| Description | Shots of peeling plaster, exposed brickwork, broken window, graffiti, etc. Jessie Watkins says the estate had declined into slum conditions by the 1970s. Alice Cole said she asked to be moved out. Boarded-up windows. Overflowing dustbins. June Parsons says there’s no community there and it’s "totally different" from what it was.
Gardens today. Film from the 1930s of people working in the same garden space, children playing, women having tea together. Watkins talking about how everyone came to know their neighbours very quickly and how they would all help each other.
Commentary introduces the film as "The biography of a building, a picture of its life, from a range of people with different points of view. Stories of hopes and ideals, but also of decline and decay. The ideas that gave rise to it, and also where those ideas came from. The social circle into which they passed. The gas company which financed it. The stories of the people who have lived in it over two generations. A particular choice of views. Views of Kensal House.". Architects plans and drawings intercut with shots of buildings and surroundings. Extract from Kensal House (1938), showing houses of the period, local man describing living conditions, Maxwell Fry talking about the Gas, Light and Coke Company building blocks of "working class flats"; models, finished buildings. Alice Cole, Resident 1936-1975, says that she was the first person to move into the block she lived in. Says the flat had hot water and a bath. June Parsons, Resident since 1936, says that her mother couldn’t believe the luxury of having a separate bedroom for the children, and an inside bath and toilet, etc. She says the buildings were known as "the Sunshine Flats". Caption: "The towpath to the North of Kensal House." Commentary asks how the designers of the flats imagined life in them. Maxwell Fry says that he and his colleague, Elizabeth Denby, wanted "really liveable flats" and some sort of "urban village life". Article by Elizabeth Denby. Extract from Kensal House showing children playing. Fry says the flats exemplified their ideas of "what urban life should be for the working classes". Commentary reads from report in The Times on a paper Denby gave at the RIBA in November 1936, in which she said that working people considered flats to be "inadequate for families whose lives centred in an around the home". Newspaper advertisements for staff and for holidays, etc. Fry points out that there were communal workrooms and committee rooms in one of the blocks which provided space for activities which couldn’t easily be carried on in a small flat. Cole describes meeting Frank Sainsbury and Elizabeth Denby and being appearing in a film about her little girl and the Kensal House nursery school, and about the women’s social club. |
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