Context 160 - July 2019

24 C O N T E X T 1 6 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 9 Birmingham: the location of second world war bombs (black are high explosive, red are incendiary) (Birmingham Library Services) plans, and range from sketches to fully detailed, multi-decade plans. Many undamaged places were jumping on the bandwagon of re-planning. Many of the plans prepared before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 were highly illustrated and quite specific in their physical planning proposals – but lacked implementation powers. After 1947, the situation was reversed. Thus the ‘reconstruction plans’ were often visu- ally appealing and effective at communicating ideas of the future city: the post-1947 develop- ment plans were not. This was a time when the planner was widely acknowledged as the expert. On the County of London Plan, for example, ‘the assumption of the rightness of the power to carry out these proposals in the common good is never questioned’.² Although many of the plan propos- als were widely promulgated, in publications and exhibitions, this was top-down information rather than consultation: there was little evidence that public responses influenced plan-making or implementation. But even the radical plans often received considerable support: on Coventry’s proposals the exhibition visitor’s book records many more positive then critical comments and ‘a Coventry such as you suggest would be worth living in’ is typical.³ On the other hand, plans had to be approved by the new Planning Ministry, and much evidence remains of highly critical and personal com- ments between civil servants and local councils and their planning consultants. Even the coun- try’s best-known and most influential consultant was criticised: ‘Generally, it seems to me a tragedy both for Hull, Sir Patrick Abercrombie and planning generally that he ever went near the place, and the sooner Hull gets away from his wilder ideas and faces up to the practical job of re-planning… in a sound, decent, ordinary way the better’.⁴ Perhaps the plans should not be read too liter- ally. ‘The plans for post-war London were always necessarily pragmatic and patchwork, both in their original intellectual conception and in their implementation, constrained by the material fabric of the existing built environment, and by social and financial realities.’⁵ The plans were always aspirational, part of an agenda of place- making and place-promotion at a time when the urban hierarchy, and social and economic structures, were changing rapidly. Many of the plans vanished without trace.Who now remembers Walsall’s 1943 plan?⁶ Even the Hull plan by Edwin Lutyens and Abercrombie was poorly received locally, and surprisingly little remains in the local archive (where some indexed items are now unlocatable). But some did have enduring influence, for example in new roads and alignments, while Thomas Sharp’s plan for Chichester and Stanley Adshead’s for York are still mentioned locally. The new visions for Plymouth and Coventry, despite the implemen- tation being to modified versions of the original plans, remain (to use an overworked word) icons of the vision for reconstructed Britain. The visions The influence of the artistic approach of archi- tects is evident in the use in many plans of formal, axial, even symmetrical beaux-arts-inspired lay- outs. Many of the plan authors were, of course, trained in this idiom, especially at the universi- ties of Liverpool and London, and principally by Patrick Abercrombie. Yet the dominance of this approach in the 1940s waned in subsequent years as modernist urbanism came to dominate. The Plymouth and Coventry plans typify these differences: Coventry had deliberately appointed Donald Gibson as a young, radical city architect, and many of his new staff were left-wing, if not communist, while Abercrombie – ‘the Professor’ – was an archetypal establishment figure. In both design traditions, although the ideas were not necessarily new, the scale of their implementation was: generating radical change in urban form and radically new plan types. Several factors, especially funding and land- ownership, led to the retention of many parts of existing, traditional, street and block patterns, Exeter: bomb damage (from Thomas Sharp’s 1946 plan: photographer unknown) 2 Higgott, A (2007) MediatingModernism: architectural cultures in Britain , Routledge 3The comment book is in the Johnson-Marshall archive, Edinburgh University library 4 Note by H Gatliff, Assistant Secretary, Ministry of Town and Country Planning, 14/2/1946; in HLG 79/226 5 Mort, F (2004) ‘Fantasies of Metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s’, Journalof British Studies 43 6 Larkham, PJ (2003) ‘Walsall: the origin, promotion and disappearance of a wartime “reconstruction” plan’, Planning History 25(2)