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Croydon Till I Die
The view from Taberner House (RIP). Image (c) Andy WilliamsCome and celebrate the cultural life of the suburbs at Croydon Till I Die, a series of events featuring authors Andy Miller, Bob Stanley, Lucy...
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Outskirts – a book about the green belt
So, I have a book deal for my next (and as yet unwritten) project! Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt is an attempt to tell the history of this peculiar, much-loved and also...
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Lion Farm Estate by Robert Clayton
In the early 1990s photographer Robert Clayton decided to take his trusty camera to record a council estate in Oldbury, in the West Midlands – the Lion Farm Estate – before it was partially demolished....
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He Snoops to Conquer
Well, I hadn't expected eminent Garden City planner Frederic Osborn to put me on to a George Formby film, but life's like that. In his book Green Belt Cities Osborn mentions a film in which George...
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Glenrothes New Town (1958)
Here's another one of those gloriously optimistic and romantic postwar new town promotional films. This one is of Glenrothes New Town, filmed in 1958. Visually it's the Ladybird Book of New Towns.It's...
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Billingham: ICI's New Town
The town of Billingham in Stockton on Tees may have existed for almost a millennia and a half, but it wasn't until what became the chemical giant ICI opened a massive plant there in 1920 that it took...
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Ballard's High-Rise
The forthcoming Ben Wheatley film of J. G. Ballard's darkly disturbing 1975 novel High-Rise is an exciting proposition. It's my favourite of his novels, so of course it could all be a horrible...
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RIP Queen Elizabeth Square
Here's a beautiful BBC documentary from 1993, High Rise and Fall, filmed at the time of the demolition of Basil Spence's Queen Elizabeth Square flats in the Gorbals.It's beautiful because they managed...
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Croydon, 1963: the reconstruction in action!
Terrific footage of postwar Croydon being built, from the BFI's archive. This 1963 amateur footage is full of gems, including the rise of the Nestle tower and the sinking of the underpass. There are...
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Building Milton Keynes, 1973
Here's another of those excellent newly digitised BFI films. This one, A Village City, is from the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, shot in 1973 when building was just getting underway in the new...
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Ladybird Modernism – Live!
It may not have passed you by that there has been a very successful exhibiton of Ladybird book artwork at the De Le Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, which has just transferred to the House of Illustration in...
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Cooking up Spaghetti Junction
Here's another one of those BFI films: an ATV news report from 1968, which starts on a road tunnel between Great Charles Street and Suffolk Street in Birmingham city centre. It then goes on to explore...
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Yorkshire Development Group
There are plenty of doomy documentaries about the post-Ronan Point downfall of 60s system building. This is not one of those. Instead it's the optimistic story of the Yorkshire Development Group,...
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Prince Charles loves the Barbican
Here's a royal walkabout at the Barbican estate from November 1972, well into the building of the flats but a decade before the arts centre was open. The event was caught with fawning absurdity by the...
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1940s Models of Coventry
Here's some very early postwar newsreel footage of Coventry. Here we see town planner Donald Gibson's model for the rebuilding of the blitzed city centre. We also have some fascinating footage of the...
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Atomic Achievement (1956)
Here's a very British film about atomic energy. Made in 1956 to promote breakthroughs in civil atomic energy at Calder Hall, Atomic Achievement is the epitome of those public information films that...
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Keeping up with L'Eclisse
A weird perk of having written Concretopia is that every so often I'll be asked to read or see something that might be of interest. So it was with this 1962 film, L'Eclisse, directed by Antonioni,...
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Henry Moore's Harlow Family Group
The sponsorship of public art became a central task of postwar organisations such as the new town development corporations and the Arts Council. Harlow's chief architect and planner, Frederick Gibberd,...
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The Curious Character of Corby
This is a lovely surprise, a vintage BBC documentary on a new town in pristine condition.The Curious Character of Britain was a 12 part BBC documentary series from 1970. A Long Way From Home was an...
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Events: October 2015
I'm doing two events in October 2015.The first is for Wakefield Civic Society on the evening of the 15th October, 7.30–9.30pm, at Wakefield Town Hall, where I'll be talking about ten buildings that...
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