The Home Front Britain on Film

In cities such as Bristol here, these are the homes of the future.

Some people think that living in tall flats raises a whole new set

of problems, and as a nation, Britain is only just getting used to them.

A man who's made a special study of the health aspects

of modern planning is the deputy medical officer of health

for Bristol, Dr John Scone.

High-flat developments can be very successful,

as illustrated by projects in Bristol, if centrally situated,

with easy access to lifts, shops,

open spaces and places of entertainment.

Families with young children especially appreciate

laundry facilities, play areas, nursery schools and roomy balconies,

preferably with sunny, pleasant aspects.

In Bristol, where they've built nearly 50 multi-storey towers

in the last 12 years, the housing and medical authorities

are experts on organising high life.

The lifts have to be built large enough to take pram,

mother and family.

The windows have special safety catches,

so a toddler is absolutely safe.

And of course the tall blocks have central heating. Payment is by meter.

The more you build upwards, the more space you need for cars.

Bristol's policy is at least one parking space or one garage

for every flat in the block.

In Bristol, council housing is self-supporting

and doesn't cost the rate-payers a penny.

The tenants pay ten shillings a week for their garage,

which may be in a multi-storey block.

The caretaker has quite a lot to look after.

Among other things, he makes up the rota for the laundry

so the housewives know exactly when it's their turn,

and they get a complete family wash for about one and six.

The communal laundry in the basement is also a place to meet

the neighbours, but you don't have to talk unless you want to.

For the more elderly, there is a special community room

where the Happy Hours club can brew up a cup of tea and have a natter.

LOUD CHATTER

Schools, shops, bus services -

there isn't much that gets overlooked in the housing planning

that's becoming more and more general today.

Some estates even have their own surgery, for the use

of the visiting doctor and to save the tenants a long journey.

It's a fact that most people like the room with a view

on the top floor once they get up there.

Clive Baker does, but his wife has some reservations.

I've got no complaints about living in this block of flats.

In fact, I think it's very nice indeed.

The only drawback I do find,

is waiting for the lifts - five or six minutes sometimes.

Well, my main worry is

when Richard gets a little bit older, where is he going to play?

You can't send a three-year-old down 13 flights of stairs,

they're just not trustworthy enough, are they?

I think we're going to have to think about moving

when he's about two or three.

It's cleaner high up and the air is fresher,

and there's less dusting to do.

But one problem of the tall flats

is loneliness - you don't meet people.

So, in Bristol, the authorities make it a policy to put

the not-so-young as near the ground as possible, where they can

watch the world go by and have a chat with a passing neighbour.

High flats sprouting like mushrooms in cities all over Britain.

The latest and tallest in London is Balfron Tower,

in Poplar, with nearly 150 flats.

It was designed by Erno Goldfinger, who went and lived on the 26th

floor to experience for himself the problems involved in high living.

He's an architect who firmly believes that the tall

building is inevitably the home of the future.

The flats I've built in Tower Hamlets

for the Greater London Council, overlooking the river,

the docks and Greenwich...

..try to solve, besides the normal problems of architecture

and building, problems of economics, population density,

the problems of children, teenagers and old people,

and the problem of cars -

the segregation of pedestrians from traffic.

The old that is valuable is not always destroyed.

This timber-framed Tudor house, complete with its occupant,

stood in the path of a new inner-bypass for Exeter.

So, by jacking up the old place as it stood, it was decided to move

the 500-year-old building to a new site down the road.

In fact, it was up the road, up a one-in-ten hill.

Mounted on an iron-wheel chassis that ran in steel channels, the

three-storey 30-ton house was slowly winched up towards its new site.

Still intact, the house arrived

and then the London removal engineers had to slowly jack it

down on to its new foundations and get the chassis out from under it.

Finally, the old place is secure in its new home,

and where it once stood, a new road could drive forward.

The Ravenscroft estate in Newham, and it's doubtful

whether you could find anything better in the whole of Britain.

When you look at life inside these homes, the old image

of the council house gets a death blow.

Years of research into the needs of the modern family

went into these homes.

