Dr Otto Saumarez Smith

About

At the heart of what I do as an architectural and urban historian is the belief that focusing on cities and buildings is a brilliant way to understand abstract historical processes and political ideologies. My work views many of the profound changes that happened to the state and society in modern Britain through the lens of the built environment. I use these sources to illuminate people and ideas as well as buildings and places. The everyday built-fabric of cities is the ideal place to track and rethink significant historical questions, because it is where concepts including the welfare state, social polarisation, affluence, gentrification, deindustrialisation, narratives of crisis, and changing patterns of mobility, were made manifest, made concrete. Through my teaching I introduce students to the hidden histories that can be told through seemingly banal buildings and places.

I came to Warwick in 2019, following a four year Junior Research Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a temporary lectureship in the History Faculty at Cambridge.

Research interests

My first book is titled Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain. It is the first monograph about the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s. The book details the rise and fall of this complex and notorious subject, where it has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain’s cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed. The result is the first account to reveal the origins and dissolution of the cross-party consensus on modernist urban planning. The book locates architectural and planning history within its wider political, cultural, and intellectual milieu.

The book was a History Today book of the year, and has been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement (David Kynaston), The New Statesman (Lynsey Hanley), Prospect (Will Self), The Observer (Rowan Moore), The Literary Review (Elain Harwood), The Daily Telegraph, Architectural History, Urban History, The RIBA Journal, Architecture Today, Journal of Modern History, The Burlington Magazine, Planning Perspectives, Reviews in History, Context, C20 Magazine, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, and Contemporary British History. Paperback August 2020.

A triannual interdisciplinary urban history workshop I run with Professor Simon Gunn, called SPUD (we have held twenty-four meetings since 2014), has formed the launchpad of a major essay collection, The Modern British City which will be published by Lund Humphries in 2025 (co-editors Simon Gunn and Peter Mandler). The book is an update and an homage to H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff’s seminal The Victorian City, Images and Realities (1973), taking inspiration from its approach but applying it to the history of British cities since the Second World War.

I am finishing a second monograph, using the careers of the architect Oliver Cox (1920-2010) and the sociologist Peter Willmott (1923-2009) to explore issues around housing and sociology. The book follows their careers and long-term collaboration to take seriously their intellectual development, and to tell a new history of the political and personal motivations of public sector actors throughout the post-war period.

PhD Supervision

Matthew Bliss: ‘Building the “property-owning democracy’: Speculative housebuilding in postwar Britain’. Wolfson Funded.

Ellie Brown: ‘The Golden Age of the Shopping Centre’. AHRC Funded.

Adam Coleman: ‘Expanded Towns’, Warwick CADRE Funded.

Tom Goodwin: ‘Millenial Modernism', AHRC Funded.

I would be keen to hear from prospective PhD students interested in how the everyday built environment illuminates political culture & change.

Selected publications

(book) Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019)
(article) ‘The Lost World of the British Leisure Centre’, History Workshop Journal (2019): https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbz007/5519070
(article) ‘Action For Cities: The Thatcher Government and Inner City Policy’, Urban History (2020): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/urban-history/article/action-for-cities-the-thatcher-government-and-innercity-policy/C479FD0A7B1C821199F4EAD302F19BBE#
(article) ‘The Inner City Crisis and the End of Urban Modernism in 1970s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 24.7 (2016), pp. 578-598: https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article/27/4/578/2525297
(article) ‘Landscapes of Hope and Crisis, Derelict Land and Leisure in 1970s Britain’, Journal of British Studies (2023)
doi:10.1017/jbr.2023.

View more publications

Professional associations

Editorial board of the journal Architectural History: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/architectural-history

I run a research network, called SPUD, with Professor Simon Gunn (Leicester)

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries

Trustee of the Twentieth Century Society

Qualifications

BA (Warwick)
MPhil (Cantab)
PhD (Cantab)

Associate Professor

Contact:

Tel: +44 (0)24 765 22489
Email: otto.saumarez-smith@warwick.ac.uk

5.69

FAB Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7HS

History of Art

Dr Otto Saumarez Smith

About

Research interests

Selected publications

Professional associations

Qualifications

Associate Professor

Contact:

Advice and Feedback hours

Office hours on Teams. Monday 2-4. But please email to organise a meeting first.

Teaching

Undergraduate modules

Postgraduate modules

Connect