Quantcast
Channel: Dirty Modern Scoundrel
Viewing all 256 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry talk Chandigarh

October 23, 2016, 12:27 pm
$
0
0
This is a quite incredible film. A lecture given by Jane Drew to the AA in 1983 on her work at the Indian city of Chandigarh with her partner, Maxwell Fry. Fry is there too, but until the Q&A session at the end of the film is a very brief presence.

Jane Drew

Maxwell Fry

It's hard not to be immediately charmed by the indomimatable force of Jane Drew and her drily witty partner. It's full of incredible quotes and sideswipes, my favourite being Fry on their battles with Le Corbusier.

'I had to fight him [Le Corbusier] because he is a little bit of a megalomaniac. I said, a city should be made by several people, not one. And, in any case, we're here.'





The whole project of Chandigarh, a modernist city like Brasilia, is a remarkable thing. And Drew is bracingly honest about the successes and failures. Critical of Le Corbusier's obsession with concrete, so many times more expensive than brick, and often poorly made; critical of the designs of their peers or themselves that failed for naive misunderstanding of climate, behaviour or culture; full of praise for the irrigation system, without which the city would have been impossible; despairing about the rigidty of the rules they worked under, which specified urban motorways where no cars were driven.





The film is an incredible piece of history: the culture clash between Drew, Fry and Le Corbusier, and the bigger one they would all face with the Indians themselves; of high-handed westerners attempting to create a city in a country they know very little about, and whose culture they have failed to grasp; of ideals facing compromises, and of the legacy of those big decisions.





Drew apologises about the quality of their ropey slides, and for the fact that we're seeing these projects before irrigation and planting had changed the entire landscape. She apologises too for the uncompromising brutalism of the unlived-in buildings, soon to be cheered up by their residents. Most of all she is saddened by the poverty of the region, the scale of homelessness which they cannot hope to out-build, and the failure to solve the problems and meet the demands of the people who lived in this new city.





It would make an incredible novel or film. What's missing, of course, is the Indian perspective on all of this. But as a lecture from architects engaged on this crazy project, this couldn't be better or more fascinating. These days the city is revered as a centre of modern design and as one of the happiest in India, according to a survey by LG, and the wealthiest too. What a fantastic record this film is. At almost two hours long it's well worth a watch.

↧
Search

Scotland's New Towns (1969)

December 6, 2016, 1:54 pm
$
0
0




Made as the final Scottish new town of Irvine was getting underway, here's a film from 1969 showing the development of East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Glenrothes and Livingston.






The film itself is your average trot through the history of postwar new towns, showing different aspects of the developments, from roads, houses and shopping centres to industry, leisure facilities and schools. But it contains glorious footage of the modern designs when they were new, including Cumbernauld's famous central area.






Well worth a watch if you have 20 minutes, it's a fascinating and sunny glimpse of the kind of modern world that planners, architects and politicians were hoping to build in the sixties.





 You can see the film here.

---


↧
↧

Crawley 1955

December 11, 2016, 11:01 am
$
0
0
This is a sequence of amateur footage of Crawley new town from 1955, made by George and Rosalind Howe for the Crawley and District Community Foundation.





It's a motley collection, from carnivals to kids digging holes, model buildings to public meetings, dance classes to neon lights, football to local shops. But it's all the more fascinating because of that. There's none of the stilted theatrics of the typical new town promo film, and so you really do feel like you're getting a fairly unmediated glimpse of life in one of the first postwar new towns, where all the entertainment took place in prefabricated huts and most of the town remained unbuilt.




The footage itself is silent but a script was produced, to be read out at screenings. Happily it has survived, but although advertised is not currently available on the Screen Archive South-East page. Hopefully they'll put it back.




You can watch the film here.

----


↧

Bull Ring Shopping Centre, 1965

December 20, 2016, 1:20 pm
$
0
0









I've posted a clip of this film before, but here is the full version. John Laing's 1965 promotional film advertising the newly completed Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham. It's narrated in breezy style by newsreader Richard Baker. There's a bizarre moment where he questions one of the architects through the narration – although this is a brilliant part of the film.






