Design Class Clips

Here, outside Paris, Le Corbusier built the Villa Savoye.

This would define the look of modernism -

a minimal flat-roofed large-windowed white box.

He proclaimed the house would be a machine for living in.

More than anything, Le Corbusier admired the modern motorcar

as a perfect marriage of function and design.

The house would function as efficiently as a car and be as modern as a car.

Imagine what people thought of the house in the 1920s.

And not only did Le Corbusier want this house to be like a car,

he also wanted the house to accommodate a car as the central tool of the modern age.

The house is raised on legs and its dimensions fit exactly a car's turning circle.

There's also a built-in garage.

This house is a machine for living in, but it's more than that.

It's a temple, a temple to purity.

This entrance hall is so simple, so austere.

And the clue to its meaning is given by this rather unexpected object

standing in the entrance hall.

A sink. Here it is, in the middle of the space.

It's a place of ritualistic washing.

Here, one washes away the outer world, the dirt that's left behind.

And purified, one then enters the upper regions of the house.

There's a beautiful staircase here, sculptural object. You go up that.

Or more striking, the architect invites the visitor to go on an artificial promenade,

to go on this ramp that leads into the heart of the building.

The first thing that strikes you is the light, the white painted walls, the huge window.

Indeed, the light draws you onwards and upwards into a better, brighter world of the future.

"A great epoch has begun.

"There is a new spirit," wrote Le Corbusier in his book, Towards A New Architecture.

Architecture that used light and space would make people healthier and happier.

No more dark basements and a reinforced concrete frame

would allow for large ribbon windows, letting in lots more light...

..but also free up the interior for open-plan living.

Le Corbusier also told people HOW they should live in his house.

Clothes should be tidied away.

There should be no unnecessary furniture

and he didn't like people having pictures up in their bedrooms.

The rules even told you how to use your own bathroom.

Behind me, the little closet is the lavatory, a secret place.

Here, a bidet. In front of me, a basin, rather charmingly top lit through the skylight.

Here, a rather squarish

uncomfortable-looking bath.

And in front of me, this serpentine form

on which I'm meant to lounge. Having wrapped myself in my towel, I lie here...

..as the architect would oblige me to do, drying myself, I suppose.

And then, from here into bed.

Le Corbusier even specified where to put the bed.

It should go between two columns, at a precise distance from the bath and the window.

This machine for living in is as attentive to detail as you might expect from a watchmaker's son.

The ascending ramp continues from the central open court,

leading to a flat roof terrace, maximising space and efficiency

for exercise and fresh air.

The architectural promenade

climaxes in an external window framing the view.

Villa Savoye made manifest a new architecture as set out to improve life through design.

But at the end of the day, it was just a weekend retreat for a rich client.

If architecture was really to change things, it would have to do it in a much bigger, bolder way.

Road signs in Britain were chaotic and came in different sizes, symbols, colours and shapes.

The result was frustration and confusion.

When the motorways were still in the planning phase,

the government had appointed a committee to investigate the issue of new signage.

I thought perhaps we might need the help of a designer.

So that was quite a very new thing for somebody,

actually, for a committee, a government committee, to employ a consultant designer.

How do they differ from present motor signs?

We've used a mixture of block letters and small letters

for greater legibility.

Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert were charged with developing

a new signage system for Britain's motorways.

They realised that the absolute essence

of an efficient motorway signage system was clarity.

The signs had to be easy to read, instantly recognisable to motorists.

Motorists had to understand what they were saying.

And it had to convey essential information to them,

but motorists really didn't need to waste time thinking.

-The basic unit, obviously, is the typeface and from that, you build out.

In order to achieve this simplicity,

they had to do some very complicated work behind the scenes.

So they thought through every single aspect of the way in which those signs would be read.

The lettering always stayed the same and you read the symbol first and then you picked out the lettering

and then you got the sense of what the message was and the route numbers.

So, basically, it's very simple. And the colours.

And we've also put white letters on a blue background for the same reason.

I remember the formula that I used was ultramarine plus azure blue

plus zinc white designer's colours.

We were amazed at the size of them.

It staggered us. We just couldn't comprehend that you need a road sign as big as we were making them.

Of course, you're travelling at 70 mph and you want to pick up the directions early.

So they're logical and they're correct, but we were surprised.

They are beautifully elegant. They're like works of art in their own right.

But they're also completely utterly functional, and that is why today,

over 40 years later, that signage hasn't changed.

It doesn't need to change. Perfect typography is perfect typography.

When you're driving on the motorway or the road,

thanks to Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, you never have to think about the signs you're looking at.

Keep it simple and it's easier to read and remember

and it looks good in its own right in the landscape.

Walter Gropius was one of the most vital architects of the last century.

