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Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's History of Home

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
  • Posted at 4:23pm
  • 26 March 2008
  • by SarahDempster-RT

Those concerned that today's BBC Radio 4 has sacrificed most of its pomposity and intellectual rigour in favour of fanciful notions of "fashion" and - nurse! The monocles! - "progress" need fret no more. For this week, cantering into the daily 3:45pm slot like a thoroughbred in tweed plus fours is Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's History of Home (Monday to Friday, 3.45pm, BBC Radio 4), a short, sharp, bellowingly brainy trot through the history of modern British housing.

There's none of your youthful "interactive" nonsense here; no phone-in discussions; no Marcus Brigstocke; no press-your-red-buttons-now and no irreverent looks at the week's headlines from a panel of adolescent braggarts with fashionably incomprehensible regional accents. Just Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, some bricks, and the sort of adjectives that haven't been heard outside of an Eton debating chamber, circa 1962.

Thoroughly researched and unapologetically articulate, this is old-school Auntie all the way. Not that it's remotely dry or boring. On the contrary: yesterday's episode - a tight, taut little treatise on the relatively brief life of British modernist architecture that took in both the splendidly icy Highpoint apartment block in London's Highgate and Wells Coates's Isokon Building - was a fantastically cheering dollop of posh.

Blame for which may be laid entirely at Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's be-ribboned hooves. Listening to the flouncing dandy neighing at Highpoint's "subtly curving walls" and "Le Corbusier-influenced structural columns" while swishing his mane all over modernism's utilitarian ideals was like being bullied by a sexy chaise longue, albeit a sexy chaise longue that wouldn't look out of place at Aintree with a small Irishman sitting on top of it. "It's about proportion and elegance!" he brayed, clattering through an echoing 1930s lounge while its elderly owners mmm-ed in palpably bemused agreement.

Over the course of 15 overwhelmingly scholarly, fact-stuffed minutes, we learned all about modernism's popularity among London's avant-garde, its preoccupation with minimalism and its belief that social progression could be achieved by making toffs live in communal apartment blocks that resembled de-funnelled cruise ships.

Overcome with excitement, LLB interrupted the programme's interviewees constantly ("this is amazing!") while pawing at the furnishings with hooves virtually ablaze with ebullience. It was an effective tack. All the talk of architectural optimism and "the victory of order and knowledge over chaos" was incredibly uplifting.

So uplifting, in fact, that I kept expecting Fanfare for the Common Man to start bugling away in the background. Although, obviously, had Fanfare for the Common Man actually started bugling away in the background, it would've been immediately interrupted by Llewelyn-Bowen, who would've smirked all over the brass before saying something rude about the conductor's shoes.

There are seven more of these wonderfully unfashionable history lessons to go. Be there and be square.

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