High anxiety
'Top People' is one of those chirpy Carry On-era Rank Look at Life documentaries made for the cinema. This one is all about the rebuilding of the City of London, 1960. It centres around Great Arthur...
View ArticlePrefabs sprout
Here's a beautifully shot sequence of silent colour footage shot around London in 1945–6. The cameraman has recorded the building of some of the first Orlit prefab houses. It's unusual for many...
View ArticleFlight from Utopia
Flight from Utopia is a BBC2 documentary from 1984, written and presented by Patrick Nuttgens, one of Robert Matthews' prodigies. He followed his teacher by starting out as one of the cheerleaders of...
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Ten British buildings worthy of Thunderbirds
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson always showed a keen eye for exciting modern architecture in their many hit 1960s TV series. Thunderbirds featuredTracy Island, the home so cool that decades later kids were...
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Ten Monuments from the Space Age in Croydon
Croydon gets it in the neck a fair bit. Soulless, drab, 'New York built in Poland', a concrete jungle. The Late Show in 1993 characterised it, in a rare moment of analysis from any media on the town,...
View ArticleSomewhere Decent to Live
Here's a brilliant documentary made for the GLC in 1967. It's about housing in London, and captures a vanishing world. This is the year before the Ronan Point collapsed, when the high rise flat boom...
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Concretopia hits the shops
Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain has hit the shops, in hardback and ebook. You can read a sample chapter here.It's really quite a peculiar feeling now that it's out and...
View ArticleInteractive timeline of Concretopia
Here's an interactive timeline for some of the major events and plans I write about in Concretopia.
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Concretopia on the news
So, I was interviewed at the Barbican by Nick Higham for Meet the Author on the BBC News channel. Here's the result.
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Ten tower block tales
1. The Lawns, Harlow.The Lawns was Britain's first 'point block'– a form of tower block that had become popular in the 1940s. In a point block all of the flats in the tower are accessed off a central...
View ArticleA Council Way of Life
Here's a beautiful documentary, One Below the Queen, about the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate in Swiss Cottage, London. It's made up from tons of warts-and-all interviews with the residents, from kids...
View ArticleA veritable jewel in the navel of Scotland
Of all the promotional films made by local councils to promote their new towns, one soars above all the others in terms of ambition, imagination and sheer brazen camp. Cumbernauld Hit was made in 1977...
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Proud Denys Lasdun shows off his UEA designs
Terrific archive footage courtesy of the East Anglian Film Archive, of Denys Lasdun in 1963 showing off and discussing his student flats for the University of East Anglia. As with his 50s East London...
View ArticleNo Place Like Hulme
Here's part of a fascinating World in Action documentary from 1978 on Hulme Crescents, Manchester's slum redevelopment scheme – with 3,484 homes the biggest in Europe. Made just 7 years after the...
View ArticleThe Pedway: Elevating London
Here's a beautiful documentary. The Pedway: Elevating London by Chris Bevan Lee tells the story of the City of London's decision to build a network of high-level walkways to separate pedestrians from...
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The Ladybird Book of Modernism
2015 will be the centenary of Ladybird Books, but it wasn't until the launch of their Peter and Jane books, the Key Word Reading Scheme, in 1964 that they really became household names. They eventually...
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Timelapse film of the building of John Madin's Birmingham Central Library
Photographer Derek Fairbrother took this incredible series of photos from the same spot in Birmingham between the mid-sixties and 1973. It shows the demolition of Mason Science College [on the left]...
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IBM, Eames and Saarinen at the 1964 World's Fair
In 1964 New York hosted it's third World's Fair. Much of the American focus was on high-tech and space-age technology, and in many ways represented the birth of the computer age, with pavillions built...
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Imagining Washington New Town
The Washington New Town plan was drawn up by the same team who worked on Milton Keynes: the snappily named Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor. The Washington New Town plan book was...
View ArticleJames Bolam: Modernist Prophet
Whenever I think of postwar modernism I think of James Bolam. Sort of. Here's three reasons why. Firstly, here's the opening titles of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? featuring the demolition and...
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