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When children's books were modern 1: Twentieth Century Britain (1972)

October 1, 2015, 11:31 am
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What single image would you choose to represent 20th Century Britain? The Festival of Britain? A Spitfire? An NHS hospital? Well, one plucky educational series of books from the early 70s had the answer: Croydon Whitgift Centre.


Imagine my delight on picking up this, and two other equally brilliant books in the series, going for a song on a second hand book stall. The Whitgift Centre as the apex of civilisation, the bookshop I worked in almost in shot.

But who on earth are the ponderously named Brockhampton Press and why haven't we all been getting very excited about them? Well, they are now part of the Hachette empire, but back then they were famous for publishing big names in children's fiction: Enid Blyton, Biggles, Asterix. This educational series, spanning the late sixties and early seventies, was clearly aimed at muscling in on Ladybird's market lead in non-fiction for children. There are echoes here of the How It Works and Achievements books, though they're much less focussed than those books. But they are still packed with beautiful illustration and fascinating facts.

This book has it all: bingo halls, Blackpool Tower, motorway flyovers, a Wates estate in Ealing, Concorde, Areas of Oustanding Natural Beauty, DNA, a Rover 2000 and Eric Gill.

Here are some spreads from Twentieth Century Britain for your delectation.









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People in Glass Houses (1967)

October 9, 2015, 12:45 am
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Here's a super-geeky documentary made in 1967 about the design of glass curtain walled office blocks and overheating. Unfortunately mutilated with a huge amount of watermarking, the film is still watchable and has some great interviews and footage.




It's all set in T. Dan Smith's Newcastle and the surrounding North-East, and so we see Norgas House in Killingworth by Ryder and Yates (here's more on the building by the Something Concrete and Modern project). Not only do we get to see inside and meet the operators of the noisy, clunking great IBM machines, we also get an interview with Gordon Ryder.



Then there's a section on the Physics block of Newcastle University by Basil Spence, and finally one on the Civic Centre in Newcastle, and an interview with its designer George Kenyon.

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Peterlee New Town, 1962

October 22, 2015, 12:15 pm
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Here's a great little film about Peterlee New Town from 1962. Peterlee was one of the first wave of postwar new towns, built for mining in the North-East of England. Famously the painter Victor Pasmore contributed to the design of the town and the buildings, including the recently refurbised modernist bridge/sculpture/folly, the Apollo Pavillion.






The town's colourful heritage includes Lubetkin's abandoned plans for a centre of towers, T. Dan Smith's drafting in as chairman of the development corporation in the late 1960s, and corrupt architect John Poulson's contracts for areas of housing and a swimming pool. This short film has been beautifully restored by the BFI.

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Barbican, 1969

October 25, 2015, 12:55 pm
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This Barbican film from 1969 is full of character, curious English wit and surprising angles. We see lots of the pedway, the City's streets in the sky network, as well as glimpses of the City's new offices, the Golden Lane estate and the Barbican centre as it was being built (the arts centre didn't open until 1981).





With fantastic cinematography by Harold Case, a veteran of many short films on sixties subjects such as the hovercraft, direction by Robert Cantelon, and fruity dialogue written by Frank Harvey ('Now it's all women in mini-skirts!'). Perhaps the most interesting contributor is the composer, Elisabeth Lutyens, daughter of architect Edwin Lutyens. Despite a career composing hundreds of pieces of modern classical music, she remains more well known for creating horror movie scores for Hammer and Amicus, and films such as Dr Terror's House of Horror, The Earth Dies Screaming and Theatre of Death.




Despite writing about this film in Concretopia, thanks to @nawtisnae for reminding me that I had never posted this classic documentary on the site.

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The Lost City of Craigavon

October 29, 2015, 1:13 pm
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Here's a great documentary from 2007 by Newton Emerson for the BBC: The Lost City of Craigavon. One of the mid-sixties second wave new towns, it blossomed so briefly, the idea of being a city for 200,000 people had its development corporation wound up in record time, by 1973, and before it had even really begun it was all over. What was left was half-finished infrastructure, few jobs and isolated neighbourhoods.






It's a town or roundabouts, a ski slope and cycle paths, like Milton Keynes, and estates reminiscent of Cumbernauld. The original planner was Geoffrey Copcutt, the mad visionary hipster behind Cumbernauld's megastructure, who again flouce deleted himself from the project in a short space of time, just as he had in Scotland.




