Select Publications

Other books and articles by Mark Clapson are listed with citations on ‪Google Scholar. Read on for reviews of select publications.

A Bit of a Flutter

Review in Times Higher Education Supplement
27 November 1992 
‘This is an admirable addition to the Manchester University Press series of “International Studies in the History of Sport” and an important addition to the literature on gambling.  [It] is in the richness of the detail, and the fact that Clapson writes paragraphs that can be understood at first reading, which make this such an enjoyable book’.

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Invincible Green Suburbs

Review in Planning Perspectives, 15, 2000
‘While the nineteenth century in Britain witnessed a dominant migration from rural areas to urban centres, the twentieth century saw the reverse; in the latter, a mass movement to the suburbs in the interwar period was followed by a longer distance exodus, to further suburban extensions and across the postwar green belts to established and new towns in the country.  In fact, the patterns in both centuries were always more complex, with countervailing trends and differences based on class, ethnicity and region.  Our understanding of this process, therefore, depends on detailed studies as well as grand narratives, and we should be indebted to Mark Clapson for highlighting one particular aspect, the outward movement of the working class in the second half of the twentieth century’.

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Suburban Century

H-NET Book Review, Urban History, October, 2005
‘Suburban Century is a breath of fresh air in the debates on suburbia. Its emphasis on the sociological aspects of the suburbs helps clarify some of the persistent myths that have clouded our understanding of the suburbs and of their continued growth. The comprehensive and wide range of studies described and referenced throughout the text is a strong point of the book. This book will be an excellent reference for other authors wanting to understand the breadth of sociological studies regarding the suburbs of England and the United States.’

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A Social History of Milton Keynes

Review by Paul Barker, The Independent, 11 February 2005
‘As Mark Clapson points out in his punctilious retrospective on MK’s first thirty years, the culmination of the New Town movement offered jobs and houses, space and freedom. On a site designated in the late 1960s, it embodied the best aspects of that decade’s passion for starting everything afresh. Clapson is a Milton Keynes resident as well as a respected historian of planning. He painstakingly records every step in MK’s growth, from a cluster of academic ideas to a city of 209,000 people which John Prescott plans to expand yet further.’

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Working-Class Suburb

Review by Sport in History Journal, 33/1 2013
‘Clapson has written a book that has a great deal to commend it. Principal among its attributes is the connecting of a micro study of some 10,000 people in South Reading to a much wider canvas of economic, social and demographic history. The final chapter, which discusses the broader policy and academic implications of Whitley’s story, is not only a model for all authors of PhD theses to follow, but equally has much for historians of sport to reflect on. To be sure, there is little on sport in the book, but Clapson’s conceptual compass points out the directions for navigating a much-needed history of sport in the suburbs.’

More reviews of ‘Working-Class Suburb’