Castles in the Air? - Scrambled City

Castles in the air? Aspirations and realities of post war housing and their gardens and landscapes

This is a short series of five zoom talks about post war housing and development produced by FOLAR and the Gardens Trust.

We have a brilliant band of speakers: Dr Catherine Flinn, Luis Diaz, John Boughton, Dr Jan Woudstra and associate professor, Otto Saumarez Smith. Their talks span from broad post war politics, the problems of getting UK redeveloped and who held the strings in Whitehall, to a brief history of social housing and the evolving forms and layouts of council estates; there will be details about individual estates, including some contrasting examples from the Netherlands, and what works and what has endured. Influences of the garden city movement will weave its way through the talks, also high rise and low rise, and creating or recreating neighbourhoods. The development of the third wave of the New Towns reveals much about changing social and political attitudes, mobility and the impact of a declining heavy industrial base. What can we learn from all this to help make our new housing better?

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This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £20 via the link here. [Gardens Trust and/or FOLAR members may use their promo code for a discount, only one code can be used.]

NB One of the talks is on a Wednesday, please check the listing below.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

Due to a recent Apple decision to charge a 30% fee for paid online events unfortunately you may no longer be able to purchase this ticket from the Eventbrite iOS app. Please use a web browser on desktop or mobile to purchase or follow the link here.

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Talk 1. Tue 16 May: Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities. First in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Talk 2. Tue 23 May: Coming Home. Second in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Talk 3. Tue 30 May: The Evolution of the Council Estate. Third in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Talk 4. Wed 31 May: Some Post-War Schemes in the Netherlands. Fourth in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Talk 5. Tue 6 June: Scrambled City. Last in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

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Talk 5. Tuesday 6 June: Scrambled City: Deindustrialisation and the Merging of Town and Country in late-Twentieth Century Britain with Otto Saumarez Smith

The original conception of the Garden Cities proposed a new relationship between town and countryside. This talk is about the fullest realisation in Britain of such a merging of the urban and the rural, not least in the Mark III New Towns of the 1970s, which were , bound together by networks of roads, telephone wires, and electricity pylons. The talk will keep in sight the fact that these processes happened in places with existing environmental and architectural histories, and intersected with other centrifugal processes such as electrification, deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, and automatability.

Otto Saumarez Smith is Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is currently researching and writing 'The end of urban modernism in the 1970s'. He is a Trustee and Chair of the Casework Committee for the Twentieth Century Society

Image: John Madin's plan for Telford

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