David Dimbleby
He wrote and presented the award-winning TV series An Ocean Apart, and
more recently, he presented A Picture of Britain, which explored the
way in which the British landscape has inspired artists. His latest
series, How We Built Britain, investigates the changing face of British
architecture.
How would you describe How We Built Britain?
Each of the six films is a story. Buildings are so much about power – they illustrate where the power lies. For example, you have the Normans, who are first of all establishing their authority and second trying to impress by building these huge castles and towers. Then you have the church becoming powerful and coming under attack and having to defend itself with grand buildings. Under the Tudors, and under Elizabeth in particular, you have wonderful houses such as Burghley that were built entirely to impress the queen. And before that, you had the medieval hall, with the idea of the feudal structure. This is one of the most fascinating things, because in feudalism, the lord would sit with everybody, but up on a dias, and he would eat first, again to display power. After the black death, you get a decline in feudalism because there aren’t the people, so labourers in the field can charge more and the whole system changes. As you move away from feudalism, the lord stops eating with everybody and goes to a private chamber and eats with his family, creating the beginnings of family life as opposed to courtly life. And houses change to reflect that – the halls shrink and eventually disappear.
Where do you think your interest in Britain’s landscape come from?
I think my pleasure in landscape and buildings is commonplace. Loads of people have it, and I certainly do. In A Picture of Britain, I was interested in the way
that we’ve changed how we see the landscape. And I’ve always been a building watcher – if I’m walking along a street, I never look in the shop windows, I always look above them to see what the buildings are like, what date and period they’re from. I’ve always liked to go and see buildings – when I go on holiday I don’t like going to the beach, I like investigating buildings, because I think that, as the series tries to explain, they are the best guide to what people and cultures are like.
Were there many buildings that you wanted to feature but couldn’t?
Oh loads and loads. All the way through I kept ringing up and asking why we couldn’t include everything we’d shot. You could do six programmes on each period and still make it interesting. We had a lot of discussions before we started about how to shape the whole thing. Because the idea of How We Built Britain is simple enough, there seemed to be three strands that had to be somehow brought together. One was the chronological order, looking at the main periods. The second, which I was quite interested by, was the development of particular kinds of buildings during those periods – so one of the ways we thought we might do it was to cover military defence, which would start with Norman castles and go right the way through to modern day pillboxes and early warning systems, or shopping, which would start with a little market cross in Chichester or something and end in Bluewater. Then the third strand, which we found had worked for A Picture of Britain, was that it makes it more interesting if you can focus upon a region instead of jumping around. If you jump around, you sort of lose a feel for the texture of the place and the look of the landscape. So we sat around mulling this over and in the end we decided to plump for regions, and to use each region to cover a certain period of history.
Do you think modern architecture still reflects our society and our landscapes?
I think it does, and I’ll tell you in what way. The most modern building, again where the power lies, is in corporate buildings. It’s gone away from politics and away from the church. Now it’s the Swiss Re and the Lloyd’s building – that’s where the cutting edge of building is. And I think, while there are people who
like living in modernist houses, and we have a lot of mediocre building – but you can ignore that because there’s always mediocre building going on – the great impetus of modern building is corporate buildings, public buildings, theatres such as the Sage building in Newcastle and things paid for by lottery money. All of the excitement is going on in public buildings. On the other hand, the domestic buildings and Barratt homes all suggest that privately, we want to live in cosy little Tudor- or Georgian- or Elizabethan-throwback houses. They’re the most popular houses – Victorian terrace houses in London and the same with the pseudo-Tudor houses in the Ruislip suburbs with a garden and a garage, which were much laughed at but are now very popular. We haven’t moved on from that, despite the attempts of modernist architects to get us to live, for instance in London, in concrete high-rise buildings. People won’t do it, they don’t like it. In Finland they do it, in Finland all the architecture is modernist like that, but we seem to have got into this rut and I think it does tell you something that, although we accept and embrace the future in our work and the way we entertain ourselves, when it come to our very private lives and our families, we still want to live in our own little burrows.