Throughout the height of enthusiasm and modernity prompts an overuse of the words 'gay' and 'continental'. Shots of people shopping, eating in the cafes, drinking in the bars, dancing in the nightclubs, are all so gentle and innocent, and don't reflect the pop-cultural boom of the era. Instead it's shot to the pace of the muzak pumped through the centre, an innovative touch meant to inspire people to buy more. We see shots of byegone businesses: Woolworths, Ratners, Richards Shops, BEA, and, of course, the centre itself.










The 23 acre shopping centre was opened on 29 May 1964 by Prince Philip and two of Birmingham's pushiest: Alderman Frank Price and engineer Sir Herbert Manzoni. Laing failed to let all of the shop units, rents spiralled and maintenance was an issue. After decades of disrepair demolition began in 2000. The whereabouts of the centre's modernist cave painting-inspired bull signs remains a mystery on a par with old wiped episodes of Doctor Who.








You can watch the film here.

- - -


↧

Absent friends

December 31, 2016, 4:33 am
$
0
0

At 6:10 am on Wednesday 9th November a tram travelling from New Addington emerged from the stretch of old railway tunnel towards Sandilands. This was a busy commuter tram heading into central Croydon, and passengers noticed it was travelling unusually fast for a part of the journey that usually required some careful handling round a tight bend. When the tram emerged from the tunnel the wheels were unable to stay on the tracks, and it derailed on the sharp turn. The two carriages fell heavily onto their right side.

The scene of the crash was, by all accounts, devastating, with the effects of so much flying glass and the violent movement of the carriages felt by each of those passengers. Rescue efforts took hours, and people were trapped in horrific situations, surrounded and in some cases buried beneath the bodies of the injured and the dead. 51 people were taken to hospital, eight with serious or life-threatening injuries. And seven people died.

The dead were five people from the housing estate of New Addington: Dane Chinnery, 19, Philip Logan, 52, Philip Seary, 57, Dorota Rynkiewicz, 35, and Robert Huxley, 63; and two from Croydon: Mark Smith, 35 and Donald Collett, 62.

New Addington tends not to make the news headlines unless something terrible happens, such as the murder of Tia Sharp in 2012. Because of its location, on a hill seven miles from central Croydon, it is easy for the rest of the world to ignore. Ironically, the trams had been one of the success stories for the estate, connecting it to the rest of the borough since 2000 and cutting the interminable bus journey time in half. Over 20,000 people live here, a tight-knit and largely working class community where people do genuinely look out for others. People here have learned to be self-supporting, because since the construction of the estate in the mid-twentieth century the needs and wishes of the population have been largely ignored by prosperous, middle class Croydon Council.

For the relatives and families of those who died in the tram crash, this will have been a dreadful Christmas, and the New Year celebrations will seem a rather hopeless irrelevance. For the injured, their lives will never be the same again, marked by the scars of the crash or the things they saw and experienced. For the rescue teams too it will live long in the memory. And for Alfred Dorris, the driver, regardless of the investigation, there will fall guilt of an unimaginable scale.

One of my brothers used to play football with one of the men who died. My sister-in-law knows the mother of another. For many of us from the estate, or Croydon more generally, seeing people marked as safe on social media will have been a huge relief. For a relatively small, interconnected place like New Addington everyone will have a line linking them to the crash, to the dead and the injured. Some people will have been the most incredible support, others completely paralysed with shock. Those lines of connection, like the steel rails, will last long and be travelled many times.

People may react with anger and bitterness, kindness and love. There is, of course, no right way to react to such a shocking event. All we can hope for is, as with any death of a loved one, that the memories of the good things – the friendship, love, laughter and sheer normality of before – at some point overtake the memories of the bad. Every journey we take on the trams now feels like an observance, whether we commute every day or just use it to take us on a rare visit to Ikea.

On New Year's Eve we should raise a glass to absent friends, and the love and bravery it takes for their loved ones to carry on in the face of terrible events. The living and the dead of the crash, your friends and family, our thoughts are with you.
↧
↧

Events in February 2017

January 12, 2017, 9:41 am
$
0
0

I have a few more events lined up. Two talks for two new Modernist Societies for starters, in Liverpool and Sheffield.

Join John Grindrod author of Concretopia and publisher of Dirty Modern Scoundrel for his talk on Ten Buildings that Changed Postwar Britain.