Some walls are detachable

to cater for changes in the size of the family over the years.

It's been finally understood that children

and youngsters need somewhere apart from a bedroom to play

and do homework, while parents get a bit of peace themselves.

The kitchen no longer cuts Mum off from activities in the rest

of the house, whilst she is working in it.

A great leap forward. But it was designed to go even further.

The planners, so often criticised for isolating people in compartments,

designed Ravenscroft as a community

with its own completely private grounds and play areas

for the tenants to run themselves.

A minority of children have turned the pleasant places into a wasteland

and now scarcely anyone uses it.

They stay firmly behind the doors of their fine homes.

Let's go zooming into the future.

Look at the sort of house we might be living in 20 years' time,

or now if anyone's got £19,000 to spend, which is what the first

model of the Water Lily House by architect Bengt Warne cost to make.

And model it is, for everything in the house is prefabricated

and soon they'll becoming off the production line by the dozen,

and down will come the prices.

A heated swimming pool in the living room.

I suppose it saves on fitted carpets!

In summer, the whole glass roof opens,

and the living room becomes a patio, open to the sky.

In winter you close it, lounge about in a swimsuit

and watch the storms raging in the sky above you.

The way Bengt Warne has used space in the kitchen

is little short of miraculous.

It's a small kitchen, and yet bread cutter...

..sink rubbish disposal...

..a built-in mixer board...

..and a lesson in how to use corner space...

..dishwasher...

..and then there's a drying cabinet.

Apart from the standard four fridges of course, two cookers with

anti-boiling over devices and controlled air conditioning.

Night, and what a pad to throw a party in.

All in the future, but the future gets nearer every day.

At Britain's building research station in Hertfordshire,

new ways and techniques of construction are investigated.

This reinforced concrete beam,

a major component in the new-style prefabricated block of flats,

is subjected to a series of stresses, and the results noted.

As nearly half the building work in Britain today comes under public authorities,

government departments are taking a lead in encouraging any sound

new method of construction that'll help to produce homes more quickly.

For over the next ten years, building output must rise by 55%

with only a 2% estimated increase in the labour force.

With official encouragement, industrialised building

in Britain is forging ahead and there are now 280 different systems.

As yet, industrialized building methods are as expensive

as bricks and mortar, but the saving is in time.

A multi-storey block of flats which used to take more than two years

to build can now be completed in less than six months.

As the constructors finish one storey and move upwards,

so the interior workers take over for decorating

and laying floors, and fitting complete kitchen units.

On large sites, like this 17-storey block of flats being built

in Surrey, another method is to pre-cast the sections

of the building on the site, to lay out a factory in other words, from

which the sections can be lifted by crane directly to the building.

All the units, like these stairways, are made of reinforced concrete.

Decorative facings of factory-made mosaic are laid onto concrete walls

to relieve the monotony.

Good design is important of course, both outside and inside.

But if Britain is going to win the battle on the housing front,

a good deal of standardisation is unavoidable.

In fact, it's the only way the job can be done if everyone is to

have his own modern home in the foreseeable future.

There are 15 new towns going up in Britain.

In all our long history,

nothing on this scale has every happened before.

Nothing to equal it is happening anywhere else in the world.

New homes for 700,000 people.

In the north of England, standing in the Durham coalfield,

is Peterlee, named after a famous miners' leader.

This is one of the most interesting large-scale housing schemes

anywhere in Britain.

Peterlee was designed to be the centre for 26 scattered

settlements which had grown up around the pitheads,

and also to provide new homes for 30,000 people.

In the old mining villages, there was no employment for women

and girls but there are lots of jobs going in the new town.

Peterlee is rapidly becoming what it was designed to be -

the centre of a whole district.

Every new town is different.

Harlow was designed to ease the congestion in London.

It has more than 300 different types of houses, flats and maisonettes.

In ten years, the population has grown from 5,000 to 50,000.

Henry Moore's famous family group sums up the spirit of Harlow

and one of its major problems - children.

Nearly half the population of Harlow are young married couples.

There are about 20,000 children.

To keep them occupied during the long summer holidays,

a big play scheme has been organised.

