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Thamesmead 1970
This is a glorious promotional film for the Thamesmead estate, built in the late sixties on the banks of the Thames in East London, and perhaps most famous for being the setting for Stanley Kubrick's...
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The American Look
'There's a fresh look to fun in America today.' This is one of the most beautiful documentaries I've seen. American Look was a 1958 film shot in Technicolor for General Motors, focusing on industrial...
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And even Princes Risborough
My research into the history of Birmingham's Alpha Tower and the ATV studio buildings, designed by George Marsh for Richard Seifert, was helped along hugely when the marvellous documentary From ATVland...
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The door to the past is closing...
There are two films here on a playlist uploaded by the London Metropolitan Archives. The first, Barbican Regained, has loads of smashing footage of the City of London taken in 1963, but labours under...
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Demolition Porn: Glasgow
Away from the happy tales of lovely modernist things being lovely and modernist, many of the most powerful films of postwar buildings online are the demolition videos of tower blocks and estates. There...
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The Internet – invented in Penge
A few years ago I saw this in Greenwich Market and failed to buy it. Then I saw one on eBay, so now I own the Internet. 'Internet' is a quintessential 1960s transistor radio, including leatherette...
View ArticleLondon as a Machine
This is one of the most significant of the rash of postwar films of planning. The Proud City, made in 1945, is a film version of Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw's County of London Plan. It stars...
View ArticleChristmas, London 1953
Some lovely ITN footage of Christmas shopping in London, 1953, at the fag end of rationing. The shop window animatronics in particular are amazing.
View ArticleStreets of Philadelphia, 1962
From fifty years ago, an educational documentary on town planning, telling the story of the postwar rebuilding of Philadelphia. There's lots of amazing footage of a city in flux, a mixture of historic...
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Alvar Aalto – Technology and Nature
Great documentary about Finnish modernist extraordinaire Alvar Aalto, covering everything from his family and war work to his furniture and architecture. The angle – the tension between technology and...
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No Ball Games
One of the most mysterious effects of postwar planning has been the architects and planners desire to create green spaces for residents to use and play on, often in the oddest places, and the council's...
View ArticleFlying over Cooling Towers
Well, here's a couple of cool little films. The first is taken by an FPV (First Person View – that's a remote controlled plane steered by a video link) and shows a flight over the five deserted cooling...
View ArticleHow We Live Today
Each terminal is linked via GPO telephone line to the central computer in London ... TV screens will get bigger while the set will get slimmer ... Millions will travel abroad for holidays ... People...
View ArticleAtomium Heart
Expos and Worlds Fairs, those outlandish and futuristic events, whose architecture and planning frequently made them look as if Godzilla and giant robots had arranged a very competitive village fete....
View ArticleThe Southbank Centre in the 26th Century
The Hayward Gallery on the South bank of the Thames opened in 1968. It and its Archigram-designed concrete walkways were still considered exotically futuristic enough five years later that it appeared...
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HORSA huts vs Horsa huts
Immediately following Word War II Britain was faced with two competing visions of temporary buildings, both called Horsa huts. The first, and most well known, were the huts built for the urgent need of...
View ArticleCarry On Prefabs
I've been writing about prefabs, for what will be the first chapter of my book, Concretopia. It happens to be the last chapter to be written, due to the arse-about-face way I seem to have approached...
View ArticleWest Germany: Cold War Pop-Up Country
Here's a couple of short videos focusing on West Germany, that Cold War pop-up country established in 1949 and then absorbed back into a reunified Germany in 1990. This first US newsreel records the...
View ArticleFarewell to the Festival
Here's an edited version of Brief City, the 1952 documentary recording a walk around the South Bank after the closure of the Festival of Britain, and a look back to when it was open in 1951. Hugh...
View ArticleThe Way Plymouth Lived
Here's the famous documentary made by Jill Craigie filmed in war-damaged Plymouth, 1946. The Way We Live features a fictional family going about their business, as well as a whole lot of folk playing...
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