How did blitzed, slum-ridden and crumbling 'austerity Britain' became, in a few short years, a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass? Discover the story of Britan's postwar rebuilding in this whistle-stop tour of ten extraordinary, brilliant or downright bizarre buildings that represent the story of this turbulent period of our history, from 1945 to 1979.

Travel from the days of prefabs and the birth of the Welfare State through to the concrete brutalism and ambitious plans that changed towns and cities up and down the country. John Grindrod is the author of Concretopia, a witty and revealing history of our postwar rebuilding, described by the Independent on Sunday as 'a new way of looking at modern Britain.'













↧

Modern art comes to Croydon by bus, 1965

February 10, 2017, 1:35 am
$
0
0




Croydon modernist Sarah Wickens put me on to this amazing film of Croydon from 1965. It's Pathe newsreel footage showing gallery owner Nicholas Treadwell and his fashionable Art and Design shop in St George's Walk. It also shows him driving a double decker bus, his first mobile gallery, through the centre of town and out to the swinging suburbs.







 Along the way we even get to see what East Croydon looked like before the building of all the towers, including the Thrupenny Bit.



Treadwell still runs a gallery in Vienna.


↧

Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral, 1975

February 14, 2017, 2:05 pm
$
0
0
In 1975 experimental synth pioneers Tangerine Dream played a concert in a modern marvel, Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral.






Many bands have played all sorts of music at the cathedral: Duke Ellington; Mogwai; The Enemy; Tinchy Stryder; John Dankworth; Eats Everything; Robert Fripp; Chase and Status. John Lennon and Yoko Ono came and planted seed in the grounds in 1968. But none were as controversial as German electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream.






They played 30 years after the end of World War Two, and their experimental and spiritual music seemed very fitting for the venue. It was filmed by the BBC, but the audio was lost. A restored version, using a dubbed version of their 1975 album Ricochet, was later released on DVD. Ricochet had itself been spawned by a concert recording at Croydon Fairfield Halls.




So this footage is very odd: great shots of them playing, and the cathedral looking entirely bonkers. But mismatching audio, one of those might-have-beens lost to history. Whatever, the film is still brilliant.

↧
Search

Basil Spence's Edinburgh University Library, 1968

February 15, 2017, 2:16 pm
$
0
0
1968 was a remarkable year to be a student. There were student marches in Poland, West Germany, Spain, Italy, France, the US and Britain, against a backdrop of protests in favour of civil rights, black power, women's lib, environmentalism and basic freedoms.





None of that is obvious from this 1968 film of student life in Edinburgh. Shot by who else but the Depatment of Animal Genetics Research Film Unit, this is a guide to the new library for students starting out at the university.





Edinburgh darling Basil Spence's design for the library was intended to look like a bookcase from the outside. It's massive low-lying form was controversial, lying as it does on the edge of George Square. It was work here by Spence and Robert Matthew that began the active preservation of the city's Georgian heritage by the modern architecture establishment.




But again, nothing so exciting casts a shadow in this film. Instead, docile to the point of narcoleptic students file from their seminar to the library, and plod their way around all the different services on offer. The film is, frankly, dull as fuck, but is redeemed by an increasingly frenzied xylophone soundtrack, one student's fetching red coat, and glimpses of Spence's monumental building when still brand new. Worth a watch, as much for what it doesn't say, as for what it does.


↧
↧

Welcome to the St Leonards Centre, Sydney, 1972

February 19, 2017, 2:00 am
$
0
0
Here's a rather wonderful document from the opening of the St Leonards Centre in Crows Nest, Sydney.





Designed by architects Kerr & Smith, this sculptural brutalist number opened in 1972, and this brochure for banking corporation CBCgives some idea of the modern wonders that will be contained within – namely advanced investment in computerisation and automation.





As the spreads show, it was designed complete with lozenge-shaped windows and was originally furnished with all of the moulded plastic furniture you could ever wish to see. 


 
↧

Building Flaine, Marcel Breuer's ski resort

February 22, 2017, 1:00 pm
$
0
0







Here's a delight – a French promo film made in the late 1960s for a modernist ski resort designed by Marcel Breuer. Flaine: Porte du Désert Blanc, directed by Gérard Sire, is a film in French showing the construction of the resort, from the ski lifts to Breuer's brutalist complex, and then on to the skiing frenzy of its early days.





