This chapter studies how the popularity and expansion of the television network in the 1950s affected the housing film. It asks who was making the housing film for television, what technology were they using and how did that affect the output? It examines the new forms of programmes which brought innovative types of critique to the agenda of the housing film. It also asks, how has the housing film on television changed over the decades since television first became widely available, since growth in numbers of channels and since network deregulation?

This chapter provides a periodisation of the history of the housing film. Through that history, structured around the periods of Hobsbawm’s history of the shorter twentieth century, it traces how the housing film reacts and responds to given agendas and political, economic and social situations. It also traces the technological developments in the history of housing film.

The Housing Film examines how a century of realities and possibilities in domestic living have been profiled and foregrounded through studies and representations of housing in the medium of film. By examining the representation of homes, our way of occupying them and their possible effects on behaviour through documentaries like Housing Problems (1935) and Paul Sng’s Dispossession: The Great Council Housing Swindle (2017), propaganda films like Cumbernauld: Town for Tomorrow (1970), dramas like Cathy Come Home (1966) and features like High Rise (2017), this book seeks to understand how film and housing have grown and developed together, each conditioning the understanding and the range of possibilities of the other. This study looks at how the histories of film and domestic spaces are in fact intertwined, it analyses and assesses the mutual effects of housing and film, and proposes and defines a specific category of ‘The Housing Film’.

This chapter begins by establishing a basic formal relationship between film and architecture. It goes on with a description of the long history of relations between architecture and film – between both the makers of film and architecture, and between the products they produce. It establishes the difference between the study of film about architecture, or of the architecture which appears in film, and a study of film about housing. It thus goes on to discuss and define ‘housing’ and subsequently to define what is meant by a housing film. The chapter finishes with a brief history of British housing.

Through following the filmmaking careers of various women makers of housing films, this chapter examines how women played a vital role in the development of the genre. It looks at the conditions which made it possible for women to come to the fore especially during WWII. It also studies why, gradually, the filmmaking industry had returned to the male dominated status quo ante by the mid-1950s.

The chapter begins by examining the roots of housing film in charity films and municipal films. It establishes Housing Problems (1935) as the foundational housing film. A short history of documentary film and the role of John Grierson is provided. There is a critical discussion of the funding and the distribution of Housing Problems.

For months we have been locked out of Junkspace. So, who’s complaining? Confined to domestic spaces, #stayhome has given many of us a forced opportunity to rethink the type of spaces that are not only functional and useful, but that make us feel comfortable. Our own residential arena may have felt restrictive and even – for some – oppressive at times, but who would say that they truly missed their daily passage through the endlessly stale air of check-in desks, departure gates, and duty frees at the airport; the epic journeys through low ceiling corridors and passageways of railway terminals and subway stations; and the blinding hallucinatory proliferation of brands and franchises in malls…?

The past century has seen a significant expansion of dedicated courtroom buildings in two separate but comparable countries, Portugal and Scotland. The architecture of both countries embodies different national and civic values. In the case of Portugal, two particular types of building are encountered with design driven by the varying demands of central Government. The first of those types comprises structures erected during the period of the dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 with a stress on the nobility of justice through monumental buildings with accompanying decoration and symbols of justice. The more recent period has seen a less homogeneous approach with both purpose-built and adapted buildings often providing spaces of mediocre quality, limited decoration and justice-related symbols. In Scotland the earlier 19th century buildings followed the design preferences of local professionals and what was produced were, for the most part, either classical Greek temples of justice or neo-Baronial strong houses of the law. In both cases the buildings were typically unadorned by symbols of justice. Recent centralization has altered that flexibility. In the 21st century in both Portugal and Scotland the expressed need to reduce expenditure on such public services, through the device of court reform, is in danger of altering the role of the courts as expressions of national or civic spirit. Here governments are seeking to economize in a way which contrasts with more expansive and design-centred approaches taken in such countries as France and the United States.

Twice consumed by fire and set to be rebuilt anew, in what sense can Charles Rennie Mackintosh's library at the Glasgow School of Art still be said to exist? Freudian derealization, Cartesian doubt and Gaelic allegory summoned by a resident scholar's memories of reconstructed timbers and their smouldering remains.

