Milton Keynes - A Village City

Visionary filmmaker Penny Woolcock explores half a century of British urban life using films digitised for Britain on Film, the archive project from BFI and its partner archives.

The tattered wallpaper of part demolished housing contrasts with gleaming new tower blocks. Ladywood in Birmingham may be on the up but what about the forgotten people?

Sheffield stands in as 'Smokedale', an industrial Everytown, in this stirring call for "new schools, new hospitals, new roads, new life", after WWII.

Coventry prepares to rise from the ashes of WWII in this docu-drama written by Dylan Thomas.

An absorbing picture of council services at the beginning of the 1960s, with babies getting polio jabs and girls having braces fitted, while Roots is playing at the Civic Theatre.

A bright and breezy promotional tour of Brum's original mega-mall.

An archetypal eccentric professor is a fitting presenter for an equally eccentric and ingenious bunch of human powered mobile contraptions.

1982 was a particularly bad year for rail commuters, with five weeks of rail strikes to contend with. Anglia Television asks, “What shall we do with the railways system?”

Anglia TV footage of the pre-existing towns and pretty North Bucks hamlets newly incorporated into the New Town Development of Milton Keynes. For TV transmission on 28 June 1968.

A sorry end to any ship: timings, tide and wind played their part in pushing HMS Conway onto the Platters rocks in the Menai Strait on 14/4/1953.

The wet and warm ale goes down a treat as aficionados gather to celebrate real ale.

Sea pinks and samphire, lighthouses and church ruins – Llanddwyn’s charms are many and varied.

Experimentation with a coat for two leaves couples with really no escape.

Progressive gathering of festival goers hits the blues.

Another blustery summer day in the 1950s and it's Lower Penn's carnival parade.