Heritage Protection as Progressive Urbanism? Modernist Social Housing in England

Heritage protection can sometimes disrupt the remaking and reimaging of cities by prioritising and protecting alternatives based on non-market values of architectural and historical significance. In England, the “post-war listing” programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender (sometimes of last resort) of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state and its socialist values from the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper, we explore what might be at stake ideologically, materially, and symbolically in the protection of post-war architectural heritage in England. While post-war listing has creating scope for alternatives, its subaltern role (in and against the state) has been limited in various ways by state strategies of market-based regeneration that erode and marginalise social housing and welfarist rights to the city. Although heritage protection has been only a minor irritant in the politics of regeneration, the paper explores what might be at stake for the Left in engaging more explicitly with heritage building protection and the selectivity of heritage value.