This dissertation looks closely and slowly at what might be called the longue durée of the demolition of Britain’s most aspirational public housing project—encompassing not only James Stirling’s Southgate Estate, but its setting in the centrally planned and built Runcorn New Town, on Merseyside near Liverpool. Taken together as a case study, the sequence of architectural activity—the drawing of the Runcorn New Town’s borders, the preparation of its master plan, the construction of its town center, and the design of Southgate itself—allows us to challenge the meanings attached by the established historiography to the alleged “failure” of modernist public housing in postwar racial-capitalist Britain. The dissertation concludes, contrary to assumptions of a modernist–welfarist consensus, that state and architecture were not united except in appearance or rhetoric. Instead, architecture and planning at Runcorn and Southgate were sites of confrontation—scenes where dissimilar and often incompatible purposes did battle. In order to narrate this history, the dissertation focuses intently on the “real” of everyday practices in architecture, planning, and public policy, aiming to draw attention to activities and motivations that passed behind—were denied representation in—the architectural signifier. On the one hand, Southgate is exemplary as a case study insofar as its “failure”—comprising not only the estate’s demolition, but a history of reinscribed racial-capitalist predations—can be read as a symptomatic return of what this repression elsewhere has hidden from historiography. On the other hand, it demonstrates that “failure” was both actively produced and contested in the individual decisions and determinations that governed the New Town’s and the Southgate Estate’s day-to-day development, and thus it offers an opening for an ethical project convinced that better outcomes conditioned by better decisions were always, and remain, possible. It thus defines possibilities for architects’ agency in creating a critical practice under racial capitalism.