Thamesmead 1970

This is a glorious promotional film for the Thamesmead estate, built in the late sixties on the banks of the Thames in East London, and perhaps most famous for being the setting for Stanley Kubrick's infamous film of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. I saw this screened in the London Metropolitan Archives and I'm really glad they've put it up online. It's a wonderful glimpse into a kind of utopian modernism that was out of vogue even as they were building and promoting it. And so much of the detail - the colours of the fabrics and the film stock, the lettering of posters and the forms of the maps, models and buildings - is utterly beautiful. No-one really has a good word to say about the plan for Thamesmead these days, but this film is a reminder of an age of high ideals, at the moment they hit the rocks in a decade of stagflation, strikes and international financial meltdowns.