Tower blocks, council estates , new towns, car parks, municipal complexes, and futuristic urban sprawls. Brutalism, the post-war Modernist architectural trend centred on rough-hewn, monumental concrete structures has been a constant presence in British cinema. Despite being one of the most significant architectural movements in twentieth-century Britain, Brutalism also remains one of the most contentious. It arouses emotions like no other form of design, its confrontational concrete forms producing responses that fluctuate between defence and derision. Drawing on a resurgent interest in Brutalism, this book offers the first major exploration of Brutalism's significance and representation across post-war British cinema.

In Brutalist Architecture in British Cinema, Jonathan Smith examines a broad range of features films that utilise Brutalism, interpreting the iconography and spatial practices of these fictional spaces, as well as their intersection with issues of class, race, national identity, and political change. Organized chronologically and thematically, this book offers close readings of seminal British films like Blow-Up (1966), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Get Carter (1971), as well as previously overlooked features like The Offence (1973), Meantime (1983), Harry Brown (2009), and more recent features such as High Rise (2015). Covering the entire post-war period, this book touches on the initial optimism of post-war planning, the dissolution of council housing under Thatcherism, moral panics around 'sink estates', a growing visibility and interest in urban Black British lives within a cinematic context, and the reclamation of Brutalism as a middle-class luxury. As an architectural style that can be both a concrete façade destined to embody externally projected values, and a socially conscious architecture tied to the Welfare State, Brutalism cinematically continues to serve as the perfect space to stage ideological battles over the state of the nation.