How Late It Was, How Late

1993. The year I finished university and returned home to New Addington, the housing estate outside Croydon where I was born, brought up and lived in, on and off, until I was 30. New Addington has six entries in Urban Dictionary, including Pikeys, Chavs and Chavin' It Large.

1993 was also the year that The Late Show broadcast this special about an architectural exhibition called Croydon: The Future. It told the story of Croydon's post-war development and the plans to turn it into the Tokyo of Surrey. None of these plans came to pass, but the documentary and exhibition utterly transformed my way of looking at Croydon.

 
It's usual to rubbish Croydon as a joke town, punchline as it is to so many lazy jokes by bad comedians everywhere. But the thing this documentary showed me was that I knew nothing about the town I'd grew up in and that it was actually emblematic of a whole moment in postwar planning and architecture that was at once massive and everywhere and at the same time culturally completely invisible.