This highly impressive monograph by Charlotte Wildman provides a fresh perspective by focusing on the often neglected interwar period in Liverpool and Manchester … [There] is no doubt that the study makes an outstanding contribution to the field of urban history, which students and academics will find invaluable for many years to come.

History: Reviews of New Books

Charlotte Wildman is to be congratulated for taking on the complexity of the modern city and demonstrating so many intriguing ways forward in studying it.

Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire

This is a clear, convincing account of the interwar period which engages with a number of important discussions in twentieth-century British history. It should be read by all historians of twentieth-century Britain, particularly those working on the interwar period or with an interest in gender, religion, modernity, and political cultures.

Twentieth Century British History

Charlotte Wildman's excellent Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 challenges these images by placing the female shopper at the heart of the new city centres of the urban north.

Economic History Review

[A] significant contribution to modern urban history, and to the study of gender, consumer culture, and religion. It is also a timely one: many of the themes that Wildman brings to the surface have more recently acquired a new significance.

Planning Perspectives

[A] fine debut monograph ... It is in the conjunction of redevelopment and urban culture that the book's real strengths lie ... The study thus presents a convincing reassessment of inter-war cities that does much to add to our understandings of the development of urban cultures and identities with the framework of distinctly local modernities.

Urban History