Leisures and Pleasures

More 'Faces of Harlow', this time enjoying various leisure and sporting activities.

Faces Of Harlow

No new town ever had a better friend than Harlow did in Derrick Knight. In ‘Faces Of Harlow’, Knight makes the not particularly exciting town look like a jet age utopia of equality and social harmony, a place where a basic kitchenette is presented as state of the art; where a prefabricated social club is presented like The Ritz; a comprehensive school like The Sorbonne.

But why not?

We know that, materially, at least, these amenities were almost certainly considerable improvements on what was there before – and far better than what the residents may have been used to in whatever part of bombed London they had been relocated from. Hot water, central heating, indoor toilets, space, a garden – all things that we take for granted - why not big it up and worry about the sociology and psychology later? Yeah, let’s do that, it’s 1964, for fuck’s sake.

The World Of The Nightmare

David Greene seemed like one of Britain’s most promising directors in 1969. After a decade in TV, Greene had made the transition to films with odd horror thriller 'The Shuttered Room' in 1967, rapidly following up with brilliant espionage romance 'Sebastian' and policier 'The Strange Affair' (see yesterday) in 1968. Although none of his films could be called masterpieces, he definitely had something, a way of taking standard, even clichéd, genre material and giving it a Carnaby Street paint job and a fresh and trendy cast of pretty semi-freaks: a sort of psychedelic-lite approach to film making.

‘I Start Counting’ (1969) was his last British film, and its critical and commercial failure drove him to America, where he stayed working in TV until his death in 2003. The film itself has a mixed reputation, is not available on DVD, and has not been shown on telly for many years, but is hardly the disaster Greene thought at the time.

Wynne (Jenny Agutter) is a 15 year old school girl with a desperate crush on her older foster brother George. Their family is pleasant, but slightly dysfunctional: fatherless, and crammed together in a small flat on a featureless new estate. In her spare time, Wynne goes back to their old, abandoned family home in a nearby wood and happily reverts to early childhood, playing house and swinging aimlesly on the rusty swing.  A series of small incidents lead Wynne to suspect that George might be the perpetrator of violent sex crimes that have taken place in the area and, desperate to show him her maturity, and heedless of the danger, she sets out to investigate.

An odd little film that ultimately appears not to have a point, ‘I Start Counting’ meanders from scene to scene at a sombulant pace, throwing up lots of dead ends and unanswered questions. The script was adapted from a moderately successful novel of the same name, but the nuances and psychological twists and turns of the written word seem to have been lost in the journey from page to screen. It’s a well-made film, but gives very little to the viewer in terms of genuine suspense or insight, although historians and sociologists and mid-century enthusiasts like me may value its portrayal of New Town Britain* in the late 1960’s, and record enthusiasts (like me) enjoy the scenes set in a groovy disc emporium, complete with West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band LP’s and space age plastic bubble listening posts.

The most notable feature of the whole venture is the star, Jenny Agutter, although it’s also the most problematic. Agutter was 17 during filming but, in school uniform, she looks considerably younger than even the 15 year old character she is playing, and the emphasis on her sexual attractiveness in both the film and its attendant publicity material seems unacceptable today.

Island Idol Basil Kirchin provided music for three out of the four films Greene made before he relocated to the states, including 'I Start Counting', and here's the opening sequence with its beautiful, wispy title song, as sung by Lindsey Moore.

* It was filmed in Bracknell in Hertfordshire, like 'I Want What I Want' and 'The Offence' from a few years later. Part Utopia, part work in progress, everything seems to be under construction, a new world in the making. The church that Wynne attends looks more like a space age bachelor pad than a place of worship, and it's slap bang in the middle of a building site. See 'Bracknell' tab at the bottom of this post for more stuff about the place.

I Start Counting

Little Utopias

Model Villages are by no means confined to our little islands, but they were invented here and, for me, they seem to encapsulate three great British traditions: gawping, hobbies, and our insistence on imposing our idea of order onto an unordered world.

An aerial view of Bekonscot

The first Model Village proper was Bekonscot in Buckinghamshire. A rich man’s obsession, it was initially a private project, and only opened to the public in 1929 after featuring in a news reel which stirred up frantic interest in this Lilliputian marvel.  Many more miniature parks followed, mostly designed as tourist attractions, often in seaside resorts. Great Yarmouth has one, as does Torquay, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. Blackpool have one, too, of course, as you knew they would.   

