🚨#History #envhist Job Alert: My Department is hiring an Assistant Professor in Environmental History. 🗃️ Come work with us at Warwick. You'll get both excellent colleagues and great students! See details below... And do not hesitate to spread the word... 👇👇👇 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPK289/a...

I’m in this week’s @newstatesman1913.bsky.social with a review of Holly Smith’s brilliant history of house rise council housing in Britain, Up in the Air www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

COMING SOON! The Modern British City 1945-2000 brings together architectural, urban and social historians, to chart the extraordinary changes that took place in British cities between the end of the Second World War and the early 21st century... Pre-order now! www.lundhumphries.com

A day teaching in Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio. Magic.

Took my new Hawksmoor-inspired jumper up to Christ Church Spitalfields today 🪦 All credit goes to the wonderful Hebe who spent countless hours knitting it!

Holly Smith launches Up in the Air at the LRB Bookshop. @holsmith.bsky.social

My book UP IN THE AIR: A HISTORY OF HIGH-RISE BRITAIN is out today!

Was Manchester really as segregated as Engels said? What kept the rich and poor apart.... if anything? My first article is out today in @historicaljnl.bsky.social and I'm so pleased to share it with you all! doi:10.1017/S0018246X25101246 @stjohnscollege.bsky.social @camunicampop.bsky.social

There's just a day to go until @manchesterup.bsky.social publish my latest book Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London. I thought I should explain a bit about where the book came from. 1/15

The deeply creepy island of Poveglia in the Venetian Lagoon, originally a nunnery, then a quarantine station, and an asylum from 1922 till 1968 - & now all eerily derelict - it’s reported that underfoot are plague pits for over 100,000 people.

Join us for a roundtable on 'The Modern British City' in January at Senate House, London, with Simon Gunn, Erika Hanna, Owen Hatherley, Peter Mandler, Otto Saumarez Smith and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, followed by wine! www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

A pair of ludicrously high-heeled Venetian clogs, or Calcagnetti, c. 1400.

Letter in the Times:

To celebate the launch of 'Up in the Air: A History of High-Rise Britain', join author Holly Smith and C20 in conversation with architectural historian Neal Shasore on the future of public housing. 🗓️ Fri 14 Nov 2025, 6.30pm 📍 Cowcross St Gallery + Online 🎟️ secure.c20society.org.uk/Default.aspx...

I for one can’t wait but I do have skin in the game - a piece on the post-war history of the idea of the working class community - but there’s so much more - it’s a BIG book

A short post about the Modern British City, out in November: www.lundhumphries.com/blogs/featur...

Pleased with this small Gustavsberg dish, showing Eskil Sundahl's Kooperativa Förbundet headquarters in Södermalm (1935).

Managed to re-buy this Ironbridge B Power Station commemorative plate.

Here is Spångavägen 49, the “Lamellahus” Oliver Cox, Michael Ventris & Graeme Shankland rented in 1947. They were later dubbed “Swedophiles”, and I’ve been exploring many of the places they visited, all of it so beautifully maintained it is easy to recapture there excitement & why 🇸🇪 so influential.

Paul Hedqvist‘s functionalist collective terrace at Ålstensgatan (1932-3). Per Albin Hansson, who was the prime minister of Sweden from 1923 to 1946 lived here, which seems just right.

Léonie & Charles-Eduoard Geisendorf’s S’s Görans gymnasium, Stockholm (1960). A masterpiece.

Kenneth Rowntree's 'Holiday in Sweden', 1938. Off to Stockholm tomorrow, mostly need to look at housing, but recommendations welcome. 🇸🇪

A piece by me in this terrific, wide-ranging, & open access celebration of @petermandler.bsky.social, about Mass Observation, the Architectural Association, and attempts to think about housing sociologically in late-1930s Britain: read.uolpress.co.uk/read/democra...

Richard Gilbert Scott’s swooping Vatican II Our Lady Help of Christians, Birmingham (1966-7)

You can get 25% off my book UP IN THE AIR: A HISTORY OF HIGH-RISE BRITAIN at Waterstones, with the code SUMMER25 until Thursday 31 #WPreorder

On Friday, Sept 26th, we'll be marking the retirement of @petermandler.bsky.social as Professor of Modern Cultural History at @camhistory.bsky.social with the launch of 'Democratising History: Modern British History Inside and Out', published by @uolpress.bsky.social. (Free) tickets available!

