Page 77 - BBC History - September 2017

Jonathan Wright previews the pick of upcoming programmes
Streets Apart
considers
the history TV&RADIO
of Britain’s
social housing

Home truths Competing identities
Streets Apart: The Story MAGAZINE
of Social Housing Patrick Wright tells us about his new radio series CHOICE
RADIO BBC Radio 4 exploring different notions of Englishness
Scheduled for Monday 28 August
One effect of the Grenfell Tower tragedy The English Fix are in charge, he proposed a new kind
was to bring issues around social housing RADIO BBC Radio 4 of left-wing patriotism. “His argument
into the mainstream. Offering context Scheduled for Monday 11 September was that basically you can’t go into this
for these debates, Lynsey Hanley’s war and rally the people without
10-part weekday series looks back to When all is well in Albion, says Patrick offering a better society in the future,”
consider how politicians, social reform- Wright, English identity is something says Wright.
ers and architects have approached pro- the English themselves tend not to It’s an argument that’s often been
viding housing for those most in need. worry about. Rather, English identity invoked down the years, yet the nuances
Encompassing Victorian model villages, is allowed to become subsumed by of Orwell’s writing about class and
postwar new towns and 1960s housing Britishness, in great part in the interests assumptions of racial superiority seem
estates, it concludes by asking how, in of getting on with the other home to have been lost. “Throughout this
2017, social housing fits with the notion nations. But this doesn’t hold true series, this is the big problem [we
of a property-owning democracy. in times of crisis. address],” says Wright, “that the cultural
“The rallying of English identity reaction to change is always to simplify
only tends to happen in moments of complexity. That’s how you rally people,
emergency, when the politeness of not you create a great simplification.”
existing for the sake of British equality is In the case of Betjeman and his
no longer compelling,” argues the writer. battles against town planners, there’s
It’s a theme Wright explores by a simplification in terms of image too,
looking at attempts by four different in that he is often shown as “a cute
figures – George Orwell, John Betjeman, old teddy bear who wrote these funny
Barbara Castle and the conservative poems”. Yet his position was less
political philosopher Roger Scruton – to conservative than many allow, bound
resist a perceived enemy. The wider aim up with ideas about urban areas being
is to trace how the nation-in-peril unity pleasant places to live. “He was
of the early Second World War has defending Metroland, he was defending
Hacker Robert Morris, author of the fallen apart. the suburban dream and garden city
internet’s first computer worm in 1988 Wright’s first subject is fantasies,” says Wright. “It’s not
Tangled web Orwell and ‘England like he was a grisly old
Your England’, his essay aristocrat.”
Geeks and Dreamers: written as Nazi bombers The series also considers
The Story of the Internet pummelled England’s Barbara Castle’s suspicion of
RADIO BBC Radio 4 cities. Likening US influence in the UK and
Scheduled for Wednesday 16 August England to a family Roger Scruton’s thinking on
where the wrong people English rural life.
The internet is in key respects an
ungovernable space. What can we do
about this? Maybe not much, suggests
Aleks Krotoski in a series tracing the
internet’s history, because many of George Orwell,
these problems are hardwired into it. who in 1941–43
helped produce
Still, it may help us to understand how
propaganda for
this all came about, and Krotoski profiles the BBC
digital pioneers, including Tim Berners-
Lee, inventor of the world wide web; “Rallying English
traces the security issues that became identity only
GETTY/ALAMY unleashed the first malicious computer tends to happen
evident when, in 1988, Robert Morris
worm; and concludes by asking whether
in moments of
the internet needs a reboot.
emergency”

BBC History Magazine 77