Crawley vs Toronto, 1970

Crawley: A Place to Grow is an early seventies promotional film for the new town. Here a Canadian student (who pronounces the town's name as Craley) meets his English cousins and the town's planners (who, it seems, talk only in narration). Crawley was one of the first wave of new towns from the late 1940s. The original planner, Alwyn Sheppard Fidler, later became Chief Architect of Birmingham in the early sixties. His wife, Margaret, famously named the Skylon for the Festival of Britain.

The student story is soon sidelined by minutes of plinky-plonky music accompanying shots of the sort of mild Scandinavian-influenced modernism that the New Brutalists so hated, while the voice-over talks of 'planting' and 'zoning' cut and pasted straight out of a press release. There's a classic new town 'pram town' sequence, where by the early 1970s mothers were still parking massive Buick-sized prams outside the shops.

It's a lovely short film, beautifully shot and just-about kept on track by the wafer-thin narrative of our Canadian hero's visit, despite frequent interruptions by the plummy, clunking narrator.