First published on Andrew’s blog in 2020

The past is another country.

I remembered that phrase because it’s the title of a book that I haven’t read, a history of Zimbabwe.  I thought it was also a quote by someone famous, but that turns out to be “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”  We could do with some of that wry wisdom amongst the current hysteria, but that’s not really my topic today.  The “famous person” turned out to be L.P Hartley, an oddly unfamiliar name.  First sentence of “The Go Between”, his 1953 novel, made into a film in 1971, the year before he died.  Screenplay by Harold Pinter.

1973.  Find it on a map.  I was transitioning from “long haired student” to … something else, a leap in the dark.  I had decided during the course of my 3 year degree in … well it was architecture really but they decided to “broaden” the field, which is a bit like flattening the curve I suppose. So it was a flexi-degree at the School of Environmental Studies, aka the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Anyway. I chose London because … well, London.  I had grown up in a coal-mining town “up north” and wanted to go to the big smoke, where the ground-breaking stuff was happening.  I had read some Le Corbusier, was aware of Archigram and had also stumbled across Jane Jacobs (The Life and Death of Great American Cities)  I was a quiet, somewhat intense teenager who had lived a sheltered existence in a religious household, but the mood of the sixties had deeply affected most of “My Generation” and I was beginning to see architecture as a mission to solve social problems.

Where today’s youth might decide to change the world “one tweet at a time”, I aspired to design totally new kinds of cities that would unleash fairness and creativity upon our species…

Link to Andy’s blog to continue

Read more about the author Andrew Milburn