Book Launch: Remaking London by Ben Campkin

Please join us on 3 October 2013 at 6.30pm to celebrate the launch of

Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture

by Ben Campkin 

Published by I.B.Tauris

RSVP Antonia Leslie, Publicist, I.B.Tauris, email: aleslie@ibtauris.com

Between the slum clearances of the early twentieth century and debates about the post-Olympic city, the drive to 'regenerate' London has intensified. Yet today, with a focus on increasing land values, regeneration schemes purporting to foster diverse and creative new neighbourhoods typically displace precisely the qualities, activities and communities they claim to support. 

In Remaking London Ben Campkin provides a lucid and stimulating historical account of urban regeneration, exploring how decline and renewal have been imagined and realised at different scales. Focusing on present-day regeneration areas that have been key to the capital's modern identity, Campkin explores how these places have been stigmatised through identification with material degradation and spatial and social disorder. 

Drawing on diverse sources - including journalism, fine art, photography, cinema, theatre, architectural design, advertising and television - he illuminates how ideas of decline drive urban change. Richly illustrated and engagingly written, Remaking London is both a compelling account of contested sites from the capital's recent history and a powerful critique of the contradictions of contemporary regeneration. 

"An important and much-needed corrective, full of fascinating insights, which exposes the myths of regeneration" - Anna Minton, author of Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City.