The urbanism of Thomas Sharp

Abstract

Thomas Sharp was a prominent figure in planning in the UK in the middle part of the twentieth century, both as a writer on planning issues and as a producer of plans. He tends to be remembered as something of an outsider from the main body of the planning profession, for being an early and prominent critic of garden city principles, from the early 1930s, and for his sensitive townscape analyses in his 1940s reconstruction plans. The main argument of this paper is that these were important contributions to planning debate and practice; they should be viewed as part of an alternative schema of planning; and that Sharp was advocating a modern urbanist approach to urban form which stood distinct from the dominant paradigms of the garden city movement and Corbusian modernism.