Five online recorded talks produced by FOLAR and The Gardens Trust, May-June 2023
With a brilliant band of speakers - Dr Catherine Flinn, Luis Diaz, John Boughton, Dr Jan Woudstra and associate professor, Otto Saumarez Smith, these 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?
1. Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities - Britain's postwar reconstructionWith a background studying and working in landscape architecture, architectural history and garden history and conservation, Dr Catherine Flinn has returned to academia and research...
Read MoreComing Home - the space and routines of arrival and departure in British housing. The route and spaces that link city to front door will be familiar to most people. But very few will have contemplated this in the way Luis Diaz has researched and...
Read MoreThe biggest collective leap in living standards in British history was provided by the rise of social housing - an observation made in 2018 by Teresa May, then UK prime minister. Up till 1979...
Read MoreSome remarkable post-war urban renewal schemes in the Netherlands by Aldo van Eyck and Herman Herzberger.Post-war modernist housing in the Netherlands is well known as are the suburban housing that materialised, all based on garden city notions of...
Read More5.Scrambled City: Deindustrialisation and the Merging of Town and Country in late-Twentieth Century BritainThe original conception of the Garden Cities proposed a new relationship between town and countryside. This talk is about the fullest realisation...
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