By Valeria Carullo

This book is the companion to the eponymous 2023-24 RIBA exhibition Wide Angle View: Architecture as social space in the Manplan series 1969-70. By the late 1960s, The Architectural Review had a history of campaigning for important issues related to the built environment. Photography had long been at the centre of their strategy as a means to communicate ideas to a lay audience. However, the project they embarked on in 1969, called Manplan, was revolutionary both in ambition and in execution. A brainchild of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, the project was conceived as an analysis of the state of architecture and urban planning in Britain. Most of the images in the exhibition and catalogue, taken by renowned photographers such as Ian Berry, Patrick Ward and Tony Ray-Jones, have never been published or exhibited before (apart from their use in the Manplan issues).