Broadcasting Buildings by Shundana Yusaf

Author:Shundana Yusaf [Yusaf, Shundana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: architecture, social science, history, BBC, media studies, Great Britain, radio, broadcasting
ISBN: 9780262026741
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

II Geoffrey Maxwell Boumphrey: Landscape as Event

A man of wide-ranging interests and immense missionary zeal, Geoffrey Maxwell Boumphrey would have passed through time without notice had radio in Britain not coincided with his talents and causes. The BBC first launched him on the national scene in 1931 in a broadcast called “The Modern Home.” From then on he was a frequent presence in British households. In 1934 he aired a widely heard series on a walking expedition entitled Along the Roman Roads. Stretching from May to June, the series covered the famous stretches of Roman roads, Portway, Icknield Way, and Hadrian’s Wall among them, as Boumphrey went in search of the physical remains of two-thousand-year-old paths that had first linked Wales, Scotland, and England into a trade and administrative network.36 Hadrian’s Wall and Avebury showed off the achievements of the Office of Works after an amending Act of 1931 and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932: the ivy-laden remains and weed-covered surroundings of a four-thousand-year-old metropolis in Avebury had been cleaned up and made into an inviting tourist destination. The following year, the BBC flew Boumphrey to five countries in Europe where he visited modern towns and housing schemes including Tomáš Baťa’s factory town in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. In the summer of 1936, he canoed through England with Geoffrey Humphrey, another writer on progressive housing. Together they produced eight episodes of Down River. Not to leave out the troubled Ireland, Boumphrey was contracted for the summer after to give a vicarious car tour through towns and country called “Ulster Holiday.”

With the exception of Looking for the Town of Tomorrow, these travelogues offered glimpses of a pastoral country born out of the ideals of the most self-consciously progressive intellectuals in London. The programs put before listeners not the landscape disappearing from view but a modern one rising out of its ashes. Lying past the spoliation of suburbs, this landscape was dotted with inns, shops, and meals of boiled eggs for days on end. History had left its marks on it in the form of dark caves, strange stone “henges,” crumbling castles, cottages with thatched roofs, iron bridges, and now row houses. It was populated with prospering farmers, struggling renters, and tenacious housewives. Its school girls were wiser than Boumphrey in navigating the rugged ground.37 When clergymen and landed society surfaced in his travel account, they were a dishonorable lot who remorselessly burned down villages and destroyed towns to best each other in futile wars. The winds of time had delivered their spoils, the castles of blood and obelisks of greed, into the hands of sitting tenants, cobblers, and miners, all born and bred on the land. Here the conventional association between a history-conscious tourist and the nostalgia for the landed classes that had maintained the beauty of rural Britain came apart.

Boumphrey invoked churches and town halls, soaring Midlands spires and Worcester Cathedral not by their stylistic peculiarities but through sociopolitical anecdotes. He converted scenes and sights into historical accounts.

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