Almost precisely in 1900, as a reaction to the horrors of the nineteenth-century slum city, the clock of planning history started ticking. But, paradoxically, as it did so, another much older and bigger timepiece started to drown it out. The very problem that the infant planning movement sought to address almost instantly began to change its shape. Most of the philosophical founders of the planning movement continued to be obsessed with the evils of the congested Victorian slum city – which indeed remained real enough, at least down to World War Two, even to the 1960s. But all the time, the giant city was changing, partly through the reaction of legislators and local reformers to these evils, partly through market forces. The city dispersed and deconcentrated. New homes, new factories were built at its suburban periphery. New transportation technologies – the electric tram, the electric commuter train, the underground railway, the motor bus – allowed this suburbanization process to take place. New agencies – building societies, public and nonprofit housing agencies – exploited the opportunities thus offered. Cheap labor and cheap materials reduced the real costs of new housing, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Better, more subtle planning and development regulations curbed the congestion and also some of the tedium of the nineteenth-century cities. The result was an extraordinary and quite sudden improvement in the housing standards of a wide spectrum of the population. But the results were often visually unimpressive and sometimes woeful – not, maybe, to those most immediately affected, but certainly to those who styled themselves expert guardians of the public taste.

And all this took place even while the pioneers were writing, campaigning, exerting influence on the body politic. The resulting dilemma is an unresolvable dilemma for the writer (and the reader) of planning history: it is never clear which came first, the suburbanizing chicken or the philosophical egg. But after all, it does not matter: the story only makes sense if both lines are understood together. So, though it is a logical impossibility, this and the following chapters – above all the next – need to be read simultaneously.

The process of suburbanization, especially the market-led variety, was far more pervasive and more evident in London and New York than in Paris or Berlin or other European capitals. And in certain key aspects – the role of public transport, the importance of cheap long-term mortgages, the relationship between private and large-scale public developments – London remained the most interesting, the most vital, the most evidently problematic of all the great cities in these years. So the story had better focus on it.

The London County Council Starts to Build

Right at the start of the new century, the British Census of 1901 showed just how acute remained London’s problems of congestion and overcrowding. Some 45% of families in one inner London borough (Finsbury) still lived in one or two rooms, while in a whole ring of neighboring boroughs² the proportion exceeded one-third.³ That year, Charles Booth published yet another paper, extolling the virtues of “Improved means of locomotion as a first step towards the cure of the housing difficulties of London.” What was needed, Booth argued, was “a large and really complete scheme of railways underground and overhead, as well as a net-work of tram lines on the surface; providing adequately for short as well as for long journeys. A system extending well outside the present metropolitan boundaries into the outskirts of London, wherever the population has gone, or may go.”⁴ True, Booth – never a believer in government action, save in dire necessity – saw this as a means to free the private builder to provide the cure. But the more collectivist mind of the London County Council’s (LCC) Progressive Party had already moved in the same direction. Though the Royal Commission of 1885 had recommended rehousing the working classes in the center, during the 1890s that idea was speedily abandoned.⁵

The Progressive – that is, Fabian-influenced – majority dominated the LCC’s Housing Committee from the start, in 1890;⁶ in 1898 it recommended that the Council itself build on a large scale on vacant land using Part III of the 1890 Act, and the full Council – after much agitation and a big debate – endorsed the policy. Finding that they were precluded from building outside their own constricted inner-London boundaries – even then, almost entirely built up – the LCC pressured Parliament for a 1900 amendment, allowing them to build estates of “working class tenements” on greenfield sites at the edge of the County and even beyond it, which they immediately used to start work on four such estates. And, even though that same year the Moderate (Conservative) party took control, keeping it until 1914, the LCC maintained a big house-building program. Between 1900 and 1914, they provided some 17,000 rooms in rehousing schemes on slum-clearance sites within their own boundaries, and another 11,000 in peripheral and out-county estates.