June 2007
How would you describe How We Built Britain?
Each of the six films is a story. Buildings are so much about power – they illustrate where the power lies. For example, you have the Normans, who are first of all establishing their authority and second trying to impress by building these huge castles and towers. Then you have the church becoming powerful and coming under attack and having to defend itself with grand buildings. Under the Tudors, and under Elizabeth in particular, you have wonderful houses such as Burghley that were built entirely to impress the queen. And before that, you had the medieval hall, with the idea of the feudal structure. This is one of the most fascinating things, because in feudalism, the lord would sit with everybody, but up on a dias, and he would eat first, again to display power. After the black death, you get a decline in feudalism because there aren’t the people, so labourers in the field can charge more and the whole system changes. As you move away from feudalism, the lord stops eating with everybody and goes to a private chamber and eats with his family, creating the beginnings of family life as opposed to courtly life. And houses change to reflect that – the halls shrink and eventually disappear.
Where do you think your interest in Britain’s landscape come from?
I think my pleasure in landscape and buildings is commonplace. Loads of people have it, and I certainly do. In A Picture of Britain, I was interested in the way
that we’ve changed how we see the landscape. And I’ve always been a building watcher – if I’m walking along a street, I never look in the shop windows, I always look above them to see what the buildings are like, what date and period they’re from. I’ve always liked to go and see buildings – when I go on holiday I don’t like going to the beach, I like investigating buildings, because I think that, as the series tries to explain, they are the best guide to what people and cultures are like.
Were there many buildings that you wanted to feature but couldn’t?
Oh loads and loads. All the way through I kept ringing up and asking why we couldn’t include everything we’d shot. You could do six programmes on each period and still make it interesting. We had a lot of discussions before we started about how to shape the whole thing. Because the idea of How We Built Britain is simple enough, there seemed to be three strands that had to be somehow brought together. One was the chronological order, looking at the main periods. The second, which I was quite interested by, was the development of particular kinds of buildings during those periods – so one of the ways we thought we might do it was to cover military defence, which would start with Norman castles and go right the way through to modern day pillboxes and early warning systems, or shopping, which would start with a little market cross in Chichester or something and end in Bluewater. Then the third strand, which we found had worked for A Picture of Britain, was that it makes it more interesting if you can focus upon a region instead of jumping around. If you jump around, you sort of lose a feel for the texture of the place and the look of the landscape. So we sat around mulling this over and in the end we decided to plump for regions, and to use each region to cover a certain period of history.
Do you think modern architecture still reflects our society and our landscapes?
I think it does, and I’ll tell you in what way. The most modern building, again where the power lies, is in corporate buildings. It’s gone away from politics and away from the church. Now it’s the Swiss Re and the Lloyd’s building – that’s where the cutting edge of building is. And I think, while there are people who
like living in modernist houses, and we have a lot of mediocre building – but you can ignore that because there’s always mediocre building going on – the great impetus of modern building is corporate buildings, public buildings, theatres such as the Sage building in Newcastle and things paid for by lottery money. All of the excitement is going on in public buildings. On the other hand, the domestic buildings and Barratt homes all suggest that privately, we want to live in cosy little Tudor- or Georgian- or Elizabethan-throwback houses. They’re the most popular houses – Victorian terrace houses in London and the same with the pseudo-Tudor houses in the Ruislip suburbs with a garden and a garage, which were much laughed at but are now very popular. We haven’t moved on from that, despite the attempts of modernist architects to get us to live, for instance in London, in concrete high-rise buildings. People won’t do it, they don’t like it. In Finland they do it, in Finland all the architecture is modernist like that, but we seem to have got into this rut and I think it does tell you something that, although we accept and embrace the future in our work and the way we entertain ourselves, when it come to our very private lives and our families, we still want to live in our own little burrows.
June 2007