The resort is celebrated for its incredible hotel, whose sun terrace overhangs a cliff, and the works of art its founders displayed there, including sculptures by Picasso and Debuffet. But as modernism began to lose its glamorous allure, and the resort became poorly maintained, it lost its status as a leading ski resort, and by the nineties the buildings were falling into disuse and disrepair.





Some of that is coming back into use now, with refurbishment, an award from the French government and a renewed interest in Breuer's work, but it's still seen as a wildly over-optimistic scheme, and has yet to be rehabilitated by the wealthy skiiing set, for whom glamour now means features in OK! and scripted reality shows.



↧

Wakefield, 1965, City of Possibilities

March 9, 2017, 3:10 pm
$
0
0






This film, The City of Wakefield, was made in 1965 by Wakefield Amateur Cine Club. It's a right little charmer, giving the viewer a chance to explore the city at a fascinating moment, as old and new style began to clash in the postwar period.






We see new housing estates, blocks of flats and old people's homes, alongside new shopping centres, schools and offices. Traffic islands are spoken of as if from a Kipling poem. The old folks in the home look terrified to be on film. Shop windows a series of museum pieces.






The narration is so posh it makes John Betjeman sound like Stanley Holloway. But, like the old new cars on the empty roads, that all adds to its charm.







 
You can see the film on the Yorkshire Film Archive here.

↧

Glasgow Today and Tomorrow (1949)

March 22, 2017, 1:33 am
$
0
0
Here's a fascinating film of Glasgow from 1949, showing the state of the city, from homes to roads and the centre, and offering some radical solutions. What makes this film so interesting is that the solutions suggested in this film, and by the Bruce Report, which it illustrates, never came to pass.





Robert Bruce was Glasgow Corporation's powerful city engineer, and his plan very much represented the vested interests of the city fathers of the day – to reject decentralisation and the fashionable ideas of reducing the density of the city by building new towns, and to instead promote a new super-dense high-rise city, New York on the banks of the Clyde.





His 1945 plan began a war of competing ideologies, and it was one Bruce lost. The super-dense city was rejected by the government, who instead prefered the plan drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie and Robert Matthew, to introduce more green space, and move thousands of people out to a new town (East Kilbride) and new estates around the edge of the city, and to comprehensivey redevelop areas like the Gorbals.




What happened over time was the battle, seemingly lost, was engaged again by stealth, somewhat fittingly in the era of the Cold War. By the 1960s the city fathers had found ways to smuggle back in their plans for a super-dense high rise city, and so tower blocks began to be built in gap sites all over, rather than in the dispersed, planned fashion advocated by the government. And so the postwar Glasgow we know and love was constructed, a strange hybrid of competing ideas, with no overarching philosophy.




Future Ealing comedy Assistant Director Erica Masters' film perfectly captures the ambition of the Bruce plan and the vision of powerful city at a turing point in its history.

You can watch the film here.
↧
↧

Paul Rudolph goes mad in New Haven

April 9, 2017, 1:36 pm
$
0
0





Paul Rudolph was one of the greats of American modernism. Admired most for his brutalist buildings and obsession with experiments in corduroy concrete, Rudolph was also clearly a bit of a handful.






This excellent 20 minute film tells the story of Rudolph's happy place – New Haven – where he designed a number of incredible buildings. Most famous is his Art and Architecture Building for Yale, later gutted by a mysterious fire in the late 60s. In the film we see Rudolph go from enterprising architect to grand master and busted flush. It's a fascinating insight into one of the great brutalist designers and some of his finest work.





↧

Talking about Outskirts

April 23, 2017, 1:15 pm
$
0
0

on 1st June 2017 my new book Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt is published in hardback and ebook by Sceptre.

Here's the blurb from the book:

––––

A captivating nature memoir telling the story of Britain's Green Belt, our national obsession with the countryside, and the author's childhood.

Coined by National Trust co-founder Octavia Hill at the end of the nineteenth century, the phrase 'Green Belt' originally formed part of an impassioned plea to protect the countryside. By the late 1950s, those idealistic Victorian notions had developed into something more complex and divisive. Green belts became part of the landscape and psyche of post-war Britain, but would lead to conflicts at every level of society - between conservationists and developers, town and country, politicians and people, nimbys and the forces of progress.

