John Grindrod - Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain

1. 1. A Holiday Camp All Year Round:
   The Temporary Building Programme and Prefabs (194451)
2. 2. A Decent Start in Life:
   Garden Cities and the First New Towns (194651)
3. 3. A Real Effort to be Jolly:
   The Festival of Britain on Londons South Bank (1951)
4. 4. An Architects Dream!:
   Rebuilding Blitzed Plymouth and Coventry (194062)
5. 5. A Touch of Genius:
   Herts, Minds and Brutalism (194954)
6. 1. A Flying Saucer Taking You to Mars:
   Glasgow, King of Comprehensive Development (195765)
7. 2. A New Dimension Added to the Street:
   Sheffields Streets in the Sky (195761)
8. 3. A Wild and Romantic Place:
   Arndales and Urban Motorways (195965)
9. 4. A Natural Evolution of Living Conditions:
   Newcastle Gets the System Building Bug (195969)
10. 5. A Contemporary Canaletto:
    How Office Blocks Transformed our Skyline (195675)
11. 6. A Village With Your Children in Mind:
    Span and the Hippy Dreams of New Ash Green (195772)
12. 7. A Veritable Jewel in the Navel of Scotland:
    Cumbernaulds Curious Megastructure (195572)
13. 1. A Pack of Cards:
    Tower Block Highs and Lows (196874)
14. 2. A Terrible Confession of Defeat:
    Protests and Preservation (196979)
15. 3. As Corrupt a City as Youll Find:
    Uncovering the Lies at the Heart of the Boom (196977)
16. 4. A Little Bit of Exclusivity:
    Milton Keynes, the Last New Town (196779)
17. 5. A City within a City:
    The Late Flowering of the Barbican and the National Theatre (195781)

A bad estate?
Tower blocks mingle with low rise flats in New Addington.

In all likelihood you have not heard of New Addington. It has few claims to fame. The most enduring export of this south London estate of 22,000 people is the Croydon Facelift, the no-mercy ponytail worn by strung-out working-class mums from the estate. Racist Tram Woman Emma West source of Twitter outrage in 2011 briefly became its most famous citizen, after a video of her racially abusing a fellow passenger was viewed 11 million times on YouTube. Kirsty MacColl wrote a song about the place: The Addington Shuffle. It seems fitting it was a B-side. And in the summer of 2012, while the Olympics were briefly transforming the rest of London into a zone of peace, harmony and love, a truly dreadful news story kept the residents of New Addington transfixed. Twelve-year-old Tia Sharp was first reported missing from her grandmothers house in The Lindens, and a week later her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the attic. Images of the fruitless searches, the wasted vigils, the shrine to the young girl were shown for days on the news, alongside Olympic champions proudly displaying their hard-won medals a few miles away in Stratford. A case like that does a lot to change a town. Owen Jones, author of Chavs, wrote on Twitter that he felt it said as much about life in poor communities as Harold Shipman did about GPs. New Addington has the lowest voter turnout of anywhere in the south of England, what politics it does have shifting over the years from staunch Labour to a recent flirtation with the far right.

Flats on the Fieldway estate.
The tree gives some idea of the high winds experienced in Little Siberia.

This vast estate was built seven miles outside Croydon town centre, on top of a hill so chilly, windswept and isolated it has earned the nickname Little Siberia. In 1935, just as green belt legislation Relations between the two settlements, ancient village and new estate, have not improved over time.