This could have been a small-minded, cheap shot of a documentary. Instead Emerson does a great job of encapsulating the positives and optimism, while also being astounded by how little came off. And there's a sense of a slowly realised future emerging from the empty shell of Craigavon, which leaves it feeling unexpectedly hopeful.
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Alison and Peter Smithson lecture, 1976

November 1, 2015, 12:52 pm
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Here's an absolute gem, recorded by some forward-thinking genius on April 4th 1976: a lecture for the Architecture Association by Peter and Alison Smithson. Here they present a number of their key urban schemes on the theme of connection:


Berlin Hauptstadt, their entry for a 1957 reconstruction competition, which would have united parts of West and East Germany in the years before the wall went up. For the housing sections it re-used designs from their failed but influential 'streets in the sky' Golden Lane competition entry. As they say of this project, 'present-day cities have a scattered urban structure and patchwork form – that is, the characteristic urban form is cluster.'


We also see the Hamburg Steilshoop competition of 1961, for a suburban mass housing scheme which has many echoes of the Hauptstadt project. As they wrote: 'every house in Steilshoop is linked the the centre by routes suitable for perambulator pushers and bicyclists.'

Berlin Mehringplatz was another competition entry, this time from 1962. Given a series of motorways to build around in the centre of the city, they describe the architecture they planned here as 'a series of events', including restaurants, shops, galleries and administrative buildings.


As ususal, none of these were built. They go into detail on all these schemes in their huge, glossy and somewhat incomprehensible tome The Charged Void: Urbanism, published in 2005. 


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Oscar Newman on Defensible Space, 1974

November 24, 2015, 2:37 pm
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Defensible Space was a book, a TV documentary and a political movement, created by a then newly naturalised American academic, Oscar Newman.




This Horizon documentary 'The Writing on the Wall' featuring Newman was broadcast two years after the Pruitt-Igoe estate in St. Louis, Missouri was demolished. Pruitt-Igoe was the poster boy for urban decay and the failure of modernism, if that was the way you liked it. And that certainly was how Newman liked it. His critique of the public space embodied in so much of postwar planning and architecture would eventually lead to the situation we have today: a political distrust of council housing and modernist design, and a three decades long swing towards the privatisation of public space.






In Britain his arguments were taken up by Margaret Thatcher's pet housing theorist Alice Coleman, whose book Utopia on Trial was a florid retread of Newman's work. More from her here. In both cases it's hard not to find their arguments rather outside-in, blaming architecture for social conditions rather than examining the effects of poverty and deprivation on the residents of estates like Pruitt-Igoe or the Aylesbury Estate in Peckham, the Caledonian Market Estate, or Pollards Hill (the other places Newman visits in this documentary).





With many of the claims made by Newman about projects such as Pruitt-Igoe now debunked, this film remains a fascinating, if disturbing, glimpse into the beginnings of a neoliberal approach to housing: the rise of CCTV, the rejection of social housing as a good thing and eventually the embracing of privatisation of our public space as the solution for all ills.
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Travelling Through the Modern World with Ladybird

December 2, 2015, 1:36 pm
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This year both the De La Warr Pavillion and the House of Illustration hosted a Ladybird illustration exhibition. And now this Christmas Penguin have released a number of humorous adult spoofs of the books using the original artwork. Ladybird's time in the sun has returned, even though many of the things I love most about what they depict are vanishing: buildings, vehicles, attitudes, ways of life.

I was lucky enough to be asked to do a talk about Ladybird and modernism for the House of Illustration, based on the blog pieces I'd written. And so I collected more books, consulted Ladybird expert Helen Day, and scanned in more images. I couldn't resist returning to Ladybird here with some of those treasures. Take a trip around postwar Britain with them, and I hope you enjoy them, and some of the things they represent, as much as I do.

1. This is classic John Berry: People at Work: The Airman in the Royal Air Force (1967), operating a radar in the unglamorous arse-end of modernity.


2. Another People at Work, this time, On the Railway (1972) showing British Rail in modernist gleaming glory alongside the dirty, grimy reality. John Berry again.

3. More John Berry (yes, I'm obsessed). The Public Services: Electricity (1966) shows the pre-privatisation world of the national grid.

4. Robert Ayton's beautiful illustrations in the Achievements series include these spectacular endpapers for The Story of Furniture, 1971.

5. People at Work: The Nurse (yes, John Berry, shut up) from 1963 shows the NHS looking to the future in the era of Carry Ons rather than the reign of Jeremy Hunt.

6. How It Works is another of my favourite series. This one, The Telephone, went through several manifestations as the GPO went through various changes over the two decades the book was in print. This image by Bernard Robinson appears to show one of the Liver Birds making a call in in a K8 phone box, introduced in 1968.

7. People at Work: The Road Makers (John Berry, 1967) brings two modernist icons together - pioneering Ladybird books and the new British road signage. Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s 1963 standardised signage remains a triumph of simple modern communication. And of course we all love Margaret leading her younger brother across the road in the school sign, a triumph of feminism in graphic design.