He believed in bridging the gap between technology, industry and architecture.

His greatest achievement was founding the Bauhaus,

the arts institute that brought together architecture, painting, woodwork and design.

In 1925, he designed the Bauhaus headquarters in Dessau, Germany.

It's arguably the most famous monument to modernism.

Great architects like Mies van der Rohe and artists Kandinsky and Klee, all taught here.

The building has three parts with no clear back or front.

A radical departure from other public buildings at that time.

Today, it's still a school for architecture and design and its workshops are still in use.

Even though they were built about 70-odd years ago,

for us now they're really good to work in.

It's great cos most of the walls are windows,

so you get the most out of natural light.

Gropius also built the apartments for the Bauhaus masters.

The three identical houses are staggered in height.

They show a theory that Gropius believed in all his life -

identical units that can be combined in any number of ways.

In 1926, he was commissioned by the City of Dessau to provide 300 low-income-family homes.

He used the Torten housing estate as an experiment

to see how much space people really needed to live in.

Each two-storey house had a plot of land just the right size for the owners to keep a sheep or a goat.

He hoped the workers could make extra cash by selling milk and cheese.

But the experiment backfired.

The estate was slated as looking like an assembly line of fridges.

In the 1930s, the Nazis accused the school of neglecting German values

and encouraging Jewish influence.

In 1933, they shut the Bauhaus down.

In 1937, Gropius went to the US

and was made a senior professor at Harvard.

He designed much of the new campus and founded The Architects' Collaborative.

Although he died in 1969, the collaborative ensured

that the Bauhaus principles of teamwork and artistic unity live on.

When I think of modern offices, I think of drab open-plan rooms in Slough

crammed full of David Brents. But does it have to be like this?

Will the office ever become an enjoyable place to work?

One of the most uninspiring office environments is the call centre.

There's not much company loyalty and people don't stick around for long.

So a company in Swindon decided to do something completely different.

-Hi.

-Hiya. How you doing?

-Good. How are you?

-Not so bad. Come through.

-Thank you.

So, Paul, how long have you been in this building?

We moved in in January 2000.

We really needed to be in a purpose-built building.

And I think there was a need for the company to have an identity

and we really wanted a building to show that.

And I've heard about some of your treats round the building.

We have ladies in 1950s trolley dolly outfits,

running round with motorised trolleys, going in between desks

and giving everyone tea and coffee and offering sandwiches.

Our reception desk that we've got here is specifically designed and built.

We like people to enjoy working here and we also want to create obviously a bit of interest about the company

via what we do, sort of thing.

Most of the people who work here are in their early 20s,

so the architect designed the toilets to look like nightclubs.

DANCE MUSIC

Not very good for doing your make-up, though.

The fountain's unique, too.

The height of the water mirrors the height of the lift, so you can tell which floor it's on.

This building is a great example of design that works,

but you don't have to use £7 million.

Richard Palmer needed a little bit more space, so he just did it using furniture.

Richard created office high chairs which sit at a two-metre-high desk,

cleverly separating the desk from the meeting area.

-Hi, Richard.

-Hi.

-So I take it you don't suffer from vertigo.

-Not particularly, no.

That's lucky cos we're pretty high up here.

-About two metres.

-So I take it you've got a bunk bed at home?

It's funny cos I'm a twin and, yeah, I used to have a bunk bed.

So maybe that's it, subliminally.

So, did you invent these? This is totally your idea?

Yeah. I mean, the chair itself is a standard Herman Miller product.

But the structure and the rest of the layout and the design is all ours.

The original inception is to try and segregate the space, but it works much better than we imagined.

We don't feel part of what's going on down there,

and conversely, they don't feel that you're part of what's going on.

So you do actually very quickly separate.

There was no desire to get secretaries in skirts up here?

HE LAUGHS

The new Selfridges feels like so much more than just a shop.

It's a destination, a whole city under one roof.

In the 21st century department store, selling comes second.

What's important is getting people through the door and keeping them there with an array of experiences.

Once and for all, splashing your cash becomes hard to resist.

We animate loads of brands, loads of experiences

in a place that has been designed to

accommodate those brands and experiences.

We have worked with a whole range of designers and architects,

and it was incredible to see how that injection of creativity and design

put a whole new momentum behind that business. We all got what we need.

You know, we got suits and trousers and socks and everything.

You know, wardrobes full of them. But it's really about that experience of buying

and the pleasure that you get about finding something new and different.

For us, it's important that our place

is as exciting and interesting as the other places that they could go to.

I think of competition for Selfridges as, you know,

"I'm going to go and watch Arsenal play," or, "I'm going to lunch."

"I'm going to go to an art gallery or a museum." It's a day out. It's part of a day out.

It's about much more than shopping.

