#basford

Top: My great uncles Raymond and Theodore "Pay" Basford and great grandfather George Bassford around 1920, colorized by my cousin (first once removed) Francine. Bottom: My great aunt Sissy (Virginia), her grandfather George, and cousin Francine. 1968.

1982 photos (by Miles Glendinning, who hasn't returned me emails for years smfh) of the Basford flats, mostly vacant at this point. The few trees that were planted upon completion had not even had time to grow much by the time of disposal.

There is also this homevideo clip, showing the estate.

One of the most intriguing estates, was the exceptionally complicated "Old Basford" estate in the North of Nottingham, sometimes known as the Basford Flats, the Basford Flats Complex, Old Basford Estate or the Davids Lane Estate (one of the main boundary roads of the development). It occupied an area previously occupied by a mixture of old tenements, industrial plots and scattered historical infill terraces, which had been cleared in stages in the 1950's and 60's, leading up to the new estate, approved in 1967. It is also one of the rare panel estates to actually display a 'Brutalist' aesthetic; the unsophisticated, aroused by the word 'brutal', like to throw it around for everything and anything they find 'oppressive', in this case, such a raw aesthetic was intentionally aspired to. The technical details for the prefabricated elements were delivered with the aid of Concrete Ltd's 'Bison' panel system, itself a modified derivative of an imported early version of the Danish Larsen-Nielsen system (which would also be directly imported by Woodrow-Anglian), but the construction contractor of the estate was a company called Drury--it also worked on the Gibson Street and Beswick-Bradford estate groups in Manchester (colloquially known as 'Fort Beswick' and 'Fort Ardwick'). It seems they little experience with such construction, for all the estates suffered from issues of varying severity.

Két-három évvel ezelőtt új őrület kezdett terjedni a világban. Ez pedig nem más, mint hogy újra szárnyra kaptak – immár a felnőttek körében, de gyerekek is szívesen forgatják – a színezők. Magam is nagy rajongója vagyok – gyerekként is az voltam – a színezésnek, ezért amikor két éve kolléganőimtől megkaptam az első felnőtt színezőmet, madarat lehetett volna velem fogatni. Azóta már több könyv…