BBC/Oxford Film and Television/Lorian Reed-Drake
“I want to go beyond masonry and mortar and come face to face with residents past and present, I want to understand how they lived and how they transformed buildings into homes.”
In a remarkable programme lasting just one hour Dan Cruickshank traces the development of a Warwickshire village beginning with its entry in the Domesday Book then through 500 years of history to the present day, studying in great detail the transformation of Medieval cottage life to the home comforts we have come to know by way of the chimney stack, glass windows and separate rooms for different functions.
On Youtube here The Cottage
Alfa Laval Brentford started on site
September 29th, 2013
Having been alerted to something going on by the increasing number of hits to my blog entry Crap flats and back to backs I’ve just done a quick web search and lo and behold work started on site in March. I’m six months late with the news but I don’t live in London or skim all my entries for updates.
Carbuncle Cup: 465 Caledonian Road, London
August 30th, 2013
Building Online -> A triumph for the dark side (this is not paywalled, you have only to register to read the article)
The building in its original form
To inflict on students a presumed way of life is both patronising and ignorant to say the least. A basic rule of life is “do as you would be done by” or the more pithy version from E.M. Forster “only connect” i.e. try to stand in the other persons shoes.
Three Streets in the Country – Michael Frayn
November 3rd, 2012
This film formed part two of the five day series Where We Live Now, in the week beginning Monday 19th February 1979. I was lucky enough to see it at Kings College London on Friday 12th February 2010.
Anna Minton – Four Thought – Radio Four
November 1st, 2012
“It became clear to me that high security was especially a feature of very poor and very wealthy areas, a visual marker and reflection in the landscape of our sharply widening inequality.”
Still available here -> FourThought.mp3 <- Right click and Save As.
Of here if the BBC drop it -> FourThought.mp3 <- Right click and Save As.
Here’s Anna Minton writing in the Guardian on the day before her Radio 4 talk:-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/oct/30/cctv-increases-peoples-sense-anxiety
Will Hutton put forward a similar point of view in an article about fairness for the Observer in September 2010.
“Ever more sophisticated CCTV policing the fortresses of the rich and the desolate housing estates of the disadvantaged has become the iconic social intervention of the age.”
https://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/26/them-and-us-will-hutton
#UCLStratford – Saving Carpenters Estate – 31st Oct 2012
November 1st, 2012
UPDATE: Keep an eye on future events UCLUSAVECARPENTERS
Last night I had the pleasure of attending a talk organised by the UCL Student Union about the future of the Carpenters Estate in Stratford, East London. By the start time of 1800 the lecture theatre was more or less full. Present were a majority of students, a few lecturers and three members of UCL management on the front row (including Andrew Grainger, Director, UCL Estates) both to see what they were up against (of which more later) and to answer the inevitable questions.
A write up by Michael Edwards is available here:-
https://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=1135
and my own notes from the evening are available below.
Rebuilding Britain for the Baby Boomers
November 26th, 2011
Maxwell Hutchinson analyses the rebuilding of post-war Britain through unique and exclusive archive interviews on the 50th anniversary of the emblematic Parkhill Flats.
An excellent programme from the series Archive on 4 of which the history of Park Hill flats in Sheffield formed the backbone, while finding time to branch off and talk about Robin Hood Gardens in East London, and the World’s End Chelsea, all against a background of the whole post war reconstruction effort.
City of Towers – Christopher Booker – BBC 1979
August 27th, 2011
City of Towers is a two hour documentary made by Christopher Booker for the BBC, first broadcast in 1979 and a master class in the history of Modernism that covers its birth from ideas first put forward by Antonio Sant’Elia, Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier in the early part of the Twentieth Century . . .
. . . to its fall from grace in the latter part of the same century when its supposed beneficiaries, the people who had to live in the concrete blocks that followed the Modernist model, rebelled, and it came to be seen for what it truly was, a failed philosophy.
City of Towers – Christopher Booker BBC 1979 – film notes
August 26th, 2011
Footnotes (by blog author while writing it up)
“Under a perpetual blanket of smoke”
Ebenezer Howard – Letchworth. The Garden City 1903
Tony Garnier – What is a city for – zoning 1904
Skyscrapers early years of C20th
H.G.Wells – The Sleeper Awakes 1898 – London in 2100
Italian futurists – machines
Antonio Sant’Elia – A manifesto of a futurist architecture 1914
Russian Revolution – large buildings, skyscrapers from communism
Manhattan skyline – skyscrapers from capitalists
Germany – Mies van der Roe & Walter Gropius
August Perret – City of Towers – early 1920s
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret – Le Corbusier (crow like) – early 1920s
“Towards a new architecture” – Corbusier – 1923
“The City of Tomorrow” – Corbusier – 1925
This stupendous vision – an entirely new kind of society
Fritz Lang – Metropolis “as the most appalling nightmare” – 1920s
CIAM – avant garde architects on a Mediterranean cruise in 1933
Thamesmead South
August 18th, 2011
On a grey and overcast day coming on to rain I viewed the béton brut of Thamesmead and perhaps these were the ideal conditions to view a form of construction that has fallen from favour in housing.
Photo set on Flickr of Thamesmead South
https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627544886106/
A film about the development from 1970 Thamesmead and Plumstead Marshes on film