12 destinations marking the arrival of modernist Britain

In the centennial year of modernism, we visit visionary places where artists, engineers and architects imagined the future

Modernism – which can be loosely defined as a movement that marked a break with the past – radically changed art, literature, performance and the built environment. It got a big break in 1922 with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot’s mentor, Ezra Pound, called it “year zero” on his calendar – though not because of poetry or art but because his hero, the fascist leader Benito Mussolini, marched on Rome.

The 1920s were also when Frank Pick and Charles Holden began to redesign the London underground and new ideas about architecture began to flow in from Germany and the Nordic countries. From office blocks built for the glassmaker Pilkington in St Helens, Merseyside, to a Mormon church in Belfast to Cornwall’s Saltash Library (dubbed “the most Le Corbusier building in the country”), modern buildings enliven civic spaces that would be far duller without them.