The Dilapidated Dwelling

This study of the British housing crisis by the idiosyncratic essayist Patrick Keiller was originally made for television. Though it's formally and even tonally more conventional than either Robinson in Space or his feature debut London, it remains a distinctive personal enquiry into the ageing stock that makes up most of the country's homes. But where the earlier films stayed outside structures and gazed on the form, here the camera ventures into the interior. Keiller muses on the reasons why Britons are attracted to age in housing, offers a quirky historical tour of traits and trends, and backs modernisation of the whole operation. Peppered with mind-bending considerations - at the current rate of replacement, some homes will need to last longer than the pyramids - it shows Keiller on form in territory he knows, but doesn't necessarily love.