Garden Utopias

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Garden Utopias: Michael Gilson, Associate Fellow of the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, takes Laurie Taylor behind the privet hedge, to explore the suburban garden and the beautification of Britain. How did millions of British people develop an obsession with their own cherished plot of land? Although stereotyped as symbols of dull, middle class conformity, these gardens were once seen as the vanguard of progressive social change, a dream of a world in which beauty would be central to all of our lives.

Also, JC Niala, anthropologist, allotment historian and writer, discusses 36 months of fieldwork on allotment sites and guerrilla gardened streets across Oxford and suggests these are places where urban gardeners imagine, invent, and produce a hopeful future within their city.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of
0:07.0	Happiness Podcast.
0:08.0	For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want
0:14.4	to share that science with you.
0:16.1	And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley.
0:19.4	I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that
0:25.4	calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:36.0	This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts, and for more details and much, much more about thinking
0:42.6	thinking about thinking aloud go to our website at BBC.co.uk.
0:47.0	There are now only two things that I can clearly remember about my childhood
0:52.4	visits to my grandmother's house in Northfield.
0:55.2	I remember how Granny always referred to all breakfast cereals as force.
1:00.6	Lawrence did you have your force this morning and and quite frankly in pre-television days
1:06.0	there was little else by the fireside to engage one's attention the framed
1:11.5	tearfully crocheted copy of some lines of verse.
1:15.3	The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds from earth,
1:20.4	one is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth. Gardens.
1:27.0	Well as a lower middle class boy I rather talk gardens for granted.
1:30.0	Didn't almost everyone have some sort of, well, small rectangular lawn, a row of straggly
1:36.6	raspberry bushes, and a bed of wilting duffs?
1:40.7	But now, a fine new book reveals the laziness of my assumption. It shows how the
	...

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