I’m John Grindrod, a social historian of modern places. I am the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain (2013), Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt (2017) and Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain (2022).

I grew up in a housing estate called New Addington, Croydon, and my work reflects the strange jumble of urban, suburban and rural that I found on my doorstep. Using my home town as a starting point these books have been a way for me to try to understand how and why our modern towns and cities look the way they do. Each book has been a journey to teach myself – and, I hope, readers – something new, whether the story of the emergence of the estates, new towns and city centres of postwar Britain in Concretopia, the modernised countryside of the green belt in Outskirts, or the more recent conflict of heritage and high tech we’ve lived through since 1980 and which I’ve been writing about in Iconicon.

The books are for people who, like me, are fascinated by the modern histories of our towns and cities, suburbs and outskirts, but who also aren’t quite sure what to make of them. They have been written around my day job – I have no training in architecture or planning and I’m not an academic, I’m just a big old geek. I try to write jargon-free books for a general readership, preferably with lots of silly jokes and pop culture references along the way. For each I’ve interviewed numerous people – architects, planners, builders and residents past and present. I also do a lot of walking, describing what I see and trying to understand how these buildings and landscapes might have come about. I hope to tell the stories of these places as fairly and interestingly as I can, combining archives from the time with perspectives from the present, to explore just what happened to those initial dreams.

The three books form a loose trilogy about how the British have planned, built, lived and worked in new buildings and settlements over the last eighty years. I am profoundly grateful to everyone who has shared their memories with me to help write them, and to anyone who might see fit to read them.

You can sign up for my Substack where I post some original writing and information about events and things I’ve seen and liked.