This book examines town and country planning policy in twentieth-century Britain as an important aspect of state activity. Tracing the origins of planning ideals and practice, Gordon Cherry charts the adoption by the state, both at central and local level, of measures to control and regulate features of Britain's urban and rural environments.

The author shows how town planning first took root as a professional activity and an academic discipline around the turn of the last century, largely as a reaction to the apparent problems of the late Victorian city. He explains, too, that this impetus for change coincided with a new perception amongst political thinkers of state planning as a legitimate and necessary function of Government's intervention in social and economic affairs.

Town planning, as a state activity in land-use regulation, housing, industrial location, roads and transport, became an important beneficiary of these developments.

The book explores changes in planning policy over subsequent decades. It highlights, for instance, the impact of World War II and the arrival of the corporate state as a 'Command Economy', and shows how town and country planning took its place in post-war reconstruction.

The final part of the book focuses on the breakdown of consensus from the mid-1970s, with the assault on collectivism by the New Right, and asks to what extent the new market orthodoxy has affected planning policy in the 1980s and 1990s.