What's really interesting is that it's not a new concept.

It's exactly what Gordon Selfridge wanted when he opened the store in 1909.

Selfridge really thought about customer psychology.

It's thanks to him that department stores have their perfume counters on the ground floor.

He realised the scent wafting out to the street would tempt people in.

He was also a master showman.

He put on art displays and hosted theatrical events.

Selfridges took the radical decision to use cutting-edge architects rather than interior designers.

Across town, a rival store is also aware of the need to diversify.

Crucial to the reinvention of a department store is the cafe and restaurants.

Harvey Nichols wanted their new restaurant to be the best in town,

a destination in itself.

The idea of putting a high-class restaurant, a cafe and a high-quality food offering,

as they call it, on top of the department store and making it a destination

was unheard of ten years ago.

What they wanted to do was really establish this as an attraction within the store, itself.

Here we have a restaurant at the top of the building.

We draw people through the building and then people percolate back through the building again

and have the retail experience.

And after a lunch-time bottle of wine, half-cut shoppers spend double the cash.

Harvey Nichols has a different design ethos to Selfridges.

The backdrop is kept cool and calm so the products take centre stage.

So confident are Selfridges of the revival of the department store

that they've started to commission more up and down the country.

At Manchester's Exchange Square, a different architect did each floor.

It's a design pick 'n' mix.

Here, Aldo Cibic uses bright colours and shiny resin.

This floor couldn't be more different.

Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen opts for elegant natural stone, subtle lighting and lots of grey.

The basement holds the food hall.

A blueprint for the future of food retailing.

The food hall is conceived as a series of droplets in a landscape

which displays food in these very beautiful sinuous forms.

The ceiling and floors are curved so you get this very sensuous form

and what you feel like when you're in here

is that you're in the belly of an amazing cavern of delights, really.

This food hall is one of the places where you just never want to leave.

You want to have lunch here. You want to spend time just waiting for people or just really sampling food.

Not good if you can't control what you're eating.

Selfridges approached me to design the ground floor.

I said I'd never done a store before and they said, "Great!"

They were looking for new ideas.

What you have is a sky which sits over the whole thing.

And the lights have been tempered so it's like a morning sky, a fresh light,

a kind of really sparkly light, so that when the cosmetics and the bags and the luxury goods are displayed,

they have a flattering, complementary light all over them.

What I then tried to do is have a floor which looks like a beach, as the water's just passed over it

and drained away. So you have these white pebbles, which unify the entire space.

And then you have these objects, which are geometric and cubic,

but also translucent, and capture the light in them,

with mirrors to reflect and give you kind of glimpses of yourself as you go past.

So what you have is an environment which is complementary to the idea of beauty

and also to the idea of luxury and feeling good.

Urban planners are already thinking of ways to cope with the consequences

of such a rise in temperature across Britain.

One area that will have to change will be the design of our homes.

By 2080, our homes will have to be able to shut out the summer heat,

conserve water and use the minimum amount of energy possible.

Well, this could be a model for our future living.

Beddington Zero Energy Development, also known as BedZED,

is the UK's largest eco-community.

It's an experimental set-up offering a practical solution to sustainable living.

Well, that's what the blurb says, but what's it like to live here?

Sue Riddlestone and her family moved in when it was built four years ago.

Wow. It's so light and bright and pretty, isn't it?

It's a fantastic feeling.

Well, when we first moved in, we thought

"Wow, this is really fantastic and futuristic."

But actually, after a couple of weeks,

we just got used to all the various features.

Believe it or not, the house doesn't need any central heating or air conditioning.

It's all down to the architecture.

-We've got these very thick walls.

-Right.

A bit like a church where you've got the solid construction

so it keeps fairly cool in the summer and also keeps the heat in in the winter.

The sun floods in through the south-facing conservatories,

capturing natural light and heat for the cold winter months.

Well, look at this!

I love this sort of futuristic rooftop you've got here.

It's fabulous.

Lining all the roofs are strange-looking vents.

They capture the wind to ventilate the homes in the summer.

Energy used in our homes accounts for 27% of all carbon emissions in the UK.

The aim here is to reduce that down to zero.

All the hot water and part of the electricity

comes from one central unit on site, fuelled by locally sourced wood chippings

that would otherwise go to waste.

The site has also been designed to save water.

The roof is covered with a plant called sedum.

Sedum is like a succulent plant.

When it rains, it holds the water and stops it all rushing down at once.

And then we collect the rainwater in big tanks under the ground

and we use that water for flushing the toilets.

BedZED is one of the few housing developments around now

that's been designed to suit the climate conditions of the future.

But can these ideas be scaled up so that by 2080, whole cities offer sustainable living?

To adapt the 22 million homes across the UK would certainly be a major challenge.

