Chapter 5 studies the life of the Dominican friars on the English Mission from 1661 to 1850, in London where they were at first welcome at court or attached to embassy chapels, at their family seats, or as chaplains attached to recusant families on rural estates. It shows their normally good relations with patrons, but also their insecurity for most of the period in the absence of sufficient residences with a guaranteed income where one friar could succeed another in the local mission. The friars maintained their Dominican idenity through their liturgy, their spiritual reading, their letters, and meetings. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, they were able to gain more support from ordinary lay Catholics in urban parishes, but also required to fund the construction of new churches and schools, while the lack of recuits required them to withdraw from many missions.

This chapter examines the unprecedented era of urban rebuilding which took off in the late 1950s and lasted into the 1970s, in which enthusiasm for ‘comprehensive’ town centre redevelopment and modernist urban renewal was at its peak. This was the era when shopping malls were imported from the United States and planted at the centre of British towns and cities, and these developments rested upon an unusual alignment between the modernist planning ideals of urban professionals, the developmental agendas of local authorities and the commercial strategies of a handful of development companies. I stress how important the rhetoric of modernisation was in uniting these different interests, but also how loosely and variably notions of ‘the modern’ were defined and applied. I also highlight the importance of the technocratic enthusiasms of the age, particularly in the early 1960s, when the idea of engineering efficient urban environments came to the fore. Planners, policymakers and property developers adopted a deeply Taylorist, mechanistic idea of urban renewal, in which prosperity, efficiency and growth would be precisely engineered while ‘obsolescence’ would be excised from the modern city with surgical precision. For urban authorities facing darkening economic prospects, these were seductive ideas, and viewed as a means to combat the onset of deindustrialisation.

Drawing upon Stockton-on-Tees and Leeds West as case studies, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in urban, industrial, predominantly working-class constituencies. It demonstrates how Conservatives in the depressed regions, despite budgetary impediments to social reform legislation, succeeded in constructing a distinctive working-class appeal in the 1930s. They did so first by seeking to assert a reworked version of anti-socialism among working-class voters at the 1931 general election; then, in relation to relief campaigns among the unemployed, by seeking to rehabilitate a conspicuous Conservative presence in working-class communities; and ultimately, in 1935, by embracing the National Government’s cross-party example to advocate a programme of economic reconstruction that was both in keeping with reformist Conservatism and capable of retaining erstwhile Liberal and Labour voters.