Very sad to hear about the death of Andrew Saint, pictured here giving huge architectural history energy with Gavin Stamp at the NT. His books all written with tremendous style across a terrific range of topics. Towards a Social Architecture, his superb history of post-war schools my favourite.

A recording of a lecture by me on "Basil Champneys & the Politics of Prettiness", slightly out of my depth, at a very enjoyable day @newnhamcollege.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=frHq...

The Modern British City 1945-2000 is out on November 28th, and is available for pre-order from ‪@lhartbooks.bsky.social‬: www.lundhumphries.com/products/the....

Wedgwood moon landing plate

This Twentieth Century Society book, out in September, is going to be absolutely stonking.

My book is out on 28 October with @versobooks.bsky.social 💥 It’s available for pre-order at £20: www.waterstones.com/book/up-in-t...

Pleased with my new bird feeder

Fred Millet sculpture at the LCC’s Raglan Estate (1965).

I'll be joined by architectural historian Otto @osaumarezsmith.bsky.social for the concluding discussion. This lecture is hosted by thebaltrust.org and is the last in their Spring series on the architecture of transport in Britain from Georgian times to the present day.

Illustrations from a 1965 issue of Northern Architect, imagining a linear monorail city stretching from Newcastle to Teesside. 💥

Groovy perspectives from a 1963 Ministry of Education building bulletin on a youth club in Bristol.

Photograph in Cassabella of the points of the LCC’s Canada Estate, Rotherhithe (by a group including Colin Lucas & Philip Bottomley), foregrounded by a still industrial docklands River Thames.

The Coplay Cement Company Kilns, located at Coplay, Pennsylvania in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. The nine kilns were built between 1892 and 1893 and used for the production of Portland cement. #abandoned #urbex #bricks #industry #Coplay #photography #EastCoastKin

Corb your enthusiasm. My flat in World of Interiors: www.worldofinteriors.com/story/otto-s...

Advert for the plum job of head of casework at @c20society.bsky.social: c20society.org.uk/work-with-us....

F staircase, Powell & Moya’s Cripps Building, Cambridge (1967).

Cutting things fine, I've just submitted the manuscript for Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London to @manchesterup.bsky.social. Which seems a good moment to notice that the book has made its way into the virtual world. manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526181954/

Event showcasing brilliant emerging research in twentieth-century heritage: secure.c20society.org.uk/Default.aspx..., the first public event put on by @c20society.bsky.social's new youth group. Come along!

Reading Helen Ashton’s 1932 novel Bricks & Mortar, a gentle novel about an architect & his family from the 1890s to the present. It’s remarkably astute about buildings & the architectural profession; brilliantly the main protagonist’s daughter becomes an AA trained Modernist.

Magnificent, gigantic abstract mosaic murals, by Kenneth Barden & J E Tyrrell, towering all the way up the 16 stories of two Gosport tower blocks (1963).

A Welsh miner’s fan, I think made as an apprentice piece in the late 19th century, an object of extraordinary dexterity & I feel inadvertent futurism.

Publication day! A social & architectural history of post-war Scottish new towns: planning & buildings plus community, family, gender, work, education, home. The ebook is FREE via bit.ly/4hLkxn9. Print copy (more attractive!) via www.bloomsbury.com/uk/building-... - do ask libraries to purchase

A brilliant event last night with @c20society.bsky.social to launch our 70th anniversary edition of Outrage by Ian Nairn, with @osaumarezsmith.bsky.social, @gmdarksky.bsky.social and Travis Elborough (also featuring @gardnergareth.bsky.social). Always lovely to see a packed room!

Hillingdon asking for feedback on a proposal to locally list Telecom House in Hayes (1973, by PSA with Gray Associates). Channelling Kenzo Tange & CPB’s Leeds University, a thrilling & unusual example of sculptural brutalism. Write in support here: www.hillingdon.gov.uk/article/1401....