Body Beautiful: medical aesthetics and the reconstruction of urban Britain in the 1940s

The convergence of two seemingly distinct discourses - those of medical science and planning - in the period of urban reconstruction at the close of the Second World War is discussed. It is suggested that planners in 1940s Britain conceptualized urban reconstruction by employing the visual imagery and rhetoric of contemporary 'medical aesthetics'. The convergence of these ideas was purposeful: medical knowledge and its newly emerging aesthetics transplanted itself easily into the imaginative realms of urban reconstruction so that planners and architects alike could visualize the social, moral and architectural improvements to be made to the city in terms of diagnosis, cure and treatment. Reconstruction was not simply building cities anew; it also involved a vision of post-war life in its full cultural complexity.