"Rebuilding: the Art of Contemporary English Culture" is an effort to define the culture expressed in the literature and art of England between 1939 and the present. Gilpin uses examples from literature, criticism, art, architecture and popular music to articulate the national identity of contemporary Britain. Included are discussions of writers George Orwell, Harold Pinter, Graham Greene, Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, Anthony Burgess, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing and John Fowles; critics Raymond Williams, F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow; artists Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Laura Knight, Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake; architects Alison and Peter Smithson and James Sterling; and the Beatles. Gilpin describes how these people deal with new psychologies, a changed social order and an expanded vision of the world.

An examination of British artists whose travel to the subcontinent of India influenced the Romantic Movement in England. It also discuss the impact of the images on the culture of Victorian Britain. Artists discussed include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johan Zoffany Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.