Who fancies this lifestyle?

This vision of housing bliss is care of a rather famous Scandinavian furniture company

who see flatpack homes as one solution to the UK's housing crisis.

Allen keys at the ready.

But wait a minute.

Ready-made housing plonked into place... Haven't we been here before?

Well, yes. Prefab housing is a great British treasure and has been around for years.

The post-war version is the one we all remember.

Modular-living aficionado Greg thinks we shouldn't underestimate the power of a prefab.

By the time of the Second World War, there was a huge housing crisis.

The problem was made particularly acute because the men were away.

There wasn't anyone to build the houses.

So the government needed to come up with something.

They came up with the idea of building prefabs.

Prefab - noun.

Something that is prefabricated as a building or fixture.

You would never know such an attractive house is a prefab.

Nowadays, labour costs are very high and particularly in the last five years,

so maybe it's more appropriate now that we're looking back at prefabrication.

Now, fast-forward to the noughties and another housing crisis...

Are flatpacks the new prefabs?

And in which case, aren't we just using a familiar solution for the same old problem?

No. This is a very different approach.

That was government-sponsored cheap housing, short-term life spans.

It was an intermediate solution.

You know, this is bringing something back which is fundamentally more sophisticated,

very, very high quality and is here to last.

It sounds too good to be true.

Affordable, high quality, contemporary housing for the masses.

But, Alan, it's still a prefab, isn't it?

If you say, "Is it factory constructed?" then yes.

But I think, from the days of prefabbed houses as we all knew them 40, 50 years ago,

this is a massive progression.

He would say that, wouldn't he?

After all, his company is responsible for bringing these houses over from Sweden.

And even if flatpack is the future of British housing, would it detach itself from the stigma of prefab?

Some people had their doubts the first time round.

There was lots of snobbery about prefabs in the 1940s.

People saying "You're not living in Tin Can Alley!" "You're not living in that chicken shed!"

But the people who moved in loved them and I think you'll find the same thing happens

with these new prefab flatpacks.

Betty lives just down the road from the new flatpack development

in Tin Can Alley, or as it's better known, Wharfedale Road.

She's lived in prefabs for over 40 years and is quite used to people's attitudes towards them.

Do you think it's funny that they kind of fell out of fashion

at some point and people started to be quite rude about prefabs?

Yes. When you get a taxi, they say, "Oh, Tin Town."

When you say where you're going, they say, "Tin Town!"

That's really rude.

We just laugh it off.

They don't see inside, do they?

-This isn't the first prefab that you've lived in?

-No. No.

-I've lived in the single ones.

-And what was that like?

-It was brilliant.

-It had all mod cons and everything.

-Like what?

Well, it had a fridge, which a lot of people didn't have then.

Electric cooker. Electric boiler. Cupboards everywhere.

'They even had an inside loo.

'Prefab living is pretty fabulous.

'Well, it is if Betty's anything to go by.'

But then again, she's not forking out up to 150 grand to buy one.

The only thing I'm slightly disappointed about with this new system

is just how expensive these houses are. They're saying 35 grand maximum income for a household,

so you've got to be low income to be able to buy them.

Yet the actual retail cost of these houses is still really high.

If they're popular, if they are mass produced, well, mass production can bring that price down.

So, hopefully, this experiment will lead to something bigger.

Is the British consumer ready for it?

Well, we don't ask everybody to like it or to want to live in it.

It's a solution. But we certainly had a very significant interest

in what we're doing.

The customers that we're talking to about living in these units

are very, very excited.

Betty loves it and, Lucy, I can see an evangelical fervour for flatpack actually burning in your eyes.

-Why do you like it?

-I think they're a really good idea.

They're really cosy. They're very well insulated.

They're much cheaper to produce and they should be more environmentally friendly to produce, as well,

than using loads of cement, bricks and mortar which creates a lot of carbon emission.

The disadvantage of it - what's the arguments against it?

Well, most people are kind of persuaded

that they need a mock Tudor, bricks and mortar, very traditional-style home.

It feels more solid, doesn't it?

Yeah, but we've got to change our perception because we have got a housing crisis.

We need to build really, really fast to accommodate everyone that needs a home

-and I think flatpacks are a really good solution to that.

-Are they environmentally friendly?

Yeah. They should be and I think the more that are made and the more that we get an appetite for them,

the more that they will become easier, quicker to produce and more eco-friendly to produce.

It was the emigre visionary Berthold Lubetkin

who was to have the greatest influence on British architecture.

It was here in leafy North London that Lubetkin launched his mission

to convert the British to modernism.

And this country's first experiment with modern living in the 20th century

wasn't conducted on human beings but on apes.

Here you see the luxurious new apartment which has been built for the two gorillas, Minor and Mug.