Growing up on 'the last road in London' on an estate at the edge of the woods, John Grindrod had a childhood that mirrored these tensions. His family, too, seemed caught between two worlds: a wheelchair-bound mother who glowed in the dark; a father who was traumatised by chicken and was almost done in by an episode of Only Fools and Horses; two brothers – one sporty, one agoraphobic – and an unremarkable boy on the edge of it all discovering something magical.

The first book to tell the story of Britain's Green Belts, Outskirts is at once a fascinating social history, a stirring evocation of the natural world, and a poignant tale of growing up in a place, and within a family, like no other.

––––

Have had a couple of lovely advance quotes for it too:

'A terrific, and very moving read. Fascinating study in the emotional landscapes of cities. A hymn to the peripheral that is totally on target.'
Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are Good for You

'What better lens to view the current friction between nature and our engorged cities than the Green Belt? A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed.'
Tristan Gooley, author of The Walker's Guide

EVENTS

I'm going to be doing lots of events for the book – talks, panels and, well, all sorts. I'll keep updating this with new things as they're announced. So far we have:

Stoke on Trent Literary Festival– tickets HERE
- 3pm, 8th June (election day!), The Eastwood Room, Emma Bridgewater Factory, Lichfield Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent ST1 3EJ

Lots more to follow!

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK

Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt, published in hardback and ebook by Sceptre.

Preorder here, or from your local bookshop:

Foyles | Hive | Waterstones | Amazon | Guardian Bookshop

If you'd like to contact me, perhaps with a media query or event request, or just to say hi, I'm on dirtymodernscoundrel@gmail.com

↧
Search

Washington Tomorrow (1966)

May 7, 2017, 10:47 am
$
0
0







Washington in Tyne and Wear was one of the later new towns, and this breezy little 1966 film shows it being planned and built.







We see the public meetings, the development corporation at work, the sites being cleared and new buildings going up. We see statistics and predictions, maps and charts. Locals wander round exhibitions of maps and models.








All is presented in a jaunty, swift tone, as we gallop from ancient history to the unknowable barrier of the year 2000. Certainly the town never reached its population targets, and its industrial history has been rather chequered. But here we have a capsule of postwar optmism and idealism, surfing a wave of can-do rebuilding and planning.

You can watch the film HERE.
↧

Ten fascinating books about the green belt

May 30, 2017, 7:10 am
$
0
0
Researching my green belt book OutskirtsI read a lot of stuff on the British countryside and the formation of our protected land, some fantastic, some not-quite-so gripping. This list shows ten (well, eleven, I set the rules and I then immediately cheated on them) of my favourite books on the subject.



1. The Greater London Plan by Patrick Abercrombie, 1944.

Yeah, yeah, no surprise here. Town planning has never been as epic or charming as in Patrick Abercrombie's 1940s city plans for London, Glasgow, etc. This one is perhaps the most influential on the idea of the green belt – devoting pages to it and with beautiful maps, charts and illustrations, the latter courtesy of Abecrombie's godson Peter Shepheard. In order to write the plan the team drove out to the edge of London and marked on a maps where the buildings ended, and that became the boundary of the green belt. High tech stuff!

2. The Green Belts, by the Ministry of Planning and Local Government, 1962.


Equally delightful, with great photographs, illustrations and a fold-out map, this booklet produced by the government was intended to celebrate the creation of our green belts. One thing it omits to mention is that in many cases the actual boundaries and existence of them was still unfinished. It would take until the 1990s for all of Britain's green belts to become fixed, by whch time one (Dundee) had already been cancelled and the rest were already under threat of removal too. With pictures of sewage works, country parks and grand houses, the booklet is a delightful curio, something we cannot imagine our spendthrift, petty and mean-minded government producing today.

3. Greengates by R. C. Sherriff, 1936

If you are not entirely delighted by this novel then I would start to worry. It catalogues the very reason for the green  belts' existence, those sprawling interwar suburbs of moderne semi-detached houses. The plot, such as it is, centres on a retired couple getting on each-others nerves in their stodgy Victorian town house. On a walk that used to be in the country they encounter a new estate of tudorbethan houses where a beloved view had been. They begin to fall in love with the idea of it, and so do we as we follow their dream. This wonderful novel has recently been beautifully reissued by Persephone Books.

