Following the establishment of the National Lottery in 1994, commentators diagnosed Britain with ‘Lottery Fever’.  In the late 1990s, billions of pounds raised by the sale of Lottery tickets poured into hundreds of architectural projects across the country. This influx of money had a dramatic impact on contemporary British architecture. As the architect Richard Rogers observed in 2002: 

‘I remember writing a little article 30 years ago and saying there’s more written about ballet than architecture. You couldn’t say that today. We now recognise that the built environment is one of the driving forces of our society. The Lottery has made a lot of difference.’

My thesis reconstructs the motivations of the constellation of actors – architects, local authorities, central government, and the Lottery funding distribution bodies – who helped propel the Lottery building boom forward. In the process, it unpicks the changing relationship between political culture, architecture and urban policy in the late twentieth century.