is ironically dedicated to Lady Margaret Thatcher herself, saw Dalston Lane as ‘an open archaeological site in which the story of the nation's post-war history can be traced out in unexpected detail’.2 In Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel tried to wrest the concept of heritage away from Thatcherism, seeing it instead as a potentially radical force.3 Lastly, Patrick Keiller's film London, as he put it himself, viewed ‘changes in the detail of the landscape, as spectators at some sporting event might watch the opposition winning’.4 His narrative was one in which a suburban Conservative party was effectively at war with cities. It is perhaps peculiar then that in the extensive scholarship on the meaning and progenitors of Thatcherism urban issues are seen as far less central than, first, its economic approach, and, secondly, its sense of moral crusade.5 The 2012 book of essays, Making Thatcher's Britain, for example – has no urban element. A recent four-volume collection presenting the most significant writing about Thatcher also ignores urban issues.6 This is...