A clip charting the redevelopment of the city of Aylesbury shows its age.
How do you create modern facilities in a historic town? Judging by this 1972 film, a good idea might be to examine what England did in the small city of Aylesbury—and then do exactly the opposite.
This intriguing clip from British Pathé, designed to run in movie theaters before the main feature, explores what happened to the town 45 miles northwest of London in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Designated an “overspill town” by the Greater London Council, Aylesbury was expanded by official decree as part of a constellation of exurban satellites, intended to accommodate exiles from the capital in cities that lay beyond the greenbelt on which all construction was banned.
The results of this transformation shown in the film are grim—at least according to soon-to-be disgraced presenter Bill Grundy, whose career ended four years later after he actively encouraged the Sex Pistols to swear on live TV. According to Grundy’s version of Aylesbury’s transformation, historic streets in what was once a sleepy market town have been flattened with a vast load of cement, while an obtrusive, charmless Brutalist civic center towers over a weathered roofscape.
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