8. Man and His Car is a Ladybird Leaders book from 1974, illustrated by Gerald Whitcomb and Martin Aitchison. As you can tell from the text, the tone of the books has become rather didactic by this stage, but there's no shying away from brutalist car parks and modernist homes.

9. How It Works: The Hovercraft from 1969 is illustrated by Bernard Robinson. There's not much that says 'postwar technology' like the hovercraft, and this book was superby cutting edge at the time.

10. And finally, back to People at Work: On the Railway. I travel from Euston most weeks, and this pristine image of the station makes me happy every time I see it.

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A Cold War Christmas from Berlin, 1962-63

December 13, 2015, 12:15 pm
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Here are two remarkable newsreel films from the chilly heart of the Cold War in the early sixties. Both were filmed in Berlin, one in the East, one in the West.

DDR







The first shows the construction of the Berlin Wall at Christmas 1962. It had been a nasty surprise for both East and West Berliners on an August weekend, when Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, signed a decree for the erection of a wall, and temporary barriers were rushed up overnight. By the end of the year a more permanent wall was being constructed. This film was made on the Western side, and is silent newsreel footage of East German soldiers building their wall and watching the West, combined with shots of the big shops in West Berlin preparing for Christmas.



The second film is from Christmas the following year, 1963, and was made in German and filmed in East Berlin. 




This is a much snowier scene. There are vox pops with people in a street in East Berlin. The translation helpfully tells me that most of them say they would like to see the wall go and be able to move about freely. We see Christmas markets, Karl Marx Allee, and a fair in Alexander Platz. It's a strange film, full of contradictions, communism and Christmas, traditions and a modern way of life: a reminder of how constantly in turmoil we are, every year, coping with extraordinary developing situations and an ever changing world.
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Ideal Home Exhibition 1959

December 23, 2015, 4:00 am
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What could be better than a trip to the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1959? This silent British Movietone footage shows some amazing stuff. There's full-sized modern houses and flats, including the Ministry of Housing and Local Government's New Flats For Old People, demostrated by a game old lady who had to keep getting up to demonstrate the kitchen, and then sit back down again.





Bright new technology includes carpet sweepers, an electric fire, a vaccuum cleaner, a Kenwood waste disposal system and a dishwasher. Alongside that we have an array of daring new foods, from pizza to Australian tinned fruit. But it's the people watching that proves most fun, especially after having watched the new film of Carol so recently. Those demonstrators are rather beguiling, especially these two servants in the kitchen...

fifties dishwasher


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Cine film from Park Hill, 1962

December 30, 2015, 3:28 am
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Park Hill Sheffield 1962

Sheffield Midland Station 1962



Park Hill Sheffield pub Tetleys

Sheffield's Park Hill housing project was designed in the late 50s and was Britain's first 'streets in the sky' estate. This 8 minute silent extract from a longer cine film from 1962 was probably made by J. Coulthard, local photographers who were brought in to record the newly finished scheme.

Sheffield Park Hill streets in the sky





What's particularly interesting about this film is that it shows people going about their daily lives, rather than portraying an empty modernist monolith. It also shows how many shops (including new-fangled supermarkets), cafes, pubs and facilities were built into Park Hill from the off, and gives a glimpse into how well-used these places were in the beginning, and of the new community that was forming.






You can view the film here at the Yorkshire Film Archive.

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Newcastle, 1968

January 12, 2016, 1:52 pm
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Welcome to Newcastle in 1968, for a thrilling (and short) tour of the city centre. This short cine film was made by Turners Film Productions. We start, where else, at the Tyne Bridge, and there's plenty of historic buildings to see, such as the Baltic flour mill, St Nicholas Cathedral and the Earl Grey monument.



But there's plenty of T. Dan Smith's modernist Newcastle on show too. There's Swan House, designed by Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall & Partners and still unfinished in this film. But the Civic Centre is the star, both inside and out, including David Wynn’s sculpture 'Swans in Flight'.






Newcastle is one of my favourite cities, and this film captures it at an exciting moment just before scandals engulfed Smith and his colleagues, and the backlash started against his and planner Wilfred Burns' modern vision. It's good to see that these days people are coming round to this space-age version of the great city.

Here's a link to the film, at the North East Film Archive.
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Centre Point, star of ABC's All of My Heart, 1982

January 19, 2016, 1:15 pm
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All of My Heart, the 1982 single from ABC, is one my absolute favourite songs. The early 80s New Pop era contains many wonders, but this ballad is an epic, gorgeously realised standout. There's a lot going on. Martin Fry's heat-of-the-moment broken-hearted lyrics, his thrilling vocal performance, and the thundering synth and orchestral roar that accompanies him.