The home is full of modern conveniences, including walls which can be adjusted according to weather

and sunglass panels so they can retain their healthy jungle tan.

So pleased was London Zoo with this pioneering structure,

that a year later, Lubetkin won a second commission.

And it was for this next building that Lubetkin really made his mark,

creating an enduring image, an icon, of the modern movement in Britain.

This was no mere zoo building.

This was an ideological statement and the British public's first taste of hard-core modernism.

The penguin pool.

Lubetkin created a stunning stage on which the penguins

would show off to each other and to the zoo's visitors.

Reinforced concrete was a pioneering material he used to create the pool's central feature

of intertwining ramps.

Never before in Britain had concrete been used with such verve

in such a minimalist, sculptural, daring fashion.

In fact, this elegant, swirling form could only have been built with concrete reinforced with steel.

But although a brilliant modern design, this must have proved a miserable home for penguins.

What Lubetkin had overlooked or ignored was the lifestyle of the penguins.

In summer, they were trapped in an open-air oven.

And though the penguins seemed happy enough using the ramps, they totally ignored the diving tank.

Neither were the gorillas happy in their concrete drum,

and by 1939 had been moved out to more suitable surroundings.

The penguins lasted a little longer in their modernist home,

but today the pool lies empty.

As with the gorilla house, the irony of a functionalist building not actually functioning

was passed over.

In fact, the popularity of Lubetkin's work at London Zoo

helped launch modernism into the wider world,

and in a sense, showed that the British public were at last embracing modernist architecture.

When the public votes for Britain's ugliest buildings, brutalist architecture usually tops the list.

Yet nearly £2 million of public money's been spent on renovating this building,

while the same amount has been sought to demolish this one.

Most people think brutalism is where modern architecture went too far,

but I really admire this.

The question is, do you have to be an architect to like brutalism?

And what should we do with these spiky survivors of the '60s?

Let's clear up one of the myths.

It's not called brutalism because the architects wanted to be brutal.

The tag comes from the French word brute, which means raw.

The surface texture on these buildings is rough and ready.

You can still see the grain of the wood used to mould the concrete.

This was architecture trying to be totally honest about how a building's made and what it does.

The style was pioneered in the '50s by big names like Le Corbusier.

By the '60s, it was being used to rebuild post-war Britain.

So when Portsmouth needed a new shopping centre,

it got one of the first privately-built examples of brutalism.

This is what the shiny future looks like now.

This is classic brutalism.

The forms are incredibly sculptural.

There are access decks to walk around and the staircases and services are on the outside.

I find lumps of concrete like this sexy. I've never seen such an expressive car park ramp.

It was way ahead of its time. Richard Rogers's Lloyd's building was praised for similar details 20 years later.

The Tricorn's architect insists there's nothing wrong with his original design,

just with where it was built and how it's been treated.

If it had been maintained,

if it had actually had all the finishes that were necessary,

the shiny shop fronts, the planting as well,

I think people'll be less aware of its brutality. And I would have hoped,

over a period of years, that people would have come to accept it, at least, if not actually enjoyed it.

A lot of people have complained that this building looks ugly. What's your response to that?

Well, I'm very surprised. A lot of people like the building.

One thing I do find is that any piece of architecture

worth being called architecture is usually both hated and loved.

If people don't notice it, it's not architecture.

Rodney has drawn up plans for how his building could be resurrected for the 21st century

and is in talks with the site's developers.

But Portsmouth Council is determined to flatten it.

They want a European grant for it to be demolished, even before there are firm plans to replace it.

The government won't protect the Tricorn by listing it.

They said it's not unique.

While the wrecking ball stands by in Portsmouth, builders are renovating

London's shopping centre for the arts, the South Bank.

It, too, was threatened with demolition.

Some people still think that's a good idea.

On your right-hand side, you will see the Royal National Theatre.

It was described by Prince Charles to look like the back of a nuclear power station,

and it was voted by the public as being one of the ugliest buildings within London.

We don't quite agree with that.

We think that building there to our right is the ugliest building in the world.

My tour guide would have loved a plan for the Hayward Gallery in the '80s,

which completely buried it under a bright new facade.

A more respectful redevelopment has finally begun.

I like the fact that it's an authentic piece of '60s design

-and the fact that it's uncompromising.

-Yeah.

There are only three windows in the whole building

and two of those were forced on the original designers. They didn't want them.

Because there are no windows, it's all about surfaces and spaces.

I've heard so many descriptions, like an adventure playground for Daleks,

like a frozen Picasso sculpture.

It's like a battleship peppered with pill boxes.

And we're moving away from this idea of judging a building on whether it's ugly or beautiful.

Brutalist buildings are truly three-dimensional.

