Los Angeles: Even before it’s finished, it’s got an anticipated price tag of $500,000,000 … in the exclusive suburb of Bel Air. ibid.
At the heart of Mayfair an extraordinary home is being built unseen by the public. A £65m refurbishment of over 43,000 square feet of living space – all for one exacting client. Britain’s Most Expensive Home: Building for a Billionaire, Channel 4 2020
For fifty years BBC has been making programmes about British homes. It’s gone mad with makeovers, it’s finessed our food, it’s directed our leisure time, and it’s planted ideas in our back gardens. The Home that 2 Built s1e1: The Sixties, BBC 2020
It was a decade of such extreme and rapid change … [BBC2] began with a range of how-to programmes that were reassuringly old-fashioned. ibid.
The basics of life: growing things, eating things, and having somewhere nice to live. ibid.
They began with cookery … ‘From all over the world comes a flood of raw materials’ … Now austerity was a thing of the past … [BBC2] set about making food programmes of various kinds, but their early offerings were as bland as boiled cabbage. ibid.
‘Hello and good evening and welcome to Know Your Onions. Now, this is a programme about food, something we all have to have.’ ibid.
Is it Ever too Late to Learn? ibid.
Fanny Cradock was a professional food writer and cook whose avowed mission was to get rich women to up their game … In the mid-60s BBC hired her as their main food presenter. ibid.
Fanny Cradock’s message to the housewives of Britain was powerful too: be modern, be bold, climb out of your rut and experiment. With the advent of colour TV, viewers realised she brought those ambitions to her outfits as well: she was great television. ibid.
People were sick of living in dreary homes. They wanted a place that felt modern, clean and stylish. ibid.
Homeholders all over the land began to ‘do up’. Older properties in particular started to get a face-lift. ibid.
1967: In Your Place: in its day it was a ground-breaker. ibid.
‘The surface which I’m suggesting for the worktops, erm, is an asbestos sheet. Now, it’s very hard. It’s slightly more expensive.’ ibid. home design visit
Habitat: ‘For some people modern design served straight will suit their eye and suit their wallet’ … More extreme ’60s’ looks were available. ibid. contemporary commentary
Margaret Powell [Waring & Gillow] v David Hicks [Habitat] – the pair were asked to go shopping for furniture and design their favourite room … they swapped rooms and then the fun began. ibid.
Gardening Club with Percy Thrower, filmed in a fake studio shed, was watched by up to five million people. ibid.
In 1968 BBC2 got in on the garden boom with a new series: Gardeners’ World … Sadly, for vintage anoraks, only a handful of Gardeners’ World survives. ibid.
The most fragmented decade of them all: 1970s. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a time of wisdom, it was a time of foolishness, the ’70s started on a rising tide of ’60s’ optimism and modernity. The Home that 2 Built s1e2: Seventies
The first time in our history when more people owned their house than rented. ibid.
BBC reflected the new house-owning fashion in their hit comedy of the period: 1972’s The Return of the Likely Lads. ibid.
The housing boom created a golden age of DIY as people started to do up old houses or repair new ones. ibid.
Make Your Own Furniture with Albert Jackson & David Day. ibid.
134,531. We needed a domestic goddess. We needed Delia [Smith] … In Delia’s first cookery course on [BBC]2 she taught the basics. ibid.
6 breweries in the 1970s brewed 72% of all our beer. ibid.
BBC2 was much much happier with more traditional forms of horticulture. With well ordered gardens in a disordered world. ibid.
Geoffrey Smith: All in a Day’s Gardening. ibid.
‘We’ve gone through a very silly period when we thought that man with his technology was all powerful and could save us from every kind of ill.’ ibid. Professor Magnus Pike
‘Gardening was suddenly regarded as sexy.’ The Home that 2 Built s1e3: Eighties, Alan Titchmarsh of fellow gardener Charlie
The decade of loads-a-money: thanks to fast cash and even faster technology British home life changed quicker than ever before in the ’80s. More people would own their homes, more money would be spent on them, and more time spent in them. ibid.
A third were renting from the council, almost one in three didn’t have central heating, over a million homes were declared unfit for human habitation. ibid.
Barbara Woodhouse was a dog-training dominatrix: Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way. ibid.
Margaret Thatcher’s … right-to-buy scheme gave Britain’s five million tenants a discount deal to buy their houses. ibid.
Arthur Negus Enjoys … Gardener’s World: still going strong today … ibid.
1982 Madhur Jaffrey … Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery … Food & Drink … Keith Floyd: a complete departure from cookery programmes of the past … Floyd on France … ibid.
Richard Stillgoe [sic.]: Looking Good, Feeling Fit … Eamonn Holmes: Bazaar. ibid.
By the middle of the decade three million homes had a home computer. BBC2 crashed into the craze with the series Micro Live … ibid.
Another device that plugged into TVs: video cassette recorder: viz. Tomorrow’s World … By 1985 more households had VCRs than cars. ibid.
This was the era in which things got personal and emotional as a makeover takeover gripped Britain. And a creative tornado was unleashed. The Home that 2 Built s1e4: Nineties
Ikea advert: ‘Chuck out the chintz today’. ibid.
BBC: Changing Rooms … Ground Force … Home Front … The Naked Chef … Escape to the Country … ibid.
‘Property shows killed makeover shows.’ ibid. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
Manchester: one of Britain’s fastest developing cities. The skyline is being transformed in front of our eyes as thousands of new high-rise homes appear every month. With the population set to double in the next five years there will be property winners and losers. When billions are being invested in the two square miles of the city centre how will this change the lives of everyone who lives and works in this city? Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom I, BBC 2020
Less than 20% of new homes built are affordable. ibid.
There are around 250 living rough on the streets of Greater Manchester. ibid.
Local property developer Tim Healey is building on five sites across the city of Manchester ranging from mill conversions to hotels and new apartments. One of Tim’s largest projects is the creation of a whole new neighbourhood; called Campus, it’s on the site of the old university and includes five hundred apartments. Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom III
Manchester’s newest apartment block – the West Tower – has opened to its first residents today. 44 floors of the West Tower are owned by pension giant Legal & General, and all 350 of its apartments are available to rent. Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom IV
The last great vision for high-rise living in Manchester was after the slum clearances of the 1960s when the council wanted to create new communities and streets in the sky. But just 21 years after they were built they were demolished. ibid.
‘The corporation decided for them and it decided wrong.’ ibid. old documentary commentary