In the decades after 1945, Britain witnessed a dramatic period of technological innovation and expansion. Decommissioning the twentieth century considers this phenomenon and its aftermath.
The state transformed the countryside with grids of pylons, huge concrete edifices, and a new era of extraction, while both rural and urban societies and economies adapted to the new cultures of energy, communication and leisure.
As these infrastructures – and the lives that inhabited them – are variously abandoned, repurposed or demolished, this book visits four distinct locations to consider how the countryside became modern, what these sites mean now, and how we might remember them.