They work, quite literally, on a number of levels.

This makes them ideal for a sport which hardly anyone had heard of when they were built.

This is skateable architecture.

But just when people are learning to love brutalism, we're in danger of losing some of the best examples.

As part of the latest plans for the South Bank, the skaters' undercroft

and concert halls above it could be destroyed.

I think it would be terrible to lose these, or the Tricorn.

If nothing else, they should be saved as monuments to the '60s.

An era which was much more heroic and ambitious than ours.

What will future generations think if we knocked these buildings down now?

995 flats, an average of three persons in a flat. So that's nearly 3,000 people in here.

People don't like Park Hill.

Some people don't, because of its outside appearance,

but they don't come to look inside.

And I don't mean inside of their houses, I mean inside the community.

It's like being in heaven up here because we've always been poor people

and these places are just lovely for us,

either for old age or young age.

What I like best about the kitchen is the sink unit.

And then you've got the cooker, which is electric.

Then this is the bathroom.

It's got a nice heated rail.

And along here is the living room.

In here, again, you've got your central heating and nice big windows again.

Altogether, we like it all.

The Park Hill estate stands on a craggy slope above Sheffield.

Completed in 1961,

it was the most ambitious public housing scheme in post-war Britain.

Park Hill didn't attempt to find a cosy British version of modernism.

Its immense scale,

its huge block zigzagging along the escarpment above the city -

this was brutal modernism on a European scale.

The idea was to build bigger new, but retain a sense of community.

Three, four,

five, six,

seven, eight. Down. Down.

These broad decks linking the flats

were intended to evoke the community spirit of the traditional street.

Here people would meet, gather, chat around the doors.

Children would play.

But it all happened up in the air.

Very convivial. And unlikely as it seems now, it worked.

People got to know each other very quickly.

I played out there regularly.

And I loved it, cos my mum and dad knew where I was.

If I wanted to go to the playground at the bottom, they could look out of the window and see that I was there.

Everything was new, it was sparkling, it was modern.

Fridges, which not many people had fridges in them days... So everything - it was all a new experience.

We could make ice-cubes to put in our drinks, you know. And it were just fabulous.

We had everything on our doorstep. We had sweet shops, cake shops.

You mention it, we had it there.

We had a milkman, as well,

that delivered milk every morning onto your doorstep.

We had four pubs and every one of them in them days used to be full.

It were just a great community to start with.

In less than three decades, the estate was in trouble.

What had been popular public housing

now assumed a threatening aspect of an inner-city sink estate.

The streets in the sky turned from being a focus of community life into a muggers' paradise.

Now, it's become everyone's least favourite place to live -

a concrete prison.

Whichever way you look at it, Park Hill is something of a whodunnit.

You can't help but feel that somewhere along the line, a crime has been committed against humanity.

The problem is working out exactly what the crime is and who's the guilty party.

For some, it's the architects who are to blame because, whatever their worthy ideals,

they imposed an alien concrete megastructure on the people of Sheffield.

But others argue that the early happy years of Park Hill would have continued

if only it had been properly managed and maintained by the local authority.

The battle to apportion blame goes on as ferociously today as it ever did.

About 50 years ago, there was a positive outbreak of house-building fever

as councils decided they wanted to move their populations out of the noisy, smelly centre of the city

and put them in purpose-built estates.

And here in Swansea, they had all sorts of experimental answers,

and other councils used to come and have a look and see how they were getting on,

and make their choices from the things they could see in Swansea.

Now we're told there've got to be millions more houses,

but for people of my generation, this brings us out in a rash.

We worry. Are we going to make the same mistakes all over again?

The idea then was that people would live over there, shop over here, work over there and play...

The only trouble is that everything needed to be linked by an efficient network of roads.

The ring road, the link road, the trunk road - thousands of roads.

And it seems, far from linking us, it has the effect of shoving us all in cars.

Walking anywhere seems downright perverse.

Well, we're building again.

And this time, it's going to happen in the areas where dirty,

heavy industry of the past has been cleared away.

This is not only regeneration, it's a new vision,

which is is to free ourselves from giant link roads,

by putting work, play and housing all in one area.

Much as it was, wasn't it, in our original cities?

Who's to say that all these new ideas are that much more effective or right?

Because everybody had faith in the old ideas.

I think it was very much...

At that time, it was a very top-down approach.

It was, "We know best. We're going to do this."

And it was all about massive development - the scale was massive.

Whereas I think now we're realising that you've got to involve the local community.

So partly it's about scale and involvement.

If you start with the idea of quality and you say quality's going to be about good design,

that involves using top architects, and top architects are quite expensive, aren't they?

Yes, but again, it'd be worth finding out.

And you learn from experience that, unless you get that high quality, then you eventually pay for it.