In 1899, even before they had parliamentary powers, they moved to buy the Totterdown Fields site at Tooting in South London.⁷ The means to its development was the electrification of the tramway, which the LCC had acquired from private interests a few years earlier. In May 1903, when the Prince of Wales opened the line from Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges to Totterdown Street, he was also able to visit the first cottages, just occupied. In 10 years, workmen’s tickets on the trams rose more than fifteen-fold.⁸ A second peripheral estate, at Norbury, outside the LCC area, was slightly more problematic; the LCC trams terminated at the boundary half a mile short. A third, White Hart Lane at Tottenham in North London, 2 miles from the county line, was a bigger challenge still: the LCC had hoped for a tube line as part of the construction mania of the mid-Edwardian years, but it failed to come to pass.⁹

At the fourth site, Old Oak in West London, they were luckier; the estate was planned around an extension of the Central London Railway, which, begun in 1913, was delayed by World War One and opened only in 1920.¹⁰ The whole estate, minuscule though it may be, is thus a classic example of a satellite settlement planned around a transit line from the city; it anticipates by more than a decade what Bruno Taut was to do at Onkel Toms Hütte in Berlin in the 1920s and, much later, Sven Markelius was to achieve at Vällingby and Farsta in Stockholm in the period 1955–65.

It fell short in one respect, for the LCC: they were not in charge of the underground fares, as on the trams they were. From the outset, they saw the trams as “instruments of social policy”:¹¹ early-morning cheap workmen’s fares would ensure that rent and fare combined would be less than central London rentals. “The advantages of air-space and pleasant surroundings can, therefore, be secured at practically no extra cost and even, in the majority of instances, with some reduction of necessary expenses”: so they argued in 1913.¹² Thus, though “the Council has not been free to abandon the policy of central housing or rehousing … the policy laid down by Parliament has often led to the retention in central districts of many working-class families who might have been accommodated in the suburbs at less cost to the community and at greater advantages to themselves.”¹³ By 1914, the trams were carrying 260,000 passengers a day, against 560,000 on the cheap early-morning workmen’s trains.¹⁴ About this time, Charles Masterman described the effect in South London, where the LCC routes were especially dense: “Family after family are evacuating the blocks and crowded tenements for little four-roomed cottages, at Hither Green and Tooting. The unaccustomed sign ‘To Let’ can be seen in almost every street.”¹⁵

So the LCC prescription worked – for some. What Masterman, for all his acuteness of observation, may not have noticed was that the migration was socially selective. It was the better-off skilled artisan who had a bargain from the move: the LCC cottages gave his family more and better-designed space for their money, but they still cost more than the rent of a miserable room near the center, and in them, sub-letting was specifically and stringently barred. So those earning £1 a week or less – the casual laborer, the carman, the market porter, the docker – who had only 7s. left for rent after buying food, were still trapped in the slums; and, during this first full decade of LCC building from 1901 to 1911, overcrowding in London actually worsened.¹⁶

But for those who could escape, the effect must have been dramatic. Both the early peripheral estates, and the more numerous inner-city slum-clearance schemes, represent some of the earliest examples in Britain of large-scale town planning, and both kinds achieved an extraordinarily high level of architecture and civic design. The credit for that belongs to the new Architect’s Department, to which came a group of young and talented architects steeped in the traditions of William Morris, Norman Shaw, and the Arts and Crafts movement. This is the first but not the last point in this story when chronology and organization run awry: this early LCC style was in many ways identical, in spirit and in practical outcome, to that practiced in the same years by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker at New Earswick Garden Village outside York, at Letchworth Garden City, and at Hampstead Garden Suburb, which forms a main focus of Chapter 4.

Where it differed, at least in the earliest examples, was a result not of philosophy but of legal constraint. Working outside existing cities, and sometimes able to pressure traditionalist local authorities, Unwin and Parker were able to set aside the rigid local by-laws which, ironically, had been created 30 or 40 years earlier to guarantee minimum standards of light and air for working-class housing, but which did so at the expense of uniform and dull gridiron layouts. The LCC architects were seldom so lucky. In their earliest scheme of all, completed in 1900 – the Boundary Street estate in Shoreditch, a central-area rehousing scheme on the site of the Jago, a notorious nineteenth-century slum – they had been able to achieve a remarkable effect with five-story walk-up blocks, designed by various hands like large pavilions around a leafy central circus: a kind of palace for the poor, still impressive even more than 120 years later, now restored after years of local authority neglect. But, in their earliest edge-of-town and out-of-town schemes – 1,261 houses at Totterdown Fields (1903–9), 881 houses at White Hart Lane (1904–13), and 472 houses at Norbury (1906–10) – they were stuck with the grid and had to do the best they could with it: by varying the length and setting back some of the terrace rows, by constantly imaginative treatment of the facades, and – at Tottenham – by incorporating a private donation of open space to create a remarkable central quadrangle of houses around a park.¹⁷

