Made in Belgium

1947 - The Changing Nation

Hugh Casson.

The Contact Books series was a magazine in disguise.  When they went into production in 1946, there was a ban on new magazines (to preserve paper), so they stuck it in a hardback cover, gave each edition its own title and put the word 'book' on the front.

Fascinating reading for anyone interested in post-war planning, architecture, world afffairs, sociology etc as seen by the broadsheet sophisticat / design set of the time.  There's probably an essay to be written on this lot and their similarities / connections to globalisation, neoliberalism, centrists, Blairites etc etc.  Or maybe not, I dunno; I've probably spent too long on twitter lately.

(Maybe even the whole bake-off, Keep Calm, Middle Class Revolt thing - which we all hate, of course - and the British artists & illustrators of the UK 30s/40s - who we all love, right?   John Minton, Edward Bawden and - I *think* - Edward Ardizzone make appearances in various Contact books).

These scans are from the 7th volume.  Barbara Jones, being snotty about the suburbs in the classical style here, was best known as an illustrator.  She went on to work on - The Woodentops!  The tv series, not the band.

There's a great piece about the history of Contact HERE.

Children at Play

1973, the Department of the Environment.  The results of a survey into outdoor play on 15 local authority housing estates, all but one built during the 1960s.  Including Park Hill in Sheffield.

The text is fascinating and makes a good, dry, factual companion to Colin Ward's 'The Child in the City'.

Shocking fact: "architect designed" static concrete structures were not popular!

I ended up scanning pretty much the entire thing; I'll post more in due course.

1969