/ JOURNAL
Nothing’s too good for the workers
Britain’s post-war architecture, and especially its post-war social housing, is an enduring love. A period where architects, responding to huge social need, attempted to apply modern thinking to re-imagine ways of living to not just replace, but to better what had gone before.
It feels an era filled with huge ambition, experimentation and optimism, but also flawed thinking, mistakes and naivety. It constantly makes me think about the work we do as digital designers today, and the lessons we can learn — good and bad — from that period.
For every light-filled, thoughtful, human scale estate is a commoditised, shoddily-built estate thrown up by a council desperate to meet housing need whatever the compromises its residents would come to face.
Highgate Newtown Phase 1 in Camden, by Peter Tábori and Ken Adie is emphatically in the former camp. ‘The White Flats’ is a short film about estate made by its residents and directed and edited by Anna Price. It's human-centred social design as it can be.
It's a lovely, generous film too. So many films about modernist/brutalist estates have a middle class voyeur aspect to them: all exterior fetishisation rather than considering the lives being lived inside them.
Price's film is, like the estate, about its people first.
The White Flats from Anna Price on Vimeo.
Fun to find out that Anna Price is also the award-winning editor of ‘Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland’, my favourite thing on TV in the last year.