4. London's Green Belt by David Thomas, 1970 and Green Belts by Martin Elson, 1986.

Two for the price of one here. These are the two academic books exclusively on green belts. London's Green Belt was written in the late 1960s just as many of those boundaries were finally being fixed. David Thomas, a geographer from the University of London, splits the subjects into three sections: the problems of London, the emergence of the green belt as a remedy, and the effects of its arrival. Martin Elson's book is more ambitious, written in the mid-eightes at the time of Patrick Jenkin's hopeless stewardship of the Department for the Environment and soon-abandoned plans to curb the green belt. Elson, a town planner from Oxford Polytechnic, also split his book into three sections: emergence of the green belt, how the land is used, and the future. Both are full of fascinating data but probably not the most fun reads. Although the authors are capable of excellent writing the purpose of their books was informational rather than lyrical. Strictly for academics and planning geeks.

5. New Lives, New Landscapes by Nan Fairbrother, 1970

My absolute favourite book of landscape writing. Fairbrother took up landscape architecture late in life, and this book was written only a couple of years before her death. In it she talks about how Britain's landscape had been modernised though new roads, estates, growing cities, and industry, and she wonders how we might best go about balancing the management of our countryside with our desire for the fruits of modernity. It might sound dry, but she is incapable of writing a dull sentence. The book is funny, shocking, gossipy, educated, waspish and moving. I cannot recommend it you strongly enough. She deserves to be read every bit as much as that other great landscape writing Nan, Nan Shepherd. Yes, that's right, click buy, click buy.

6. Green Belt Cities by Frederic Osborn, 1969 (2nd edition)

Osborn had been one of the founders of the garden city movement, an architect planner friend of Ebenezer Howard who worked on both Letchworth and Welwyn, who then helped in the setting up of the new towns programme after the Second World War. Here he combines both a description of garden city ideals with accounts of the reality of creating these towns, which were each designed to be contained by their own green belts, or to be placed away from large cities on the far side of their broad green girdles. Osborn was by all accounts a charmer, and this gentle tome back this up. It's most interesting because Osborn was heavily involved in the reality, rather than being an observer. Another one for the planning geeks among you.

7. Conurbation by the West Midlands Group, 1948.


Incredible what you can pick up from second hand bookshops. This is a gem, a report by the West Midland Group into the reconstruction of the Black Country and the area around Birmingham. Their aim was to correct not only the effects of a world war but also that of the industrial revolution, which had so scarred the landscape with pits, quarries, factories and works. It contains a foreword by eminent planner Lewis Mumford, and contributions from the likes of Geoffrey Jellicoe and Thomas Sharp. A hefty hardback, it contains data-heavy maps, charts and plenty of worrying photos of knackered landscape. Most shocking of all are photos from a train journey through the Black Country, from Birmingham to Wolverhampton, a kind of bleak landscape Muybridge.

8. Stig of the Dump by Clive King, 1963



If you're a regular reader of this website, or have dipped into Concretopia, you'll know how obsessed I am with the modernist Span village of New Ash Green in Kent. Clive King was a resident of nearby Ash in the years before the new village was built, and wrote this landmark children's book as a way of making the sleepy area feel more exciting. A local boy falls into a  chalk pit, and into the home of Stig, a young caveman. They have adventures. It was everything I wished would happen to me when I was a kid, and so similar to where I had grown up that it seemed almost possible too. Perhaps there were cavepeople living out there, beyond my school in the chalky countryside? Stig of the Dump is one of those magical books that expanded my imagination and made me into the ardent reader I remain today. Thanks Clive.

9. Tomorrow's Landscapes, Sylvia Crowe, 1956

Sylvia Crow is one of the most important figures in our twentieth century countryside. She was Britain's first landscape architect, and became famous for her work on the green wedges of Harlow new town. This book is taking on the topical 1950s subject of derelict land, one which was obsessing Ian Nairn and Lionel Brett at around the same time. The difference is, of course, that where the other two produce a great deal of impotent hand wringing, Crowe was actually doing something about it. Trees would be planted, land use deliniated, derelict land reclaimed. Whether it was work for the Forestry Commission, new towns or local authorities, Sylva Crowe inspired a generation of people – particularly women – to take on the seemingly impossible issues of our countryside and improve things for the better.