Although there are examples all around the world, these typically merely reproduce famous landmarks at a reduced scale. The best kind of British Model Village instead creates an idealised fantasy environment: a village or small, manageable town which is perfectly proportioned and presents a nostalgic portrait of Olde England. There is usually a Church, a Butchers, a Bakers, a Bobby on a bike, a cricket match in progress, a pub; thatched roofs and narrow roads, buses and steam trains, a winding river with anglers on the bank and jaunty boats on the water – all the signifiers / clichés of the land of lost content, a cosy, rural environ essentially unchanged from the Edwardian era. This safe, self-contained microcosm can be taken to mind boggling length: the Isle of Wight and Bourton on the Water’s model villages have their own model village, for example.

 

Bourton on the Water's Model Village's Model Village

There are no riots here, no anti-social families, no over-crowding, no litter or tiny pools of vomit- no problems whatsoever, in fact, instead a happy, harmless, comforting stasis: everything in its place, reassuring, safe – even death is banished, although dry rot can be an issue (a couple of model village’s include burning houses, but each conflagration is under control, and the good old Fire Brigade are in attendance).

Roland Callingham, inventor of the model village as we know it

The model village is created not by gradual settlement like normal centres of population, but seemingly all at once, by the guiding intelligence of a God-like figure and the myriad hands of his craftsmen (Bekonscot was accountant Roland Callingham’s idea, but he pressed his maid, gardener, cook and chauffer into helping him with the work). To this end, the design and purpose and feel of the development are informed by the deity’s sensibilities and preferences / prejudices, and it is their concept of order that is imposed.

This desire for order is, of course, also reflected in the real life model communities that were built specifically to provide housing for workers in the shadow of the factory or industry they served, as well as in the post-war enthusiasm for new towns, with their carefully placed amenities and logical but convoluted road systems. Again, as in their small scale counterparts, order is informed by a patrician view of the world. 



Model village, Great Yarmouth

Model community, Bournville

George Cadbury

Model village, Isle of Wight

Model Community, Port Sunlight

William Lever (brother not pictured)



The village of Bournville doesn’t have a pub, for example, as George Cadbury was a Quaker and disapproved of alcohol (one hundred years on, it still doesn’t have a pub - The Creator’s shadow looms large). Port Sunlight was an early example of a profit sharing scheme, but William Lever made the decision that the workers share would be put into houses rather than into their hands (in typical patrician style, he feared cash would be wasted on sweets and alcohol). The workers were not consulted, just as the thousands of Londoners forcibly rehoused into the new towns at Stevenage and Bracknell and Hemel Hempstead were not consulted. It may very well have been ‘for their own good’, but it’s nice to be asked.

Similarly, private developments at Thorpeness and Portmeirion also follow the pattern. Thorpeness is a strange resort of artificial lakes and mock-Jacobean chalet type accommodation, a holiday village for the wealthy friends of multi-millionaire Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie based, in part, on Peter Pan’s Neverland; Portmeirion, the famous location for ‘The Prisoner’, crams an Italianate village into a relatively compact space, an architectural showcase for the work of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. Both were created as private empires, idiosyncratic worlds shaped to suit an individual, and, long after the creator has died, ‘little’ people still fight to preserve the traditions and order arbitrarily imposed in the past.

Unique skyline at Thorpeness

The extraordinary Portmeirion 

Sir Clough Williams-Ellis and his most famous long-term resident

Whether full size or 1/12^th scale, the motivation for the creator of the model is clear: to produce, like God, a perfect, complete world in your own image – an opportunity that I suppose we are all working towards to some extent with our own homes, gardens, sheds and blogs. It is perhaps no surprise that the publicity material for model villages rarely fails to mention ‘feeling like a giant’ as one of the benefits of visiting, as if power or a sense of omniscient omnipotence is passed down to the tourist as they traipse around the exhibit – seeing life all at once, from an elevated position, perhaps with an enormous sandal clad foot poised to crash down on it all.   

Offending Articles

Lobby Cards from 'The Offence'.