Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

An excellent guide through the history of British council and social housing. While the focus is largely on London it does a good job to touch on the key themes and challenges taking place, including themes from Europe. I agree with a lot of the points made by the author though did find the tendency to decry conservative policy and push his own left wing ideologies a bit grating. This is not to say the book doesn't offer factual balance and state the benefits and successes of such policies but a ‘yearning' for the ways of old is consistently returned to, as an opinion I have no issue with this but I feel it tends to sideline some of the needed budgetary transformations of local government it has already outlined as critical and of importance.
The research and summarisation is overall excellent, I particularly enjoyed the final chapter which was written in a much more prosaic style and drew conclusions and weighed up the current and future situation wonderfully.
If I could I'd have given it 4.5 stars.