If you live here you should watch it. Honest.
However, Director Kay Mander’s filmed survey of twenty-four square miles of rural Oxfordshire was part of a 1943 government project to better understand the use made of the countryside in order to facilitate better planning, and most interestingly, focuses in part on Hook Norton Itself.
The film was commissioned in October 1945 but grew out of a survey carried out in the last six months of 1943 by the Oxford Agricultural Economics Research Institute. This was published in 1944 as Country Planning. A Study of Rural Problems edited by the Institutes Director, C.S.Orwin. the study was based on 24 square miles of north Oxfordshire to the southwest of Banbury.
This film is Crown Copyright.
Credits to BFI National Archive and the COI (Central Office of Information). Shown here with permission.
Hook Norton features particularly from 23:40 – but the whole film is worth a watch!
