Basildon: impoverished utopia

This documentary about Basildon (New Town Utopia, produced and directed by Christopher Ian Smith) was remarkable for encapsulating a few key years in British social history, with the following key dates:

1948      Foundation of new town of Basildon
1980      The Housing Act under Margaret Thatcher provides council tenants with the “right to buy”.
1974      arrival of the railway (Basildon) – the line was already there when Basildon was founded, but it took more than 25 years for a station to be built. 

The documentary is punctuated by rather patronising comments from Lewis Silkin, planning minister under Atlee, on the vision of Basildon – a very top-down view, guaranteed to alienate the residents. That attitude is mercifully no longer with us. Other indicators of Basildon’s development would be the politics of the town. In 1974 Basildon was a safe Labour seat, then switched to the Tories in 1979, and remained Tory to 1997. Since 2010 it has been Conservative again.

The contrasts highlighted by this documentary include

-          From a town with its own industry, a town where there was no need to travel anywhere else, to a commuter town for London. The railway must have changed the whole composition of the town.

-          From a town based around social provision of amenities, at little or no cost, to a town where you ignored what was already there and bought your own version of theatre, gym, whatever; from a social community to a consumer society (at least, that’s the claim of this film).

In passing, you couldn’t help noticing:

-          An almost complete lack of ethnic minorities in the documentary. Most of the people interviewed were old and white, and most of them male.

-          The documentary is almost entirely based around musicians and painters. Although their view is interesting, it’s only one view; there is no attempt to create a rounded view of Basildon.

So, what are we to make of Basildon from this documentary?The Guardian called it “unapologetically upbeat”; I wouldn’t go so far as that.  Is it a tragic memorial to top-down planning? Is is a memorial to the generation who successfully moved out of London to live in what must have seemed a green paradise? A time capsule of 1960s urban design, most likely, with its one “significant” building, Brooke House, Grade II listed, trying to be vaguely Corbusian but lacking the courage of its convictions.