Martin Fry ABC All of My Heart video 1982


One thing I don't remember from the time, though, is the video, and more particularly the extended cutaway to a timelapse film of Centre Point, the 1960s Richard Seifert landmark at St Giles in London. We see it first at night, and then as the sun rises the light glints on the glass and casts shadows across the concrete. It accompanies one of the most soulful moments in the song, as it gathers itself for the final onslaught. Who directed this video and why they inserted this lovely timelapse film in is a mystery to me, but if you know, do let me know!


Centre Point Richard Seifert 1982

Richard Seifert and Martin Fry, together at last. Now there's some slash fiction.

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Bradford Reborn (1979)

January 25, 2016, 3:08 pm
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This film was made in 1979 for Bradford Metropolitan Council, to promote the city's sixties redevelopment and a new late seventies housing estate at Pollard Park.







It's presented in old-school smoothie style by Geoffrey Wheeler, host of Top of the Form and presenter of peerless children's history programme How We Used to Live. He does some great heroic posturing, particularly at one point with a well-placed foot on a roundabout kerb.




Bradford 1979


It begins with a rambling and twee history of the district, complete with Genevieve type car and endless etchings, and then we're into the postwar concrete town centre: shopping mall, office blocks, fountains, car parks and urban motorway.

In the film we meet that stalwart of these kind of films, the borough engineer. This one is Reg Atkinson who takes us through the plans to demolish the back to back houses and replace them with new homes. 






Naturally there's no mention of John Poulson, the corrupt architect who had just emerged from prison at around the time the film was made, and who had once bribed his way through the place, getting major development projects passed his way in the sixties. And I'm sure there's a fair few viewers who would regret the demolition of the Victorian grandeur of the old city centre, and even the mean industrial revolution back-to-back slums of the edges. Others may miss the postwar city centre seen here, which has continued to be modified.






The film does make a good case for Pollard Park having worked as a redevelopment scheme in the late seventies. Yet high unemployment hasn't made it much fun in the last decade or so, and there's talk of those much heralded green spaces being remodelled. Which makes the comments by the residents feel rather sad. In the film they have all moved to Pollard Park in the last two years, and seem full of the joys, in a rather low-key manner.

You can see the film here.

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Glasgow 1980 (or is it really Glasgow 1971?)

January 31, 2016, 2:50 pm
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This is a film for people about the city they live in, about how the city is changing for people.


Every so often in this seemingly endless trawl for postwar cinematic gems that capture the era's grand plans and rebuilding schemes, I come across something that's truly exceptional. Oddly, more often than not those films are Scottish. This one is an absolute cracker.





Glasgow Queen Elizabeth Square Basil Spence shopping centre

Glasgow 1980 is a film made, confusingly, in 1971. Perhaps that's why, despite the upbeat narration, the feel of the piece is pure Get Carter: brand new gritty concrete landmarks and an urban scene so perfect for the cinematographer to create disorientating angles and looming drama.


Glasgow office 1971

Glasgow computers 1971



This film covers the period from 1960, when the redevelopment programme began in earnest, and projects forwards ten years after the film has been made. At this half-way point we see all manner of different huge projects in motion. We see Kingston Bridge, half-finished, the start of the urban motorway box, which the film promises will be complete by 1980. We see plans of Springburn, and shots of Basil Spence's towers at Queen Elizabeth Square. We also see the monolithic towers of Red Road from the air.





Red Road Glasgow aerial view

As ever, the human highlights in the film aren't the peaceful shots of walks in the country or kids at school, but the record of gaudy neon nightlife and discos, the strange technology of pre-digital offices, and that alien invader – the supermarket, where abundance overwhelms the viewer, partly because the shopper we follow puts everything she sees into her trolley, even her kids.








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Planning Teesside (1970)

February 14, 2016, 1:04 pm
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This is a really interesting film, because unlike so many of the glossy publicity films of the new towns and big city corporations, this one sets out to critique the plans for a whole area: Teesside.




Not only do we get the opposing views of local politicians, and the honest vox-pops of residents from Billingham, Stockton and Teesside, the visuals do a lot to reveal what was really going on in the area. Huge industrial growth, bringing with it both jobs and pollution, dominates the skyline. Huge areas of the towns remain bulldozed and unregenerated. Meanwhile thousands of acres are being claimed back from the tides, with the hope of more petrochemical industries to join ICI and Monsanto.



