Livingston – a Town for the Lothians
Here's another of those heroic new town corporation films from the 1960s. This is for one of the last new towns, Livingston in Scotland.
It takes us on a journey from overcrowded Glasgow to bucolic Livingston, and to the planning and construction of the town, and the first residents moving in. It was designated a new town in 1962, the first residents moved in four years later, and this film was made three years after that in 1969.
Stylistically it's rather tame compared to the films from, say, Harlow in the mid-sixties, where the desire to show the new town as groovy was uppermost in the producers' minds. The Livingston film is a much more sober affair, showing a sensible town for sensible people. Children play nicely with balloons, parents move wordlessly into new houses, planners toil mirthlessly in cluttered offices. Oh, but those offices! The footage there is priceless, the great maps tacked to walls, the endless scrolls of blueprints, the enameled anglepoise lamps and vast modernist windows.
The model shots of planners slotting walls and roofs into place, followed by vast construction crews doing the same with their concrete equivalents, and later the model railway appreciation society and their miniature landscape all create a gentle wave of wit and insight. The voice over is as patrician as you'd imagine, not saying anything too memorable lest any viewer or resident might pick the corporation up on it later.
It's a smashing film, the faded print and light muzak soundtrack preserving a moment in time that lives forever thanks to these many promotional movies. The reality would of course prove rather different. But then, isn't that the case with all of life.
You can watch the film at the National Library of Scotland site.
It takes us on a journey from overcrowded Glasgow to bucolic Livingston, and to the planning and construction of the town, and the first residents moving in. It was designated a new town in 1962, the first residents moved in four years later, and this film was made three years after that in 1969.
Stylistically it's rather tame compared to the films from, say, Harlow in the mid-sixties, where the desire to show the new town as groovy was uppermost in the producers' minds. The Livingston film is a much more sober affair, showing a sensible town for sensible people. Children play nicely with balloons, parents move wordlessly into new houses, planners toil mirthlessly in cluttered offices. Oh, but those offices! The footage there is priceless, the great maps tacked to walls, the endless scrolls of blueprints, the enameled anglepoise lamps and vast modernist windows.
The model shots of planners slotting walls and roofs into place, followed by vast construction crews doing the same with their concrete equivalents, and later the model railway appreciation society and their miniature landscape all create a gentle wave of wit and insight. The voice over is as patrician as you'd imagine, not saying anything too memorable lest any viewer or resident might pick the corporation up on it later.
It's a smashing film, the faded print and light muzak soundtrack preserving a moment in time that lives forever thanks to these many promotional movies. The reality would of course prove rather different. But then, isn't that the case with all of life.
You can watch the film at the National Library of Scotland site.
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