"Ruined City" by Nevil Shute

 A novel, set in 1930s England, about the redemptive power of enlightened capitalism.

Henry Warren, a merchant banker, is on a walking holiday when he becomes seriously ill. He is taken to a hospital and treated as a charity case. The hospital is in a town in the north-east of England which has been ruined following the closure of its shipyards. Confronted with the reality of the depression, the banker undergoes an epiphany and decides to buy the shipyard and source orders for ships. It isn't easy and involves sailing close to, and perhaps crossing, the line that demarcates legality.

You might not expect a bent banker to be the hero of a book about unemployment. There are a host of alternative perspectives. Shute might, for example, have depicted a penniless widow defrauded by Warren's machinations but instead takes a greedy vicar as his paradigmatic investor. He might have suggested, a la Marx, that all profit reaped by capitalism is money squeezed out by not paying workers the full value of their labour; instead he takes the modern view that entrepreneurs are job creators rather than exploiters: “I believe that's the thing most worth doing in this modern world ... to create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work. There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. ... Without work men are utterly undone.” (Ch 10) You might promote Henry Georgism as in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.

Shute sticks with telling a story and, perhaps as a consequence, it packs nothing like the punch of classics such as Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. 

The book is recommended reading in Another England by Caroline Lucas

Trigger warning: Racist language and assumptions about blacks, Arabs, Jews and particularly Balkanites.

Selected quotes:

• “The weekly dole ... meant undernourishment. You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.” (Ch 4)
• “He's something in the cinema industry, but I don't think he comes into the picture.” (Ch 6) Please tell me this pun was deliberate!

October 2025; 269 pages

First published by Cassell in 1938

My Vintage paperback was issued in 2009

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God