Scrambled City: Deindustrialisation and the Merging of Town and Country in late-Twentieth Century Britain

Speaker: Assistant professor Dr Otto Saumarez Smith

John Madin's plan for Telford

The original conception of the Garden Cities proposed a new relationship between town and countryside. This talk is about the fullest realisation in Britain of such a merging of the urban and the rural, not least in the Mark III New Towns of the 1970s, which were , bound together by networks of roads, telephone wires, and electricity pylons. The talk will keep in sight the fact that these processes happened in places with existing environmental and architectural histories, and intersected with other centrifugal processes such as electrification, deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, and automatability.

Otto Saumarez Smith is Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is currently researching and writing 'The End of Urban Modernism in the 1970s'. He is a Trustee and Chair of the Casework Committee for the Twentieth Century Society