Building Milton Keynes, 1973
Here's another of those excellent newly digitised BFI films. This one, A Village City, is from the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, shot in 1973 when building was just getting underway in the new town.
For Concretopia I interviewed an original resident of Galley Hill, the first estate completed in the new town, shown in the film. It's peculiar to see it like this, houses surrounded by dead land, in shots taken from the air, like those of blitzed cities.
I spend a lot of my time in MK, and those linear parks that Fred Roche talks about have turned out brilliantly. Yet it's also amazing how high-tech the plan was, with that super-fast grid of roads, cable TV and factory units like spaceships.
This film successfully gets across the ambition and scale of the place, Britain's largest new town.
For Concretopia I interviewed an original resident of Galley Hill, the first estate completed in the new town, shown in the film. It's peculiar to see it like this, houses surrounded by dead land, in shots taken from the air, like those of blitzed cities.
I spend a lot of my time in MK, and those linear parks that Fred Roche talks about have turned out brilliantly. Yet it's also amazing how high-tech the plan was, with that super-fast grid of roads, cable TV and factory units like spaceships.
This film successfully gets across the ambition and scale of the place, Britain's largest new town.
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