The Seven Car Parks of Croydon

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25/10/2010

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Seven Car Parks of Croydon

Sue Perkins revisits her former home-town, Croydon, the mini-Manhattan of Outer London

Sue Perkins investigates why her former home-town, South London's 'Mini-Manhattan', became the butt of so many jokes. From 2010.

Sue Perkins revisits her former home-town of Croydon.

She's asking just how South London's 'Mini-Manhattan' became the butt of so many jokes, mocked by comedians from the great Morecambe and Wise to Basil Brush.
   
With a skyline made up of 60's brutalist office blocks and re-clad 80's ones, Croydon's aesthetics are hard to love, but whether you're heading to town from Gatwick Airport, commuting from the South Coast, or a new immigrant registering at the Home Office's Lunar House, Croydon is your welcome to London.  
 
With a powerful sense of nostalgia tinged with panic, Sue, who's joined by fellow comedian Steve Punt, lurks on the stairwells and top storeys of seven car parks in Croydon, trying to get a new perspective on local planning decisions, past and present. 

Sue hears historic tales of Elizabeth the First and punk svengali Malcolm McLaren, Bridget Riley -  Queen of OpArt  - and the emergence of the hottest current urban music Dubstep. 
  
Vincent Lacovara, fan of Croydon, and its current urban planner believes these concrete viewing platforms can provide a fresh vantage point from which the history and super-future of Croydon can be laid out before Sue -  so that she can see all the possibilities it had to offer her, and which she missed growing up. 

The great architectural commentator Nikolaus Pevsner said Croydon's skyline was 'thrilling from a distance' but maybe that's the problem - up close it takes a trained or loving eye to appreciate the uniqueness of Croydon - and after all we can't all come from the Cotswolds. 

The time has come to reassess the concrete dreams of the 1960's - and Sue is the woman to do it. 

Producers: Sara Jane Hall and Gillian Darlington

First broadcast on Radio 4 in October 2010.

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