Broadcasting the Life and Death of Victorian Cities

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the question of how to care for and preserve Victorian urban heritage was an important topic in public debate. At the beginning of his career at the BBC, Ken Russell made four highly original short documentaries that address this issue from several different points of view. John Betjeman: A Poet in London (1959) and Shelagh Delaney's Salford (1960) offered middle-class and working-class perspectives on the large-scale destruction of Victorian buildings to make way for modern planning and high-rises, while A House in Bayswater (1960) and London Moods (1961) further elaborated on points made in the first two films. Considered as a thematic cluster, these four films map how several discourses intersected on the contested site of Victorian urban heritage, not least the different voices of middle-class and working-class stakeholders, both of whom had an interest in preserving aspects of urban architectural heritage, but for widely different reasons. As such, a close reading of these films demonstrates how topical documentaries can become, over the distance of more than half a century, a powerful site for reconstructing and understanding the subtle shadings of past attitudes and old cultural debates

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Cultural heritage · Media studies · Middle class · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture

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