Elizabeth Darling 
Re-forming Britain [PDF ebook] 
Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction

The emergence of British modernism has gone largely unconsidered, so whilst historians have examined Britain’s engagement with modernity in terms of art, politics and planning, this study addresses and fills that gap. Re-forming Britain considers the process through which architects sought to establish modernism as the dominant ideology in British architectural culture from the late 1920s onwards. The author documents, contextualizes and explains the emergence and nature of architectural modernism in Britain between the wars and shows how modernist architects allied themselves with progressives in other fields and through what the author characterizes as ‘narratives of modernity’ – projects both realized and unrealized and in different media – made a deliberate campaign to convert the nation to this ideology.