Monstrosities Mon Amour

Kidnapped once more in an Austin Maxi, I find myself in the Land of Mid – Kidderminster, to be precise, admiring its largely unheralded William Mitchell artwork, the Great Wall. Travel writer Mike Parker hails from Kidderminster, and has always loved this vast concrete mural along a retaining wall beside the town’s ring road. Created in 1973 by concrete wizard William Mitchell, the Great Wall of K...

This episode was recorded live at the Horse Hospital in London on 10 May 2026 as part of Concrete Atlantis. In this special episode, historian and biographer Gillian Darley kidnaps not just me but a whole audience at the Horse Hospital and takes us on a trip to the Essex coast, site of the long decommissioned Magnox nuclear power station at Bradwell-on-Sea. She admires it for its sublime impact on...

Let’s ditch the Austin Maxi for a gentler way to travel: cycling round the 1950s bike lanes of Stevenage, discovering the joys of a well planned town, with Stevenage-born historian Gareth Edwards. Stevenage in Hertfordshire was Britain’s first post-war new town, designated in 1946. Initially overseen by Clough Williams-Ellis (founder of Portmeirion) and his communist deputy Dr Monica Felton, they...

Let’s crash the Austin Maxi in the basement of the Victoria Centre in Nottingham, with historian and raconteur Lucy Brouwer, who runs the very entertaining and illuminating tours Watson Fothergill Walk. Opening in 1972, the vast and vastly ambitious Victoria Centre became the nexus of all things shopping for a city on the up, where full employment was spoken of in the launch brochure. By the next...

It’s a home-town kidnapping in this episode, when award-winning beer writer David Jesudason whisks me down the road to the Point cinema in Milton Keynes. Exploring the shiny mirrored red framed pyramid, a huge landmark of 80s entertainment and a multiplex pioneer. David grew up in nearby Dunstable, and so here he pits the wonders of the sleepy glider-town against the bright new city of MK, where t...

Archaeologist Rebecca Lambert is used to investigating stone circles and prehistoric sites, but when she first visited the National Theatre she found a modern henge on the south bank of the Thames. In the year of its 50th Anniversary, we visit the original ‘concrete monstrosity’, Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre , which opened in 1976. Seen through the eyes of an archaeologist it is a very differen...

Writer Tom Cox has long been fascinated by the eerie flatlands of the Fens, those drained marshlands on the edge of East Anglia. On our way around we discuss the folk horror of scarecrows, the romance of agribusiness and the weird agoraphobia - or is it claustrophobia? - of somewhere so flat and relatively uninhabited. And we marvel too at the odd midcentury modern villages that have cropped up in...

Get ready for an underwater adventure as we go beneath the Thames with curator and architectural historian Dr Rosamund Lily West. Have you ever been told you’ve got a mouth as big as the Blackwall Tunnel? Or been stuck in a conversation about the traffic? Or worse still, been actually stuck in the traffic there? It’s easy to overlook what an engineering marvel the Blackwall Tunnel is, the first tu...

Let’s visit an ancient Norfolk town, and instead focus on its postwar estates with one of Britain’s best loved housing historians, John Boughton of Municipal Dreams. Thetford gets a bad rap. It isn’t particularly well known outside of Norfolk, and in many ways feels like a lot of towns expanded in the 1960s and 70s. With a variety of housing estates demonstrating the fashions and philosophies of t...

Let’s visit a wonder of Britain’s industrial heritage – the gaudy seafront excess of Blackpool, Britain’s most extraordinary seaside town. After a summer break Monstrosities Mon Amour is back with a seaside special! Blackpool isn’t just the Tower, the illuminations and Strictly. Where else could you get your bumps felt on the beach by a phrenologist, see a dead woman in a coffin just for fun, and...

Turner Contemporary was the first modern art gallery in Margate this century, right? Wrong. And why are so many studio pottery teapots languishing in charity shops? Margate, on the north Kent coast, is famous for its amusement palace, Dreamland, for the Chas and Dave song, and for its hipster reinvention this century thanks to David Chipperfield’s Turner Contemporary. But before that gallery opene...

What’s so special about this modest little bridge in a central London park? And why is twentieth century architecture’s saviour Catherine Croft a capybara superfan? St James’s Park in London is surrounded by spectacular acrhitecture: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Buckingham Palace and Horseguards Parade. But in the middle, over the lake, is a polite little mid century bridge, that hides a f...

How and why was the chi-chi seafront in Regency Worthing modernised in the 1960s? And what is the appeal of a Swedish prog-rock album of Tolkien’s fantasy epic? Worthing in West Sussex, long associated with the subversive observational wit of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde, has since been scandalised by the shadow of a late 1960s concrete car park on the sea front. Between the delightful lido and the...

Where in Glasgow can you go for your niche shopping interests as well as for a night out? And what crockery pattern is the very epitome of Thatcher-Major era Britain? Glasgow, city of thundering urban roads, handsome tenement blocks and a world famous art school that keep burning down. And also the Savoy Centre, a brutalist gem in the centre that combines shopping arcade, market stalls, tower bloc...

Why is there a standing stone and a burgeoning counter culture to be found on a pedestrian junction of the M32? And why are good second hand cardigans just so goddam hard to come by? Join me and writer Gareth E Rees to discover the mysterious haunted side of midcentury modernity. Bristol, magnificent city of cathedrals, waterways and university cloisters. Also, home of Junction 3 of the M32, where...

How did an out of town retail park end up being built on the beach in Britain’s sauciest seaside town? Join me and comedian Angela Barnes to discover a new side to the place that terrifies the tourists and horrifies the hen-parties. Brighton is home of some of the country’s finest pleasure palaces. The West Pier. The Pavillion. And Brighton Marina, of course, that 1970s Ballardian dream, filled in...

‘Joyous, fun-coloured, and life-enchancing are very much the qualities we are not looking for at the moment.’ So says Philip Downer, occasional tour guide and the man behind a hugely popular Instagram account on London’s architecture, as he shows me the delights of one of the City of London’s most excessive 1980s landmarks, the crazy gothic fantastia of Minster Court. While trapped in the boot of...

In this episode design and feature journalist Helen Barrett kidnaps me in the boot of her Austin Maxi and takes me to the Wiltshire town of Swindon, where we explore the American-style relics of its optimstic twentieth century. Along the way we also find time to celebrate the hynotic rock edifice of Status Quo’s Down Down , and talk class, Norman Foster and Chelsea Girl. Monstrosities Mon Amour is...

Monstrosities Mon Amour is a new podcast celebrating places and cultural artefacts more usually slagged off or easily dismissed. In this first episode writer and geek John Grindrod (that’s me talking about myself in the third person, I must stop that) is ambushed by architectural historian and walking guide Mike Althorpe, otherwise known as The London Ambler . I find myself stowed away in the boot...