period, not a great deal changed despite the profound effects of economic depression. In that view, a great deal of housing was built but attention was drawn away by interest in the preservation of the countryside and the vices of suburban development. However, the significant point is that the idea of town and country planning was sustained. In addition, many of the changes were rather quieter and perhaps not widely announced as town planning. Thus, a legal historian describes the legal changes affecting land between 1922 and 1925 as revolutionary. ‘But it was in the provision of national equipment and infrastructure, the successor to the nineteenth century works, that the power of the state was most evident’ (Jessel, 2011: 176). Furthermore, in the later 1930s there was a greater interest in the notion of planning in general as a response to what was seen as a society in peril from malign social, political and economic forces. ‘The inter-war history of planning, therefore, seems to reflect the wider changes taking place in economic and social thought, largely in response to the depression and to the inability of the unfettered market economy to overcome it. State intervention became respectable’ (Broadbent, 1977: 151; see also Renwick, 2018).
The coalition government of 1940 and, more emphatically, the Labour government of 1945 introduced a set of far-reaching changes in interventions in the market. Although this change in mood owed a great deal to the Second World War, which started in 1939, it had, as I have implied, also been prefigured in the late 1930s. Preparation for, and prosecution of, the war involved a very large extension of the powers of the state and the effects of this extension spread well beyond what might be seen as war-fighting activities. During the war, a set of government and other inquiries and reports paved the way for subsequent action, to some extent motivated by an obvious need for a programme of physical reconstruction. Particularly influential were plans for the redevelopment of British cities, especially the Greater London Plan 1944 (Abercrombie, 1945), which had at its centre proposals for the improvement of housing, the construction of new housing beyond the outer suburbs, the management of transport and the provision of more open space, especially in the development of a green belt around the city. A set of government reports appeared pitched at the national level. The Barlow report of 1940 proposed the further redevelopment of congested urban areas, the dispersal of industries and industrial population from congested areas and the encouragement of a balance of industrial development across regions, together with plans for diversification of industry in each region. The Uthwatt report of 1942 tried to provide solutions to the problems of compensation and betterment. A radical system of land planning entailed allocating land uses to the best outcome, and that implied a potential conflict with existing landowners, affecting the value of their holdings. Land use planning since the beginning of the twentieth century had struggled with the presumed need to compensate owners for taking control of their land and to tax gains in the value of land created by planning decisions. Uthwatt proposed the compulsory purchase of war-damaged land, together with the vesting in the state of development rights in land outside the boundaries of urban development and the creation of a periodic levy on rises in value. Rural planning was the subject of the Scott report of 1942 which dealt with the creation of national parks and green belts as well as improvements in rural services and housing. At the same time, in this period plans were developed for the design and construction of housing on the assumption that a great deal of it would be undertaken by the state in some form.
Legislation in 1943 and 1944 followed from this ferment of ideas which were, it should be remembered, produced by a coalition government. That is, there was a significant measure of consensus across the political parties. The later Act
provided sweeping powers to local authorities to engage in reconstruction and redevelopment. They were enabled to buy land, simply and expeditiously to deal with areas of extensive war damage and areas of ‘bad layout and obsolete development’ – blitzed and blighted land. This was the first occasion when a General Act permitted planned redevelopment on an extensive central area scale. (Cherry, 1996: 108)
A Labour government was elected at the end of the war in 1945. In many respects it inherited and enhanced the radicalism of its predecessor, putting into practice many coalition proposals, and extended it in its preference for wholesale planning. A set of New Towns was designated and construction quickly started. The preparation of local development plans was made compulsory and all development – with a few exceptions – required permission from the local authority. Most importantly, from the point of view of resistance to the commodification of land, there was an attempt to resolve the issue of compensation and betterment. The 1947 legislation provided for the imposition of a development charge on any increase in value that followed the grant of planning permission. This provision was indeed an important extension of state intervention in property rights in the public interest and has been widely described as the nationalization of development rights. Where the value of land was lowered by planning restrictions, compensation would be paid. It would not be paid, however, as a consequence of any refusal to develop.
With the exception of the compensation and betterment provisions, there was a remarkable degree of political agreement on a planning system which regulated what landowners could do with their land. This consensus lasted for thirty years from the early 1940s and has been described as the golden age of town planning. The basic outlines of the planning system were stable, the planning profession had increased both in numbers and in training and expertise and there had been substantial redevelopment of many towns and cities. The major disputes concerned a central issue: the financial provisions of compensation and betterment. In this respect, there was something of an oscillation throughout the period. Conservative administrations changed the provisions in favour of landowners and developers while Labour administrations introduced measures that increased state intervention, to the disadvantage of owners.
The history of town planning from the middle of the nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth – the Long Century – can be seen as resistance to commodification in the form of state intervention in the market for land via limitations on property rights. As Jessel notes in his legal history of the English landscape, state intervention through planning controls has ‘weakened the idea of ownership and the rights of property established in the seventeenth century’ (2011: 170). However, at the same time, it is important to note how relatively restricted these interventions were – and are. They amount to a partial control only, especially in the markets for housing and agricultural land. Proposals for the outright nationalization of land, which had some followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, received very little support from any government, even the Labour one of 1945. Furthermore, the climate for interventions in the market for land changed a good deal in the 1970s and I come back to these developments at the end of this chapter.
Ideology and Moral Climate
So far, I have discussed the regulation of the use of land which constitutes a restriction on the full exercise of property rights. I now turn to an examination of why and how that regulation and its practical application arose and how a set of moral convictions, an ideology, is formed which can have that effect.
Earlier in this chapter I stressed the way in which town planning in Britain was formed in a reaction to the horrors of the Victorian city. But another reaction – and a different horror – was also involved. Those whose interests lay in commentary on the state of the country, especially its towns and cities, were not only impressed by the conditions in which their fellow citizens lived, they were also moved by a sense of the disorder apparently created by urban life. The two themes – social justice and order – ran through public debate about cities in the Long Century from 1850 to 1970. Sometimes one of these themes predominated, sometimes the other. For example, for the intellectuals writing, talking and lobbying about the state of towns, the social justice strand was probably more important towards the beginning of the period, while a concern with order was prominent in the later part. My argument in this case study is that what I shall call a disposition, a set of beliefs and professional practices, is created by a group of intellectuals, some involved in the actual practice of planning and some not, in interaction with an audience drawn from a wider social group but one with the same social affiliations. That disposition resulted in a set