We're not just competing with Wales and the rest of the UK. We're competing with Ireland,

with other parts of Europe. We're competing with America. So it's got to be about quality.

But it's not just about the quality design. Are the buildings sustainable?

Whether they're residential or whether they're offices.

Are they low in energy use?

But also, is it sustainable and accessible in transport terms?

There's no point putting huge developments in and people have got to use cars, their cars,

in order to get to their work or shopping.

But is there a sense that these flats are just for wealthy people?

Some of them are, but there will also be development for social housing.

The old marina, Maritime Quarter of Swansea,

has a mix of private-sector development and social housing. And it's worked.

We've found from experience that having isolated developments,

particularly in the cities, just doesn't work and you need that mix.

But what do the locals think?

It does look glamorous. It looks much better than the other side, definitely.

They are quite stark compared to this development,

which is far more interesting to look at as a building.

And have they been a success, do you know?

Well, I know for a fact, a friend of mine was the quantity surveyor on this project

and virtually these flats were sold out before the project was finished.

I think people are pleased that Swansea is getting some development.

I think a lot of people think all the development goes to Cardiff,

and they like it that Swansea is having a lot more development here.

I love this Swansea-Cardiff thing! To somebody coming in, we know that one way or another,

it all comes down to the fact that Cardiff gets what Swansea doesn't!

MUSIC: "Wonderful Copenhagen"

# Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen! #

Welcome to Copenhagen.

# Once I sailed away But I'm home today... #

When I was RIBA President, we gave Copenhagen our first European City Of The Year award

for its very people-centred approach to planning.

And that's why Copenhagen's such an inspiration.

It's also a city with rough corners - no Paris or Milan.

A city with an historic harbour at its heart, a similar climate to the UK,

and 40 or 50 years ago, a city that had lost its way.

At the forefront of this people-focused approach to regeneration

are the world-renowned Gehl Architects,

and I'm going to meet partners in the firm, Helle Soholt and Lars Gemzoe.

What do they think creates the perfect living street?

I think it's very important that there is

a mix of pedestrians, bicycles, cars.

A mix of small shops, bigger shops.

Some shops are down in the basement, others are on the ground floor.

We have people living on top in apartments.

There is a great mix of activities taking place

and that is why this is working as a 24-hour street.

-So it's a vertical and horizontal mix?

-Yes. Yes.

I think there's an interesting change here in Copenhagen

when it all started to make the environment better.

The whole notion was that this is a shopping area.

Today it's much more seen as a meeting place.

People looking at other people is the key thing that we all love to do

and it's also a way where public space becomes, in the best cases,

the place where you can learn what society is.

In sites that are underpinned by sound statistical data, how have you applied your studies?

I mean, what have you discovered by watching, this people watching, that you're so good at?

One of the things that we learnt out of this

is how important it is to make people visible in the planning process.

Just the sheer fact that we got information about what people actually do in public spaces.

How would you set about deciding on priorities

for regeneration of that sort?

The most important thing is to ensure diversity.

Diversity in public spaces,

diversity in streets, diversity in parks,

diversity in housing, so that you ensure in the very end, a diversity of people.

Such diversity is often missing from UK developments.

But in Copenhagen, there are examples all over the city.

But how to see them all in the time?

These city bikes are found on virtually every corner in central Copenhagen

and they're free for anyone to use.

You've just got to put in a deposit like a supermarket trolley and you're away.

And wish me luck.

This is brilliant.

First stop is Sankt Hans Torv,

a new public square that's been created in the place of a busy road junction.

A good place to try some of Lars's and Helle's people watching for myself.

I'm now going to play wildlife presenter.

We're going to see how this species behaves in its habitat.

Let's observe.

VIOLIN PLAYS

There's all signs of life here.

There are people just sitting,

standing, eating,

just lying and sopping up the sun.

The kids playing.

There are courtship displays.

And there's even a a guy over there who seems to be totally passed out.

It's no accident that this place is popular.

It's a very thriving mixed-youth area with people living, working.

There are live uses at ground floor. There's a kiosk in the square. There are cafes.

And there are proper corner shops where you can buy useful things.

There are places you can put your bike. You can even climb on this work of art.

It has become a real urban village green.

And that is the approach we need if real regeneration is to work.

When a 2½ mile section of elevated motorway opened in West London,

residents were faced with six lanes of traffic hurtling past their homes at bedroom level.

ALL CHANT

All the traffic is pouring past here. It's light at the moment.

By three days, four days, it'll be intensely heavy.

Meanwhile, the families in this road and the 142 children, like the youngster here,

will have to sleep in the front rooms because there's no room at the back.

And we're planning more demonstrations unless they assure us that something is going to be done.

-All your neighbours are leaving.

