The Green Girdle, 1941

Here's a fascinating film from 1941 made by the British Council, on the 'green girdle' or green belt around London.



I tell the story of the green belts in my book Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt, and so for me this film is an invaluable piece of history. Although the idea of green belts goes back millennia, it was only in the 1930s that Britain began to get any of this form of protected land round our towns and cities. The London County Council sponsored an act of parliament in 1938 to make them official but London's belt and that of other cities such as Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow, were still expanding into the 1960s and 70s. Green belts had become urgent business in the 1930s because of the growth of tudorbethan semi-detached housing around towns and cities, eating up the countryside, and green belts were a rather primitive policy to act as a stopper.



This film is interesting because it's so early on in the whole project, and because the British Council usually made films for overseas consumption, whereas this was a wartime tonic to the nation, to remind people of the better world around the corner if only we could win that blasted war.



The cameraman is Jack Cardiff and the music conductor is Muir Matheson, so this could be any number of top rank midcentury Britiish films. It has an unusual structure too: didactic narration at the start and end, and then more impressionistic montage of images of the green belt for the main body. Well worth a watch.