As a kid in 90s Birmingham, Keiran Goddard would gather with his friends to watch the tower blocks coming down. That’s what passed for entertainment back then. Controlled explosions, collapsing buildings.
The demolition of Shard End’s postwar council estates marked the end of one story and the start of another. It was a dust-blown display of regeneration and progress. The housing that replaced it would be an improvement.
The people of east Birmingham would move on to better lives. Goddard, specifically, moved on to study English at Oxford University. He now lives in London and writes books for a living.
Physically, he has left his home town far behind. Emotionally and spiritually, not so much. Enda Walsh wrote the script; Clio Barnard called the shots.
Set in and around Shard End, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a jolting, stirring ensemble drama in which a tower block’s demolition serves as a kind of societal big bang, spinning five childhood friends into a fraught adulthood. When writing the book, Goddard identified with the character of Patrick, the idealistic graduate turned zero hours delivery driver who argues that decent housing is a basic human right, not a capital asset. But he’s also like Rian, the group’s breakout star, who made a killing on the stock market and bought a sterile London flat.
Rian is the chief investor behind a new apartment complex that is to be built on the bones of the old estate. The film shows it rising in time-lapse leaps and bounds, just as historic strains set to work on Rian’s close-knit gang of mates. The story scaffold may be simple, yet the drama that follows is anything but.
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