With the trial of T. Dan Smith looming, and the coming oil shocks and the 3 day week, there is a sense of doom watching this film now, which magnifies even the bleakness of the cinematography. It remains a great record of a pivotal moment.

You can watch Planning Teesside here on the BFI Player.

More on Billingham here.




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East Kilbride: Town of Tomorrow (1954)

February 20, 2016, 5:18 am
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Here's a very early new town film, from East Kilbride in 1954, not even a decade since the New Towns Act was passed. It was a promotional film made for the East Kilbride Development Corporation.





Stylistically it has the feel of jerky newsreel footage, but the structure is classic new town promo film: taking us through the heroic story of the town's founding and development, lots of shots of building work, children playing and looking off into the future, and sensible-looking adults going about their business with a minimum of fuss.





Mixed in we do get some of the development landmarks, from meetings and unveilings, that give a feeling of what was considered important at the time by the corporation, if not the people of the town. No-one really gets to speak, it's all down to the narrator and the endlessly swirling score. But we do get to see some excellent models and maps (pointed at by a planner's pipe) and even some classic 'pram town' images from a neighbourhood shopping street. And, of course, it's all overseen by the Clyde Valley Regional Plan, that must-contested document that led to the creation of the town in the first place.





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Transatlantic Teleview: New Towns in Britain (1956)

February 26, 2016, 2:46 am
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Britain's first tower block



Here's a film about Harlow made in 1956, just a decade after the New Towns Act was passed. It's presented by Chris Chataway, who had been one of Roger Bannister's pacemakers when he broke the 4-minute mile just two years before this film was made, and who would later become a Tory politician. The programme was made for the US market, hence his conversion of sterling to dollars throughout and explaining that 'Pram Town' was referring to baby carriages.




As well as the great footage of the new town under construction we get some good interviews with some of the pioneers too. Particularly exciting, though, is the interview with the town's architect-planner Frederick Gibberd, which takes place on the top floor of the Lawns, Britain's first tower block. It's nice to see the relaxed Gibberd dismissing some of Chataway's more excitable assertions, and explaining the new town/green belt plan in a reasonable way, as his hair is being whipped about by the wind.




I saw this film a couple of weeks back at an exhibition about public art at Somerset House, called Out There. It's a great show, with a big section on Harlow and the New Towns, as well as the original model of Basil Spence's Thorn House and great photography and film of concrete sculptor William Mitchell. If it's still on when you read this, it's well worth a visit.

You can see the film here.

Concretopia John Grindrod Owen Hatherley
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A Look to the Future (1963)

March 2, 2016, 3:42 pm
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Here's an extract from one of Michael Calthrop's 1963 BBC schools programmes on town planning, A Look to the Future. This extract focusses on the building of Route 11 and the pedway in the City of London, and the very early stages of the Barbican.




The programme focussed on York, Edinburgh, Oldham and London, and featured planner Percy Johnson-Marshall (who oversaw the Lansbury Estate for the LCC for the Festival of Britain) and critic Lewis Mumford (author of The City in History), neither of whom, sadly, are in this clip.





What we have here is short and sweet. A dashingly handsome presenter, some glass curtain walls in pristine condition, and some streets in the sky in their radical heyday.

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The shock of new Birmingham (ATV Today, 1976)

March 14, 2016, 3:08 pm
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ATV Today 1976 Chris Tarrant Birmingham

This is one of the most curious clips I've posted. Taken from local Midlands ITV news programme ATV Today in 1976, presenter Chris Tarrant shows a man round the city centre who hadn't visited for 25 years.





Worcestershire countryman Arthur Jones is astounded by what he sees, all the changes since 1951. The film starts on a central reservation outside the Bull Ring shopping centre. Arthur, when provoked, describes the towers surrounding him as 'not natural'. The Rotunda isn't fit for people, it's a pigeon coup. But his tone isn't hostile or angry, just a bit bemused by it all, by the speeding cars and crowds. Tarrant tries to get some more extreme reactions from Arthur, but he's not having it. Instead he takes to singing sad old folk songs, which gives the film an unexpected twist of humanity and soul, beyond what the production team might have anticipated. A walk alongside a polluted canal is particulary poignant. Tarrant, initially trying to prod Arthur into outragous behavour, instead settles into the more informative role of a tour guide, explaining the wonders and purpose of Spaghetti Junction and parking meters. Arthur's reaction at the crazy driving around the junction is particularly funny, to which Tarrant's response that you get used to it seems rather lame.







This cheap bit of magazine telly, seen years later when another Birmingham redevelopment apocalypse has occured and many of these structures have been swept away in their turn, seems doubly poignant, and filled with unexpected charm.

Another great film from the Mace archive. You can view it here.
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