British style poppy for November 11.

[Lallans]

When visiting some of our towns and cities if you understand what you are looking at you can often see the effects of bombs and rockets on the urban landscape.

Things such as rows of houses with a sudden gap, sometimes on both sides of the street, where 1940s or 50s houses have been built to fill in the damage. The bombs were usually dropped in 'sticks' of six, so using the virtual mappings available you can sometimes tour an area and pick out the line of gaps in the original buildings.

The V1s and V2s were more destructive and resulted in approximate circles of rebuilding around the point of impact.

Of course some places were so badly affected that whole areas were cleared away and all new houses built. Some were covered in prefabricated houses - they were meant to be a temporary measure until 'real' houses could be built, but such was the need for housing that they were kept long after their planned lifespan. I can remember 'prefabs' in the 1960s. Many newly weds after the war moved into a prefab then into a larger house and then back into a prefab when the kids left home. Some moved in and never moved out again.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

I believe it was Prince Charles that made the remarks about how the luftwaffe had merely left piles of rubble and it was the British social housing authorities themselves who had really uglified those areas?

[Highland Logan]

I believe it was Prince Charles that made the remarks about how the luftwaffe had merely left piles of rubble and it was the British social housing authorities themselves who had really uglified those areas?

Brutalism

The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete", a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings. The term gained wide currency when the British architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1966 book, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, to characterize a somewhat recently established cluster of architectural approaches, particularly in Europe.

Brutalism has some severe critics, including Charles, Prince of Wales. His speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated Brutalism, calling many of the structures "piles of concrete". "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe", said Prince Charles at the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's annual dinner at Mansion House in December 1987. "When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."(1)

(1) Glancey, Jonathan (2004-05-17). "Life after carbuncles". The Guardian (London). 2010-04-27.

[Pleater]

Hmm - a rather let them eat cake attitude.

My aunt Freda shared a house with her mother, two brothers and four sisters, plus a couple of lodgers, until she married and was delighted to have a prefab to move into when she married.

Until I was two years old (1953) I lived in that house with my parents, and all my mum's family - and the lodgers - and then we moved to my other grandparent's house and my brother and sister were born there.

Eventually (1958) we were able to move into a newly built council house. For a few months I even had my own bedroom.

I bet Prince Charles never had to share.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[Mike_Oettle]

In South Africa, ex-service housing (like the estate where my wife grew up) was brick-built.
And barracks also were brick-built. A family we knew (the husband was a an ex-air force pilot) lived in married quarters at the nearby air base.
But extensive use was made of prefabs for schools, especially in the new suburban areas that mushroomed after the war.
The primary school that my wife and I attended was a prefab. We occupied each of the rooms in turn as we went up from Sub A (now called Grade 1) to Std 5 (Grade 7) until the June of our final year.
(In South Africa, the school year coincides with the calendar year.)
During those years our parents had staunchly given their support to a fund-raising effort – the provincial administration would match our contributions pound for pound, and that was how we got a brick-built school building with a hall.
We spent six months in a brick classroom before heading off to high school.
You can still see prefab schoolrooms, or entire schools, on the Cape Flats.
In Port Elizabeth it was the practice to move the prefabs about: when one school no longer need its huts, they were moved to another school. Some are documented as having stood in no fewer than seven different school yards.
The University of Cape Town’s main campus above Rondebosch was built in the 1920s, and featured ivy-covered walls and red-tiled roofs. Béton brut was quite strikingly used for the new architecture faculty building erected in the mid-1960s.
I quite liked it at the time, but am less sure now that it actually added anything to the campus.
Regards,
Mike

[Stratherrick]

In my home town, Torquay in Devonshire, there are lots of places where you can still see Luftwaffe bullets in the walls of houses, shops and bridges etc.

Slainte

Bruce

[piperdbh]

Some of the reporters/presenters on the BBC last night were wearing poppies.

[Lallans]

Some of the reporters/presenters on the BBC last night were wearing poppies.

I read recently that November poppies are a 'religion' in Canada- not an innacurate statement. Certainly, you will not see a public figure at this time of year that isn't wearing one. There was a host of a science show on cable TV that resisted but had to give in- I personally don't watch that show anymore due to a rise in BP at the sight of the man.

A new thing in Canada is a dimwitted "peace group" that sells white coloured "peace" poppies to counteract the "prowar" red ones, or at least tries to. I don't follow their show any more either.

[xena]

A new thing in Canada is a dimwitted "peace group" that sells white coloured "peace" poppies to counteract the "prowar" red ones, or at least tries to.

Which makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. The red poppies, and Remembrance Day itself, is the biggest anti-war demonstration in Canada.

[Lallans]

Which makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. The red poppies, and Remembrance Day itself, is the biggest anti-war demonstration in Canada.

YES! And the people who wear the RED poppies know what war means, first or second hand.

[Mike_Oettle]

Xena wrote: “The red poppies, and Remembrance Day itself, is the biggest anti-war demonstration in Canada.”

But those dim-witted peaceniks don’t want to understand. They are obsessed with the idea that commemorating the war dead is a glorification of war.
Regards,
Mike