Named one of the Books of the Year 2019 by History Today. Many British cities were devastated by bombing during the Second World War and faced stark economic dilemmas concerning reconstruction planning and implementation after 1945. How did politicians, civil servants and local authorities manage to produce the cities we live in today? Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities examines the underlying processes and pressures, especially financial and bureaucratic, which shaped postwar urbanism in Britain. Catherine Flinn integrates architectural planning with in-depth economic and political analyses of Britain's blitzed cities for the first time. She examines early reconstruction arrangements, the postwar economic apparatus and the challenges of postwar physical planning across the country, while providing insightful case studies from the cities of Hull, Exeter and Liverpool. By addressing the ideology versus the reality of reconstruction in postwar Britain, Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities highlights the importance of economic and political factors for understanding the British postwar built environment. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, and the Grenfell Tower Disaster in London demonstrated that while causes of urban disaster may be simple, the consequences present major challenges. In her meticulous study, Flinn shows that the reconstruction of Britain following the air raids of World War Two saw many grand plans. Some were realized, while others were undermined by political, practical and economic constraints. Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities is essential both for our understanding of post-war British history, but also as a corrective to naive arguments that urban renewal can always be straightforward.