FOLAR
Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

Castles in the Air? Landscapes and gardens of public housing

Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

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

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?

5. Scrambled City

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.

Dr 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