I must confess that when I started this whole Warrington-Runcorn persona, my research went as far as Google search and Google Maps. However, I have sought to rectify this since and done a considerable amount of reading on the subject. I can’t confess to having read every page of every book here – even as an ardent fan of the topic, some of these books are strictly for town planners and post-war historians.
Where I can, I’ve provided links to buy the books from the author’s own website, or Bookshop.org which supports independent book shops across the UK. A lot of books are out of print and have been bought from Ebay.
For the casual reader
- Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain – John Grindrod
- The Nanny State Made Me – Stuart Maconie
- Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places – Gareth E. Rees
Coffee table books
- Brutalist Britain: Buildings of the 1960s and 1970s – Elain Harwood
- Mid-Century Britain: Modern Architecture 1938-1963 – Elain Harwood
- Brutal London – Simon Phipps
- Brutal North – Simon Phipps
- New England – Chris Porsz
Warrington and Runcorn specifically
- Runcorn New Town Master Plan – Arthur Ling
- From the archives: Runcorn – The Modernist Society
- Warrington: from New Town to New City? – Janice Hayes
- A History Of Warrington – Alan Crosby
- Runcorn Through The Ages – Jean and John Bradburn
- Warrington Official Borough Handbook 1979 – Warrington Council
Books from the period
- The Pedestrian In The City: Architect’s Year Book XI – Edited by David Lewis
- Politics, Planning and the City – Michael Goldsmith
- Town and Country Planning – John Ratcliffe
- The New Town Story – Frank Schaffer
Retrospective books
- Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain – Owen Hopkins
- A History Of Council Housing In 100 Estates – John Boughton
- New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth – Katy Lock and Hugh Ellis
- The Seventies: Rediscovering a lost decade of British Architecture – Edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers
- Britain’s Heritage: Brutalism – Billy Reading
Visual inspiration
- Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR – Alexandra Sankova
- Own Label: Sainsbury’s Design Studio 1962-1977 – Jonny Trunk
- Modernist Graphic Design in Britain 1945-1980 – Ian McLaren and Tony Pritchard
- Mid-Century Modern Graphic Design – Theo Inglis
- Eighty Years Of Faber and Faber Book Cover Design – Joseph Connolly