L.S Media Rating ****

At the time of Charles Booth, London was the biggest and most populated city the world had ever seen. An ever changing metropolis that Charles Booth mapped with great care and dedication on how each street fared in its social standing, position, the type of people who lived there and needs.

As part of a series of how London has changed in the last 200 years, B.B.C. 2 has taken an in depth look at some of the streets and areas that have seen some of the most catastrophic changes due to short-sighted town and country planners and lack of respect for the people they found there. The series, The Secret History of Our Streets, narrated by Steven Mackintosh, opened with a look at Deptford, its High Street and the ‘slums’ that were cleared by Town and Country planners in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The interesting and beautifully captured film showed how the South-East part of London was once home to a proud working class people who were doomed to become as obsolete as the houses they lived in. The Secret History of Our Streets showed rare footage from the propaganda films that were distributed to gain people’s sympathy and make them move out to the new towns that were being built; the programme had one of those rare moments in television, the perfect human and social documentary that delved deep in the heart of its subject and showed the human cost of 1960’s urban planning.

This was a Who Do You Think You Are? mixed carefully with the indignation of George Orwell taking notes of the deprivation in Wigan and the North and with a generous portion of history told by those that lived through the wanton destruction of their neighbourhood, all in the name of making London ‘a machine’.  If the makers of the series set out to show how social engineering was a be all of ‘progressive thinking’ by successive Governments and Town Councils after the Second World War, then they achieved in making one of the best pieces of documentary television this year. The few seconds of film from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis surely wasn’t put in the hour show for no reason.

With interviews and recollections from some of the older members of the community was compelling viewing and showed that despite what ‘progressive’ modern thinking, Sir Patrick Abercrombie and John Forshaw threw at the residents of Deptford, they still survive…just!

The Secret History of Our Streets continues on B.B.C. 2 on Wednesdays.

Ian D. Hall