I’m John Grindrod, 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 (March 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 modernized 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.
Books in order of publication:
Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain – 2013
Outskirts: Living Life on the edge of the Green Belt – 2018
Iconicon – 2022
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