The Radburn Idea 4: A Bretton Summer

I was talking to someone yesterday about this blog. At the time, I was acutely conscious of the feeling that I can strictly no longer refer to this site as a 'blog' at all. The word implies the keeping of a log, with regular entries, and that is just what I'm not doing at present. Since the publication in 2017 of my book, Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time, I've kind of ground to a halt. 

Middlefield (still available to buy for a modest sum here) is a lovely thing even if I say so myself, and a book that I maintain is like no other in the still limited historiography of the postwar council estate. It is a micro-study of a council estate, but it sometimes seems to me to be so micro, so featherlight, so personal even, that I wonder if anyone got it at all. Its dwindling nature was recently further compounded by the fact that someone - I have no idea who - at the university where I work gave it a paltry 1.5* rating for the forthcoming Research Evaluation Framework exercise - and this in an institution where it is beginning to be decreed from high that only 3* research ('internationally excellent') really counts these days. But it counts to me and so I press on, regardless. 

In the somewhat accelerated scheme of everyday life in Britain today, the summer of 2019 seems like an age ago, but back then I was thinking of ways out of this malaise, and that the best method for doing this was to get out and about. This always manages to loosen up my mind, to get me thinking about new lines of enquiry so, way back at the end of June, I found myself back in Peterborough, looking for more evidence of how postwar planners and architects were experimenting with the principles of Radburn planning. The photos below are of Bretton, one of three ‘townships’ designed and built in around 1974 following Peterborough’s designation as a third-wave New Town in 1967. 

It is a measure of the depth of that malaise that I'm only just putting these photos up here now, at the end of October 2019. But as I look at them now, I no longer care very much whether Bretton was 'true Radburn, or 'modified', or anything. It is just a very lovely place. At the start of June, I'd spent a few days in Utrecht, that miraculous city of the pedestrian and of the bicycle. I'd walked out to see the Rietveld Schröder House through a range of postwar pedestrianised suburbs. Such planning was always about new possibilities, new modes for living, and I was often reminded of those suburbs even as I later walked through the admittedly run-down (in parts) planned landscape of Bretton (which has suffered through seemingly endless years of right-to-buy, private sub-letting, and the 'actions' of a number of different and somewhat indifferent private housing associations). So what follows is a kind of photo-essay only, because I want these pictures to almost speak for themselves, but to also speak up for a way we were meant to live in the 1970s and, perhaps, for how we should live now.

The hanging gardens of Bretton

The postwar link-maisonette tradition

The 'kickabout' area (cf. 'A typology of children's play spaces') 

John Constable's 'eye salve'