The Town Planning Movement and the Late Victorian City

Abstract

British town planning grew out of the issues concerned with late Victorian capitalism and the urban problems of the turn of the century. The contributory factors in a complex situation related particularly to the influences of the housing, social and land reform movements. Other influences included the garden city, innovations in residential architecture, the tradition of model estates built by philanthropic industrialists, and the attraction of German town expansion plans. British town planning finally took on a recognizable form in the context of tackling the problem of housing the working classes, with the statutory provisions of the 1909 Act which permitted a measure of land-use control of suburban areas. There was no town planning movement worthy of the name until a sufficient body of people was convinced that town planning could make a unique and necessary contribution to the happiness, welfare and prosperity, particularly of townspeople, but ultimately of the whole nation. The principal origin of the movement must be sought in the slow creation of that belief.' THIS account, by Ashworth, of the genesis of British town planning rested primarily on two observations: first, that town planning was rooted in the economic and social conditions of its time, and secondly, that its formulation was a stage in a gradual process of evolution. This thesis was an important corrective to an 'art history' approach to the understanding of town planning, typified by Hiorns2 and a sequence of writers in the same tradition, of which Burke3 is a recent example. This school looks at successive phases of town formation and the contributions to urban design; it sees town building and its progressive developments from antiquity onward, and places contemporary town planning as an enlightened adjustment to the environmental neglect of the nineteenth century. Passing regard is paid to economic and social contexts but the precise relationship between them and the design response is never properly drawn. In a period of vigorous growth in the social sciences we would expect the Ashworth line of approach to be the more meaningful, and this has proved to be the case. But Ashworth's own thesis needs further development: an economic and social context accounts in general terms for town planning as a public response, but does not necessarily explain the actual factors in its emergence at one point in time. Moreover, it is no longer satisfactory to see the contemporary origins of town planning as simply a phase in a natural and logical evolution of other aspects of environmental control. We need to account rather more carefully for the origins of town planning at the turn of the century, not only in Britain, but throughout western Europe and the U.S.A. In 1974 I observed that the twentieth-century development of British planning was 'essentially a political, social, cultural, professional and technical response to a blend of circumstances which marked the years at the turn of the century'.4 But what was this blend? What was it in the late Victorian city that threw up the particular conditions for a town planning movement? What were the precise trigger mechanisms that changed a century-long process of