The Global Rise of the British Property Development Sector, 1945–1975

Abstract

In the three decades after 1945 the British property development sector exploded in size and began operating on a worldwide scale. The largest property companies in the world were British in this era and they built office blocks, shopping centres and hotels in cities all over the world. These overseas property developments overlapped firmly with the pre-existing political and economic geographies of empire, and their speculative transnational financing was made possible by allying with London’s financial sector and the world of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. This article surveys the rise, financialization, and imperially inflected internationalization of the British property development sector in this period, showing how property companies capitalized upon post-war Britain’s developer-friendly urban renewal order, internationalist financial sector, and inherited imperial advantages even as many of the formal political structures of empire were being dismantled. In the post-war decades, the remnants of empire as a commercial world system provided Britain’s property developers with vital stepping stones towards the fully globalized forms of financialized real-estate development that shape cities around the world today.