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Stevenage, 1971
Back to 1971 now, and a short promotional film for one of the first of the postwar new towns, Stevenage. Over twenty years since the town had been started and with its energy beginning to ebb away, the...
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They've blown them all sky high...
 Lee Munro was born in Basil Spence's Queen Elizabeth flats in Hutchesontown-Gorbals, and he's made this montage of photos to commemorate them, long after their mid-90s demolition. As he says at the...
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Terry and June and John
My home town of Croydon was celebrated in the initial 1979 title sequence of the ultimate suburban sitcom, Terry and June. In the titles, Terry arrives at the old East Croydon Station, with Richard...
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Birmingham, when the concrete was still fresh
MACE, the Media Archive of Central England, has loads of gems on Vimeo, including this, footage of John Madin's Birmingham Central Library from 1970 to 1974. It's all local news footage, including...
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Poulson in the 21st Century
 Here's four pics of Elizabeth House, Waterloo, designed by the practice of John Poulson and opened in the 1960s initially as one of the South Bank extensions to Whitehall. Poulson would later be sent...
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Grade 1 Brutalism
 Here's a short film made in 2013 for English Heritage's Brutal and Beautiful exhibition. It focuses on Denys Lasdun's grade one listed Royal College of Physicians, and is presented by Elain Harwood,...
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Events are overtaking me
Uh-oh.I'm doing a few talks and events this year for Concretopia. I've not done anything like these things before, so I'm a little nervous, but I promise I'll give them my best shot.Firstly there's an...
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Myths of the Near Past
 Here's a 1971 short film directed by Harley Cokliss based on J. G. Ballard's essay Crash from The Atrocity Exhibition. The book prefigures his novel, Crash, by three years. It's a very good film, very...
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Dirty Modern Scoundrel! - The Musical
I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice that the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels has recently been turned into a musical. In response, here's my treatment for a jukebox musical: Dirty Modern...
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Ten incredible postwar modernist pieces by Pathé
 Now that British Pathé have shared their incredible archive on YouTube I thought I'd pick out a few highlights of their modernist coverage. It's basically Boring Postcards that move.1. Firstly, here's...
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Ronan Point on film
Here's a couple of newsreels from the late 60s following the Ronan Point collapse in Newham, May 1968, in which four people died. The first is a report on how the borough had changed all of their tower...
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FuckYeahNewEmpiricism - a top ten
So fuckyeahbrutalism is obviously A Thing. But I think I might be unable to resist the pull of New Empiricism, essentially a competing modernist ideology of the mid-twentieth century characterised...
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Millbank Tower... in the beginning
Millbank Tower, the curvaceous sixties skyscraper and low-rise complex along the Thames between Westminster and Pimlico, has been a feature of the news for the past few decades, firstly as home to the...
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Civic Pride and Joy
King Olav of Norway opened Newcastle Civic Centre in 1968, and naturally Pathe News was on hand to record the occasion. No sign of 'Mr Newcastle' T. Dan Smith, though, perhaps he was away at one of his...
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Rotherhithe and Bermondsey's best
I pass these three estates on the train every day between New Cross Gate and London Bridge. I've always been intrigued by them, so one morning I hopped off at Surrey Quays and went for an explore and...
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10 amazing official postwar plans
 The official story of postwar planning and rebuilding got written over and over. There were the pre-war and forties plans for cities such as London and Plymouth, the fifties and sixties versions of...
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Concretopia - the paperback!
On the 8th July the paperback edition of Concretopia is released. Donna Payne has adapted her brilliant cover design and Old Street editor Ben Yarde-Buller and I have gone through and made some...
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Basildon - Our Town
Hello. I'm a narrator with a plummy voice and I'm going to talk to you about Basildon in Essex. This little oddity traces how Basildon grew from self-built shacks and roughly built roads to an official...
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Kitten Kong
Days after a terrorist attack on the Post Office Tower in 1971, the BBC showed this episode of The Goodies: Kitten Kong. The kitten, Twinkle, is grown to enormous size by Graeme Garden, and goes on the...
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Top Ten pics from the JR James Archive
The University of Sheffield has put one of the most wonderful archives of photos online: pristine postwar modernism photographed and collected by J. R. 'Jimmy' James, former Professor of Town and...
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