This article surveys the Thatcher administration's approach to inner-city policy. It uses recently opened archives to reignite the debate over how far these years marked a radical break with past practices towards market-oriented approaches. The first part explains why inner cities became such a central issue for the Conservative party, running through all areas of domestic policy and taking up a vast amount of legislative time. The second part details some of the transatlantic neo-liberal ideas that blamed inner-city ills on government intervention, which were increasingly influential amongst senior Conservatives. The third section shows how little free market ideology actually succeeded in directing government policy, which more often than not saw an expansion of the role of the state. Antagonism with local authorities is revealed to have been a much more important and influential factor. These themes are expanded in the fourth section, which charts the Action for Cities policy drive of Thatcher's final term.

This article looks at central government's role, focusing on the parliamentary terms 1959–64 and 1964–6, in directing the way in which local authorities enacted the central area redevelopment schemes of the 1960s. The first two sections review the substantial but little-studied literature produced across the political spectrum about central area urban renewal in the period 1959–64. Section III uses the Joint Urban Planning Group, a group set up within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a case-study to show how modernist approaches to redevelopment became operative within a government department. The Joint Urban Planning Group has received no attention from historians. Section IV discusses the fate of these ideas during Labour's first term after the 1964 election.

Graeme Shankland (1917–84) conforms in many ways to the popular image of a 1960s planner with his lyrical advocacy of inner city motorways and his suggestions of enormous programmes of renewal in ‘outworn’ Victorian city centres. As an advocate of the belief that ‘our problem in Britain is that it is our generation which must completely renew most of the older parts of our larger towns and cities’, Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly completed. Raphael Samuel labelled him ‘the butcher of Liverpool’. Simon Jenkins’s antipathy towards planners developed after viewing Shankland’s Liverpool plan: ‘I was looking at Bomber Harris. This was the end of the beautiful city and that reaction has infused everything I have thought since about planning and architecture.’ At best, Paul Barker saw him as misguided: ‘I think, for example, of the destruction of the centre of Liverpool by well-meaning planners like Graeme Shankland.’

In 1974, Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, of the leading Glasgow practice of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia (GKC), were announced as the winners of the competition to design the new Robinson College, Cambridge, which had been endowed by the businessman David Robinson. The first (and principal) phase of their design was completed in 1981. Robinson remains the most recently created college in Cambridge, which had seen a flurry of new foundations since the mid-1950s, including Churchill College, Clare Hall, Darwin College, Fitzwilliam College, New Hall, and Wolfson (originally University) College. In addition, Robinson was the last major project by its architects, who had assumed the creative lead at GKC in the early 1950s and were subsequently responsible for a series of significant religious and institutional buildings in both Scotland and England. The firm was wound up in 1987, a move that has been described as ‘a tragedy for Glasgow and for Scottish architecture’.