CRASH! A Better Britain II: Britlins – Owen Hatherley, for Dezeen, assessing Scott King and Matthew Worley’s satirical proposal to redesign Britain as a 1970’s holiday camp
The following is an abbreviated extract from Dezeen, 28 July 2017.
Britain is in trouble. Politically polarised, economically stagnant, poorly housed, precariously employed, internationally ridiculed. Luckily, the designer Scott King and writer Matthew Worley have a solution: Britlins.
Modelled on the principles of the UK’s famous, ironically-admired holiday camps of the post-war years, like Butlins and Pontins, nowadays occasionally used by metropolitans for alternative music festivals, Britlins demands we make life in Britain more like a holiday. That is, like holidays as they were once practiced, with neat little chalets, grass you were meant to keep off, organised entertainments and perfect predictability.
“Life should be fun, like it used to be. Life should be slower, safer and a little bit cheeky,” reads the text written by King and Worley. “We must recover our values: we must make a new older Britain.”
In a country where “no longer do things only get better”, they suggest that, “Perhaps, the only way forward is to go back. Forcibly.”
So their Britlins brochure advocates a series of measures to make post-Brexit Britain like a permanent holiday camp. “Low-income, high-unemployment and religiously non-assimilated communities” that are “impossible to turn around”, like Bradford, Leicester and Luton, are to be subject to “total floralisation”. Workplace slides will make work fun again. A series of rebrandings will help de-industrialised towns get their identity back.
Some towns will receive the “prestigious royal prefix” – Royal Ayr, Royal Bognor Regis, Royal Skegness. Others will get “the desirable On The Wolds suffix” – Canvey Island on the Wolds, Merthyr Tydfil on the Wolds, Wigan on the Wolds. The capital will be moved to Blackpool, with rootless cosmopolitan London surrounded by the “London partition”. HELLO Agriculture work camps will provide work for “school leavers and those newly arrived on our shores”, along with “those who can't find a home on the Britlins model”.
Photographs show giant bright beach balls bouncing above the skylines of Manchester and Edinburgh. These are part of “the Friendly Fire plan”, where we will “recreate the Blitz spirit – in a fun way”. A series of town plans for a series of Britlins new towns are shown – Saxnot, Balder, Frigg, Loki, arranged like seaside Milton Keyneses. These will then be connected via special heritage lines and segregated roads, “the greatest proposed single investment in Britain's infrastructure since the Victorian age”.
Like many of Scott King's works, the satire is so poker-faced that you could easily imagine it being taken totally seriously – there's just a slight tilt too far that gives it away.
CRASH! A Better Britain II: Britlins, published by Reading International, 2017
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