Anna Keay: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why were so many big mistakes made in the middle part of the 20th century? St. Pancras almost was knocked down, as I’m sure you know. That would have been a huge blunder. There was something about that time that people seem to have become more interested in ugliness. Or what’s your theory? How do you explain the insanity that took all of Britain for, what, 30 years? Well, I think this is such a good question because this is, to me, what the study of history is all about, which is, you have to think about what it was like for that generation. You have to think of what it was like for people in the 1950s and ’60s, who had experienced, either firsthand or very close at hand, not just one but two catastrophic world wars in which numbers had been killed, places had been destroyed. The whole human cost of that time was so colossal, and the idea for that generation that something really fundamental had to change if we were going to be a society that wasn’t going to be killing one another at all time. This has a real sort of mirror in the 17th century, during the Civil War in the 17th century. There’s a real feeling that something had to be done. Otherwise, God was going to strike down this nation, this errant nation. I think for that generation in the ’50s and ’60s, the sense that we simply have to do things differently because this pattern of life, this pattern of existence, this way we’ve operated as a society has been so destructive. Although lots of things were done — when it comes to urban planning and so on — that we really regret now, I think you have to be really careful not to diminish the seriousness of intent of those people who were trying to conceive of what that world might be — more egalitarian, more democratic, involving more space, more air, more light, healthier — all these kinds of things. We can see lots now that we say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. This is not how society works.” But we didn’t experience what they experienced. I actually have real respect for a lot of that. I think a lot of things that were done . . . I’m going tomorrow to see a place somewhere called Letchworth, the world’s first garden city, which was planned and laid out north of London in the 1910s, which was completely about saying we’ve got to design a new world. I think it’s good to have a bit of humility in considering these decisions because people don’t go around wantonly trying to destroy the environment. They think that they’re doing the right thing. If we look at most of the Western world, it seems to me that after World War II, there are very few, really very few beautiful new neighborhoods created. A lot of spectacular individual buildings, but it’s very hard to find neighborhoods that are as nice as what was built in the 1890s, the 1910s. Depends on the country, the era. What happened to neighborhood architecture? Why did it so radically decline in wealthier societies?…

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