land by controlling the uses to which it can be put. In sum, the key feature of the ideological formation of town planning is the combination of two apparently very different elements in an alliance. Order-planning sees town planning as oriented to the restoration of social order, while for justice-planning the activity is geared to solving problems of the distribution of resources between different sections of society.
Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the Garden Cities movement, wrote in the late nineteenth century of the disordered life of cities of the time, especially London. He quotes Lord Rosebery in 1891, then Chairman of the London County Council: ‘I am always haunted by the awfulness of London: by the great appalling fact of these millions cast down … without regard or knowledge of each other, without heeding each other, without having the slightest idea how the other lives’ (Howard, 1965 (originally 1902): 42). Howard himself was preoccupied with the overcrowding of London, its expansion and the disordering of the countryside that it produced. Raymond Unwin, one of the most influential of early town planners, begins his major work on the subject by noting ‘the rapid and disorderly increase in the size of towns and their populations’. The countryside is being covered in rows and rows of houses put up ‘without any consideration for the common interests of the people’ (Unwin, 1909: 1, emphasis added). Thirty years later, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis lamented ‘the discomfort of living in a land where disorder, ugliness, and inefficiency are generally accepted and tolerated’ (Williams-Ellis, 1937a: xv). At the end of the 1930s, Anthony Bertram, a writer on architectural and design matters, is more forceful still: ‘But what the town-planner wants, and what indeed everybody wants who has any feeling for urbanity, for the design of cities and towns, is order. That is not at all the same thing as uniformity. No, we want variety, but ordered variety, not everybody following their own sweet will, which seems nowadays to be not at all sweet’ (Bertram, 1939: 23, author’s emphasis). What is required is a plan.
What is the root of disorder? Town planning is the deliberate shaping and organizing of the physical environment. According to Patrick Abercrombie, a town planner of the twentieth century, if there were no such organization and human habitation were allowed to grow ‘naturally’, the result would be ‘complete muddle’ as in the nineteenth-century towns of the UK. And one form of this muddle is ‘laissez-faire’. Ideologies require the identification of enemies. For Abercrombie, the enemy is clear enough here; it is the Smithian ‘muddler who will talk about the Law of Supply and Demand and the Liberty of the Individual’ (Abercrombie, 1943: 26, 27). G. D. H. Cole, who also had quite a lot to say about the virtues of planning, suggested in 1945 that ‘reliance on the free play of economic forces … has been largely responsible for many of our worst and most intractable social and economic problems’ (Cole, 1945: 21). A similar proposition is advanced by J. M. Keynes, who argues that a utilitarian, economic and financial ideal has become the guiding light of the community as a whole. This, the ‘most dreadful heresy … which has ever gained the ear of civilized people’, has meant that the state does not intervene to ensure the ‘preservation of the countryside from exploitation’ (Keynes, 1937: 2).
Order-planning’s contribution to the ideology of town planning had a number of elements. Howard’s was the idea of the Garden City conceived as a third alternative to town life and country life. That would ‘restore the people to the land’ which is the ‘very embodiment of Divine love for man’ and would cure ‘the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty’ (Howard, 1965: 44). Garden cities combined the virtues of both town and country and would therefore act as magnets for the population. They would provide employment and amusement and, at the same time, good housing and green space, all in an attractive layout. Howard did succeed in constructing two garden cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, as we have seen, although all did not entirely go to plan, but his major legacy lies in the foundation by others of New Towns after the Second World War and, secondarily, in the layout of suburban areas in the interwar period. New Towns have been constructed all over the country although mostly within striking distance of London. The terms of reference of the New Towns Committee, which reported just after the end of the Second World War, argued that New Towns should be ‘self-contained and balanced communities for working and living’, an ambition which comes straight from Howard (New Towns Committee, 1946: Howard, 1965: 119, 121). These are revealing phrases. The towns were to be self-contained in that they provided everything – employment, amusement, transport, health and social care – and inhabitants hardly had any compelling reason to cross their boundaries. And they were to be balanced communities representing all social classes, giving a cooperative order to the settlement. F. J. Osborn, who worked with Howard and became a major force in the development of town planning in the UK, argued for the extensive development of New Towns because their size could be contained and their inhabitants could therefore enjoy ‘the inalienable advantages of comfort in their houses, beauty and grace in their surroundings, sunlight, fresh air, health and a share of civic powers’ (quoted in Whittick, 1987: 25).
Garden Cities and New Towns were one order-planning response to the disorderly city. Others were the doctrine of green belts, the often visceral antipathy to suburban development, together with associated moves to preserve the countryside and coastline. These were all symptoms of the same condition. As much as anything else, green belts, constraints on ribbon development, prohibitions on rural building and New Towns were effectively designed to contain cities and towns, to stop the spread of contagion. If uncontrolled, buildings would appear in every pretty country village, despoil beauty spots and corrupt the coastline. The County of London Plan (Forshaw and Abercrombie, 1943) sought to develop the already existing green belt around London which, in addition to forming ‘the main place of week-end walking, bicycling, picnics, etc.’, served to restrict the outward growth of the city and prevent the agglomeration of urban units. Similar ideas of extending existing green belts generally introduced in the interwar period informed other city plans. A 1941 plan for Birmingham, for example, proposed green belts to prevent separate towns from growing together to create ‘huge urban areas’ (Birmingham Bournville Village Trust, 1941).
The invasion of the countryside by the suburbs of towns was of particular concern in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the interwar period when there were few restrictions on building at low density along roads. This ribbon development excited often furious resentment widely and not just in the planning profession. (For a literary survey see Carey, 1992: ch. 2. Poets could be particularly scathing.) Disease imagery abounded. Clough Williams-Ellis, the founder of Portmeirion, for instance, declared: ‘The disfiguring little buildings grow up and multiply like nettles along a drain, like lice upon a tape-worm’ (Williams-Ellis, 1928: 162); or Abercrombie again: ‘The aesthetic fault of the ribbon is simple: it is an urban formation purely, but it is thrust into the comparative naturalness of the country. It is like a cancer – a growth of apparently healthy cells but proceeding without check or relation to the whole body’ (Abercrombie, 1943: 120–1). H. Chessell invokes a different kind of horror in ‘the ribbon development of housing along the new arterial roads, and the stretching of the city’s tentacles far out into the countryside, with all that implies’ (n.d.: 20).
It is when confronted by the despoliation of the countryside that the language of commentators reaches its most strident. So, for them, country is country and town is town. They each have their virtues but they should not be allowed to mix. The countryside is quiet, slow, old and the province of nature. The town is noisy, fast-moving, brash, new and the product of human dominion over nature. This distinction between the two ways of life is, of course, a familiar one. The arguments of Thomas Sharp, a planner and academic writing in the 1930s and 1940s, is characteristic of the tendency. He is vehement that town and country must not be mixed for that would be to destroy both; the countryside must be ‘defended against the suburban flood which during the last two decades has threatened to overwhelm it, which has, indeed, already overwhelmed great tracts of it’ (Sharp, 1945: 145). Howard Marshall is even more apocalyptic about the destruction of the countryside which is spreading like a ‘prairie fire’. ‘The jerry-built bijou residences creep out along the roads. Beauty is sacrificed on the altar of the speeding motorist. Advertisements and petrol stations and shanties ruin our villages. A gimcrack civilization crawls like a gigantic slug
