Showing posts with label housing estates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label housing estates. Show all posts

Wednesday, 15 August 2018

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.















Monday, 26 June 2017

Aztec Gods and Twentieth Century Housing Estates

Sunday, 6 March 2016








9 comments:

  1. F*** me, that's brilliant!
    Reply
  2. Extraordinary stuff.

    Those photographs look very elaborately staged... I wonder whether this was tied in with a TV programme, or else some kind of real life project for kids?

    Also: they ate a bison?! No wonder the town engineer looks so aggrieved at this outbreak of modern day primitivism.
    Reply
  3. TV prog - YES, according to TV Cream. Made in Holland and broadcast in the holiday morning slot on UK telly apparently, though I don't remember seeing it.
    Reply
  4. Top stuff indeed Dolly. Looks like we all missed this one. I have no recollection of this being on TV at all during the holiday morning slot. Has any one seen it???
    Reply
  5. I wonder if it was one of those "East Anglia only" jobs?
    Reply
  6. Wow first visit to this blog and I see this post, I remember reading this at middle school, something made me think about it a while ago and I could not remember the title at all, just that it had mention of an Aztec god. After many searches for kids book/Mictantlicuti or some such I gave up. And here it is!
    Reply

    Replies




    1. Almost a Nazi salute going on in that first picture.

Houses and Homes

Wednesday, 17 February 2016



From the same series as Concrete, though they'd dropped the "Children's University" tag by the time this one appeared in 1980.  Written and illustrated by Heinz Kurth.

Note the internet prediction near the end, with the button-heavy control panel and reel-to-reel tape deck.