London: the Proud City (1945)
This is one of the most significant of the rash of postwar films of planning. The Proud City, made in 1945, is a film version of Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw's County of London Plan.
It stars a monocle-polishing Abercrombie among a cast of stilted, awkward, plummy-voiced experts, interrupted only by the rather more workmanlike and intense Arthur Ling, the planner who demonstrates the scheme in action. As he says, South London is 'a typical picture of muddle and overcrowding which clearly calls for drastic reconstruction.'
To modern eyes and ears there seems a disjunct between the patrician tones of the planners, speaking in voices we're used to being ridiculed by Harry Enfield, and the politically and socially radical scheme they are proposing. It's strange too to think how soon other architects were dismissing Abercrombie as old hat and pushing further and faster. It's a fascinating watch.
It stars a monocle-polishing Abercrombie among a cast of stilted, awkward, plummy-voiced experts, interrupted only by the rather more workmanlike and intense Arthur Ling, the planner who demonstrates the scheme in action. As he says, South London is 'a typical picture of muddle and overcrowding which clearly calls for drastic reconstruction.'
To modern eyes and ears there seems a disjunct between the patrician tones of the planners, speaking in voices we're used to being ridiculed by Harry Enfield, and the politically and socially radical scheme they are proposing. It's strange too to think how soon other architects were dismissing Abercrombie as old hat and pushing further and faster. It's a fascinating watch.
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