In three special programmes Will Self, Joanna Trollope and Iain Sinclair join Laurie Taylor to discuss how imagination and reality combine to create the environments in which we live.

How does an artistic interpretation of the city, the countryside or the suburbs reflect the social realities of that environment? And how much is the lived experience of a place affected by the imagination and the associations it brings?

Imagination and the Countryside

The novelist Joanna Trollope, sociologist Howard Newby and rural ethnographer Martin Phillips discuss the ‘rural idyll’.

The dream the British have of the countryside is not always borne out by the experience of living there, yet the ideas we hold about a 'proper' countryside often prompt changes.

Martin Phillips’ research revealed long term residents complaining of "too many village fetes" and incomers who are simply too keen to get involved in everything. Joanna Trollope reveals what drove her out of the countryside five years ago.

Imagination and Suburbia

The writer Iain Sinclair, the sociologist Paul Barker and cultural theorist Tim Hubble discuss the dream of suburbia and why it is so often portrayed as a nightmare.

As the bastion between the unfamiliar wildness of the country and the danger of the city the suburbs are seen as a refuge, or an exile.

However, despite research showing suburban residents happier than people living elsewhere in Britain, suburbs constantly parodied and attacked in literature in film.

Why, when the official statistics show 86% of UK residents living in suburbia, do so few like to admit that that is where they live?

Imagination and The City

In a recording before an audience in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House the novelist Will Self, sociologist Richard Sennett and geographer Doreen Massey discuss the fear and excitement, violence and speed that a city creates and the role that imagination plays in producing the hard reality of city demographics.

How does an image of a city impact on the experience of the people who live there? What is the relationship between the fear and danger that a city evokes and its strength and force of attraction?

Laurie and his panel will take questions from the audience on the nature of modern cities and the role that culture plays in creating them.

Watch exclusive video of the debates

Listen again

Listen to Imagination and the Countryside
Listen to Imagination and Suburbia
Listen to Imagination and Suburbia
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