10. Britain and the Beast, edited by Clough Williams-Ellis, 1938

This is a cracking read. Bleak, angry and riddled with all sorts of class issues, it tells us so much about the culture of the interwar period. Edited by the eccentric architect of Portmerion, it's a collection of essays on the state of our countryside, then under threat from our expanding cities and the supposedly loutish folk who spill from them. Contributors include Bloomsbury Group economist John Maynard Keynes, professional nostalgist EM Forster, farmer AG Street and Brains Trust gobshite Cyril Joad. Pretty much every essay is rude and furious, usually at the expense of 'townsmen' wrecking the country. My favourite essay is 'Laughter in the South-East' by novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith, in which she recounts with horror a meeting at the Isle of Oxney in which attempts to protect some of the farmland from building was laughed off. Her account of being was shaken by the attitude of locals, exclusively concerning the economy rather than the natural environment, remains a powerful read. A rash of books of this ilk were produced in this period – indeed many of the contributors produced whole books dedicated to it – but this one gives a flavour of privilege and bigotry alongside well meant concerns about landscape damage and lack of planning. Read with caution!
↧
↧

Ronan Point - the 1968 inquiry report

June 16, 2017, 4:59 am
$
0
0
In the aftermath of the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower it's hard not to think back to the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968. I thought perhaps people might find the inquiry report into Ronan Point useful. Apologies for the less than ideal photos.










 




 

 
  

  
  



 

























↧

The Forgotten People of Birmingham

June 22, 2017, 2:56 pm
$
0
0





This is a fascinating – and extremely depressing – montage of different documentary clips from the 50s to the 70s, covering urban renewal in Birmingham. 





There are shocking shots of the old industrial revolution slums, still inhabited in the early 1970s. We have Norman Power discussing the redevelopment of Ladywood, and how the old mixed community had been displaced, and the classes separated out. Then there's the reality of high rise living at Castle Vale, recorded in the 70s too, with residents complaining of graffiti and vandalism. Interviewers here are alien and ask leading questions, the lens of the reports often feels distorting, but even so the clips and the people interviewed are interesting and a valuable record.




As we know, 19th century houses and 20th century towers can be good places to live. But they can also deteriorate. The combination of poverty and bad management that created unbearable conditions are starkly illustrated in these troubling archive films.







Each of these films can be seen in full on the BFI player, including Low Level Housing (1975), and Balsall Heath Slum (1971).


↧

The Sound of Outskirts

June 28, 2017, 2:23 am
$
0
0
I've been lucky enough to be asked onto a couple of podcasts recently to talk about Outskirts.

The first was Thought Starters, where I was in conversation with the critic and historian Tom Dyckhoff. His excellent new book, The Age of Spectacle, tells the story of the rise of 'starchitecture' and gentrification in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I was interested in the subject because essentially he's taking up where Concretopia left off, in the late 70s, and the book is full of satisfying and revealing intervews and case studies, from the protests at Covent Garden and it's rebirth in the 80s to the desire for city authorities to create new 'icons'. It was fascinating to talk to him about all of this, and how the story of city rebirth, for good or ill, contrasts with the green belt story of preservation, pressure and protests. Interesting too to discuss how closely interwoven these two stories actually are.

You can hear Tom and I on Thought Starters HERE.


The next was the ever-brilliant Little Atoms. I'd appeared on this once before, to talk about Concretopia (the interview also exists in print in their magazine), and once again I was interviewed by Neil Denny. He split the interview into two halves – firstly we discussed the green belt aspect of Outskirts, how it had come about, why, and some of the bizarre elements of it, from landfill sites to dogging. In the second half he asked me about the more personal angle of the book, which is after all a family story of moving from the inner city to the edge, and how that had affected my parents and my brothers. It turned out to be rather more emotional thank I'd expected.

You can hear the Outskirts episode of Little Atoms HERE.

Finally, and unrelated to Outskirts, a thank you to Andy Miller and John Mitchinson for having me on Backlisted, the  wonderfully eccentric and constantly charming books podcast. I appeared on it a few months back, talking about my love for the darkly twisted novels of Muriel Spark, Memento Mori in particular, and was delighted to hear that they enjoyed the book too.

You can hear the Muriel Spark epsiode of Backlisted HERE.
↧
Viewing all 256 articles
Browse latest View live
Search