Tonight Christopher Booker tells the story of what he calls ' the greatest social disaster in Britain since the war'. City of Towers. Few things have aroused more violent feelings in Britain in the past 20 years than the pulling down of vast areas of our cities to make way for the planners' brave new world of tower blocks, motorways, shopping precincts and faceless housing. For the first time one film tells how it all came about, from the birth of the modern movement in Britain to the disillusion of the 70s, when planners, politicians and property developers finally launched Britain's cities on the greatest tidal wave of change in their history. The film shows how the people of Britain began to fight back against 'the concrete jungle'.
A personal view of the suburbs by Michael Frayn. Millions of people live in them. Few people ever look at them. The suburbs, hundreds of square miles fringing our big cities are the butt of jokes and the settings for situation comedies. But, in their way, the suburbs are an astonishing piece of folk art, as extraordinary as Stonehenge or the great cathedrals. Michael Frayn, playwright, novelist and journalist, turns his attention to the sprawling acres of suburban London, and in particular the small south west suburb of Ewell, where he grew up. This film evokes the suburbs as they appeared through the eyes of childhood, and explores the appeal of those tiny developments, once just three streets in the country, which mushroomed into the great dense dormitories so many of us live in today.
Thirty-two new towns have been built in the United Kingdom since the last war. They attract suspicion, praise, and denunciation. Writer and teacher Colin Ward is a passionate observer of the urban environment, and in this film he sets out to discover which of these responses is just. What sort of life do people lead in the new towns? Are the new towns expensive failures or the sole success of British post-war planning? In Harlow, Peterlee and Runcorn he hears from architects, 'first generation' residents, and their children who have known no other home town. At Milton Keynes, the youngest and biggest of the new towns, he examines its reputation as 'the Muhammad Ali ' of the new towns - brash, self-confident, but perhaps a winner.
Patrick Nuttgens likes modem architecture. Amid the cries of woe he looks at the achievements of post-war British architects and finds much to admire. It's no good expecting anything like St Paul 's Cathedral to be built in the 20th century. There isn't the money nor the need for it. What society wants are schools, hospitals, shops, airports, service stations and homes - buildings which respond to the technology of the times and needs of the people who are going to use them. To prove his point, Nuttgens takes us on an odyssey from a housing estate in Leeds to an insurance company in Ipswich, a leisure centre and hospital in Swindon, a school in Edinburgh, a Darlington factory, London's National Theatre and the extraordinary headquarters of the Halifax Building Society.
'Country' and 'City' are powerful words meaning different things to all of us, depending on where we live. They conjure up potent memories, associations, myths, dreams and images. Many of these images are expressed in poetry, painting, novels, postcards and, most recently. advertising. But how truthful are they? What do history and literature tell us about the way country and city actually relate? Raymond Williams believes that to separate one from the other is false. It distorts the way we see the past and confuses the way we plan our future.