It's a lot of work, but it's worth it.

Harlow is building its own sports centre.

Here, youngsters from the town are helped by young

volunteers from all over Europe.

They work hard and they don't get paid.

They consider it a job worth doing for love.

Market day is an old tradition in Britain,

as old as the oldest town and as new as the newest.

Harlow's market place is more than a collection of stalls.

It's a place of excitement, of the unexpected,

of a bargain to be gloated over long after.

Was it so different 1,000 years ago?

Perhaps here is one answer to what makes a town more than just

a lot of houses - the town is also the people in it.

They're meeting and mixing, they're jostling and laughing.

Their indignation and their pleasure.

A new town expressly designed for the motor car age,

on the basis that every family living in it will own a car.

A town where traffic is concentrated on motorway-type roads

built for free flow and safety.

A town of peaceful co-existence between motorist and pedestrian.

It's Cumbernauld in Scotland and its planners have found a way

of getting over some of the problems of a car-owning community.

Here is one of the housing areas where no car can enter,

and where children can play without risk of being run over.

And for the 70,000 people who will live in Cumbernauld,

there will be special pedestrian routes, footways with

a built-in row of bricks that lead to the town centre and shops.

It's what the planners call a second generation new town

and it's going up to relieve overcrowding in Glasgow.

Its centre is on a deck above the approach road, with shops

and business premises on the deck.

Yet, even as Cumbernauld grows, and its builders

work on the town that is meant to meet the impact of the motor car,

it may have been overtaken in the high-speed drive into tomorrow.

For some experts are already saying

that its basis of one car to one family isn't enough,

that many families in the future will own two cars.

If the motor car is not to become our master, Britain has to

face a revolution as drastic in its own way

as the Industrial Revolution of nearly 200 years ago.

There are some people who like a place

that's a bit out of the ordinary, perhaps something like this.

Here's one for sale at Winterton-on-Sea in Norfolk.

This lighthouse, built in 1840, was closed in 1921 because the build-up

of the sand dunes took the sea a quarter of a mile away from it.

Then it was turned into a home.

Now, with a big bungalow built onto the back of it, it can be said

to have every mod con.

During World War II, the room at the top was used as a gun site.

Today it has been converted into a sun room.

A room with a very special view.

Few of England's oast houses are used today for their original

purpose of drying hops,

but some people have discovered that they can form

the basis of beautiful home.

These oast houses at Halstead in Kent were built about 80 years ago

and were later converted.

Most of the rooms are circular which is fine

so long as you don't want to hang pictures on the walls.

They have to be stuck on without frames.

Built to guard the Kent and Sussex coast

when Napoleon threatened invasion, Martello Towers are

today mostly crumbling monuments to a dictator's frustrated ambition.

But this one near Hythe has achieved a new role as a holiday home

for a London family.

Not far away at St Margaret's Bay near Dover, a block house was

built for artillery use in 1910. Today, it too is a holiday house.

The kitchen still has the lookout window.

The sitting room window bay had been built onto the back of the house,

and with walls nearly two feet thick, it's cool even in a hot summer.

This house is a real do-it-yourself effort.

It was designed and built in Highgate, London, by architect

Walter Segal, for him and his family to live in while their

new permanent home was being built at the other end of the garden.

Put together like a boy's construction set,

the house is made of slabs of compressed wood chips.

The slabs, two feet wide, are held in position by batons

and the wallpaper is wedged behind them.

Sizes of rooms can be altered by moving the partitions.

Though planned for temporary use,

the house could have a life of about 40 years.

It cost less than £900.

The whole thing can be entirely dismantled in about ten days.

And here's the home of an ex-railway man

who just couldn't live away from railways.

Just before he retired,

signalman Alfred Barrett bought the disused station building

at Little Kimble in Buckinghamshire, and turned it into a home.

Mr and Mrs Barrett still see trains every day,

for Little Kimble is now officially a halt and many stop there.

The dining room was once the porter's rest room.

The sitting room was the general waiting room and booking office.

After eight years, the Barretts have transformed the station house

and the garden is looked after in the best railway tradition.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd