Anna Minton’s short book on the modern built environment, subtitled ‘Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city’, is a strange but interesting creature: although it hangs in the no-man’s land between serious academic study and philosophical monograph, it is never anything other than serious in its intent. The central premise is to undertake a loosely chronological journey through UK housing policies of the past thirty years, from the ideas that underpinned them through to their fallout for communities across Britain, one that unfolds through anecdote, interview and, where all else fails, cold, hard, social science.

If this sounds intimidating, I should also add that Minton is frequently at pains to make her subject interesting and accessible; the journey detailed in her book often seems as much a personal one as it is an intellectual one. Likewise, Minton’s writing is never out of touch with the people whose lives have been altered by the grand designs of generations of politicians – from the East End families alienated by the unsympathetic developments in nearby Canary Wharf to the teenagers in Salford with nothing to do except be subject to arbitrary ‘stop-and-search’ by the police on a Friday night. Social concern, tempered by a genuine sympathy for the dispossessed and excluded is at the fore throughout this book and it is greatly to Minton’s credit that its expression here is never less than riveting.

Nonetheless, however arresting Minton’s subject matter is, it is also worth observing that her writing is at times surprisingly reluctant to take risks. There is something of a ponderous inevitability to her conclusions – perhaps due to a desire to convey the rigour with which she has clearly pursued her work. There is a clear and concious debt to such social thinkers as Walter Benjamin, yet she rarely presses her ideas to their limits; rather than attack her subject with the multi-faceted brilliance of a Roland Barthes, Minton is content to progress steadily towards the conclusions that we have had suggested to us from the early stages of the work. In the process she steers us away from some potentially fascinating avenues of inquiry – such as the tendency for New Labour ministers to introduce housing policies that reflect their own prejudices towards communities of lower social standing – and runs the risk of exhausting her own material.

Yet in the end it is only a risk: Minton’s revealing work in tracking down the hidden faces of our own modern social segregation, from its architects to its victims, is a real eye-opener, and one which eminently deserves to be read. Minton’s strength lies in convincingly detailing these deep-seated problems, rather than in setting out their solutions – her general theme of ‘copying the continent’ would need substantial development before I would be able to regard it as convincing – and provided you accept Minton’s writing on these terms, this book is a truly remarkable read. If you consider yourself to be a socially concious adult, this book is more than simply interesting: it is unmissable.

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