The past century has seen a significant expansion of dedicated courtroom buildings in two separate but comparable countries, Portugal and Scotland. The architecture of both countries embodies different national and civic values. In the case of Portugal, two particular types of building are encountered with design driven by the varying demands of central government. The first of those types comprises structures erected during the period of the dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 with a stress on the nobility of justice through monumental buildings with accompanying decoration and symbols of justice. The more recent period has seen a less homogeneous approach with both purpose built and adapted buildings often providing spaces of mediocre quality, limited decoration and justice-related symbols. In Scotland the earlier nineteenth century buildings followed the design preferences of local professionals and what was produced were, for the most part, either classical Greek temples of justice or neo-Baronial strong houses of the law. In both cases the buildings were typically unadorned by symbols of justice. Recent centralization has altered that flexibility. In the twenty-first century in both Portugal and Scotland the expressed need to reduce expenditure on such public services, through the device of court reform, is in danger of altering the role of the courts as expressions of national or civic spirit. Here governments are seeking to economize in a way which contrasts with more expansive and design-centred approaches taken in such countries as France and the United States.

The Glasgow School of Art has a long history of the cultivation of the art of drawing. Many types of drawing have been taught and practiced within the institution since its establishment in 1845. Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art building, completed between 1897 and 1909, can be seen as one great outcome of that design-through-tradition. The building not only sheltered and thus enabled a further cultivation of the art of drawing, but became itself a model for the practices of that drawing tradition. There is a strong body of work, much of it by teachers and students of the Mackintosh School of Architecture, which has focussed on the building and explored through drawing the architectonic features and significance of the structure. This work has been useful as a teaching and critical aid but also as a contribution to the art and discipline of architecture. In the wake of the first 2014 fire, which destroyed part of the building, this body of work suddenly became of use as a design tool rather than simply an exploratory or critical tool, as the institution sought to reproduce exactly what had been lost. The most recent 2018 fire wreaked a destruction much more comprehensive across the whole building. Accordingly, we are forced to completely review the relationship of that drawing heritage to the building. That is to say, the building largely no longer exists, and the drawings take on a life of their own in a way not previously attached to them. The school may, however, be rebuilt, recreated ‘as was’ at some point in the future, potentially instigating yet another type of relationship between the existing drawing work and a new ‘Mackintosh’ building.

This chapter examines the action in Graham Greene’s short story The Destructors where in immediately post-war Britain a group of boys demolish a Christopher Wren house with their bare hands for no apparent reason. In a city littered with the ruins of war, Greene’s boys seem to play out an allegory of the wreckage of the social system. Can the result of their joint destructive efforts be considered as a ruin itself however, or are they engaged, as the author seems to hint, in some type of paradoxically creative enterprise which redefines the nature of the social?

The 'Colm Cille's Spiral' is a project involving artists, writers and scholars from across all the countries of the British Isles in which I took part in 2013.Conceived as a collaboration between practising artists and scholars in the academy, Difference Exchange, an arts agency, and King's College London, engaged the collaboration of groups from Derry, Dublin, Glasgow, Llandeilo and Lichfield, and London.The investigation and production of art and scholarly work was set to address 'the apparently remote history of a sixth century monk (St Columba/Colmcille). 1 The artists and writers were supported by generous funding and the backing of several universities and arts organisations 2 and a network of advisors and curators, in their work to endeavour to make 'connections between the extreme past and the immediate present'. 3 The attempt to reconnect with the past through both scholarly and artistic method, involving that is to say, academic historical research and creative reimaginings makes for an obvious immediate tension between what are ostensibly pure objective and subjective approaches to the material.

Francis Newbery, Director of the Glasgow School of Art between 1885 and1918, produced a painting that depicted the deliberations of the School’s governors as they commissioned the building of new school premises designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The painting was acquired by the School in 1914 and hung in the Board Room. A mixture of deliberate technique and fortuitous circumstance in the creation of this work seems to have made for a canvas saturated with meaning in the evidently discordant complexity of its representations of time and space. An examination of the painting is used critically to engage with the story of the creation of Mackintosh’s masterwork, and to contextualize the process in which the latter was produced as a significant work of art.