-Yes.

-Do you wish you were going with them?

-I do. I've lived in the street all my life

and I want to get out now.

But the Westway was only the start.

There was a much more radical plan in the pipeline.

Inspired by American freeways, it was called the motorway box.

30 miles of elevated motorway forcing its way through central London.

It is a controversial proposal, since it involves a complete ring

of four- and eight-lane highways so close to the heart of London.

The motorway box will be driven through some of the most densely populated parts of London.

With the newly opened Westway there for all to see,

Londoners realised what the impact of the motorway box would be.

Well, I object to having things steamrolled over me

without being able to say what I feel. And I've found that a great many people felt the same way.

Homes Before Roads's campaign believes things have been got out of perspective by County Hall.

Homes Before Roads was a new political party, formed to fight the proposed motorway box.

That has been boosted up to a position that will dominate London.

The scale of the proposals was extraordinary.

The so-called motorway box went through Kensington, Battersea,

Lambeth, Hackney, Camden.

Tight-built Victorian terraces.

So it was going to be this huge motorway, in many cases elevated,

through all the inner-London boroughs.

How can you build any new road through London

without taking down somebody's house?

Well, I think this is obvious.

You will take down somebody's house in building a new road

but, in fact, we're talking here of taking down the houses or the homes

of hundreds of thousands of people.

Homes Before Roads succeeded in putting up over 80 candidates

in the 1970 Greater London council elections.

This is a borough in which the so-called motorway box

is expected to cut a swathe through the housing.

And there has been a very great deal of interest to see how many boats the Homes Before Roads candidates

take away from the traditional parties.

The Conservatives won the election and were committed to building the motorway box.

It was a defeat for Homes Before Roads, but they would have the final victory.

When Labour regained control of the capital three years later,

they immediately dropped the motorway box.

Opinion was changing about building motorways in London.

Modernism was very destructive.

It was very narrowly focused on getting modern roads built,

getting comprehensive development done, and it didn't pay very much attention to the people themselves.

Around the end of the '60s, beginning of the 70s, there was a huge flip change

in popular attitudes,

from a belief in wholesale reconstruction of cities

around the car, to a belief in conservation, preservation

of the existing city, limiting the impact of the car on the city to the maximum extent possible.

It was one of the biggest and most sudden psychological changes I've ever observed

and I think that ever occurred in the history of the 20th century.

One of the local members said,

"Well, you know the route goes through Britain's best butterfly wood, don't you?"

And that was it.

That was something that would get people interested.

Butterflies and bunny rabbits always do it for people.

41 of Britain's 53 species have been recorded here,

and Friends Of The Earth campaigner Joe Weston is waging an uphill struggle to save them from the M40.

We've got some very, very rare butterflies here. Purple Emperor and the Black Hairstreak.

Fast disappearing from the British countryside, in very much danger

of disappearing from this environment if the motorway's completed.

Once we'd made those arguments and we'd had the cameras out and the press out once,

where do you go from there? What happens next?

The environmental group Friends Of The Earth have come up with a new ploy

for making life difficult for the motorway planners.

We decided to buy this field and then sell off the land in small plots

to thousands of people, hopefully all over the world,

-that would then completely

-BLEEP

-up their compulsory purchase process.

But Joe needed publicity for his cunning plan.

Lewis Caroll had been a regular visitor to Otmoor

and it was the inspiration for Through The Looking Glass.

"For some minutes, Alice stood without speaking, looking out

"in all directions over the country, and a most curious country it was.

"There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side.

"'I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard,' Alice said at last."

And so Joe renamed his field Alice's Meadow.

This wasn't any longer just wildlife.

This wasn't any longer just landscape. This was cultural heritage as well.

Home in the summer of many of Britain's rarest butterflies

and a scene which it's said inspired Lewis Caroll's chessboard landscape in Alice.

The idea of turning all this could frustrate the government's efforts to complete the motorway.

One afternoon, we had the BBC,

the head of the Department Of Transport, the Minister Of Transport.

He's a member of a cabinet that can make laws.

ITV, Breakfast Television.

If the route is approved, then notices will have to be served on all the landowners.

We even had a crew that had flown in from Sidon.

Israeli tanks had been shelling the hotel that they were in the day before.

The next day they'd flown to Otmoor to film this story for NBC.

This plot of land where I'm standing belongs to Alex Warman of Oslo in Norway.

And this one belongs to Alan Parker of Melbourne.

This field has been divided into 3,000 separate plots.

Friends Of The Earth have sold those plots to 3,000 different people from all over the world.

We were even interviewed by the Tokyo Times. It was just amazing.

We could have sold England. It was incredible.

When the M40 was finally built, its route avoided Otmoor and today, it still remains untouched.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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