Only after 1910 did they begin to break loose. On a small site for 304 houses at Old Oak in Hammersmith, where they had a free hand, they were able for the first time to build on curving streets to create an Unwinesque townscape of cozy corners, overhanging gable ends, and gateways that provide glimpses into half-hidden interior courts. The whole effect is cunningly conceived around the underground station, and set against the vast green expanse of Wormwood Scrubs, which – like the Heath at Hampstead Garden Suburb – forms a permanent green belt, separating the new satellite from the dense terraces of North Kensington a mile away. Here as in the other estates, the LCC planners labored under extraordinary constraints: costs were as low as £50 a room, densities as high as 30 houses or 130 people to the acre (which, Abercrombie and Forshaw would argue 30 years later, required a high-rise solution), grim prison walls loomed just around the corner. Yet here they created a magic world that, even today, somewhat down-at-heel, has the capacity to astonish. Then, in a second stage (1919–21) at Norbury, they brought off a tour de force in the Unwin–Parker tradition, almost outclassing the masters: they exploited a small hill to create a brilliant courtyard of terrace houses, rising above the by-law streets like a walled German medieval market-town.

The First Town-Planning Schemes

Meanwhile, compared with the LCC, the other great urban authorities of England were doing relatively little. And many shared Booth’s view that better urban transit, coupled with private house-building, offered the main route to the eventual solution of the problem; the infant art of town planning should concentrate on providing a better framework, within which the developer could work. That logic led to the Liberal government’s Housing, Town Planning, etc. Bill, which, bitterly fought through Parliament – the Second Reading deferred no less than 19 times, axed at the end of the 1907–8 session, reintroduced, and with no less than 360 House of Lords amendments – was passed into law in 1909.¹⁸

Introducing it, John Burns – now, as President of the Local Government Board, retaining some echoes of the oratory that had once swayed Trafalgar Square – intoned,

The object of this Bill is to provide a domestic condition for the people in which their physical health, their morals, their character, and their whole social condition can be improved … The Bill aims in broad outlines at, and hopes to secure, the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified, and the suburb salubrious.¹⁹

The principal means to the “home healthy” would be more extensive slum-clearance and rebuilding powers for the local authorities:

On its housing side the Bill seeks to abolish, reconstruct, and prevent the slum. It asks – at least, I do for it – the House of Commons to do something to efface the ghettos of meanness and the Alsatias of squalor that can be found in many parts of the United Kingdom.²⁰

To that end, the Bill reformed the 1890 legislation, giving local authorities unambiguous powers to retain the houses they built under slum-clearance schemes, thus paving the way for the post-World War One public housing drive; it also allowed the Local Government Board to prod recalcitrant authorities into action.²¹ Indeed, it gave fairly draconian powers to the Local Government Board; there was a widespread view, apparently shared by Burns himself, that local councils were not up to the job. And that tradition of central interference – doubtless based on that distrust – has been an abiding feature of British planning throughout the subsequent century.²²

But the most important section of the Act dealt with the new town planning powers, which, Burns explained,

seek to diminish what have been called bye-law streets, with little law and much monotony. It hopes to get rid of the regulation roads that are so regular that they lack that line of beauty that Hogarth said was a curve.²³

The by-laws, in contrast, were seen as crudely restrictive; thus culs-de-sac were forbidden because they were seen as bad for public health, and at Hampstead a special Act of Parliament had to be passed to circumvent the Hendon by-laws. And Hampstead was seen as a model in the fight for greater elasticity.²⁴

The model was thus the small group of schemes that had already managed to escape from the tyranny of the by-laws:

They have only to take a motor car or any other vehicle, and go to places like Balham, Millbank, Boundary St., Tooting, Ealing, Hampstead and Northfield to see how modified schemes of town planning, accompanied by schemes of transit, tram, train and tube are progressing.²⁵

The objective, accepting that London’s population would continue to grow outwards, was to plan for it by gaining agreement between the public and the private sector: “to get them to turn together towards one outlook with one scheme, instead of mutually fighting each other to each other’s detriment”²⁶

Let us take Bournville for the poor and Bournemouth for the rich. Let us take Chelsea for the classes and Tooting for the masses. What do you find? You find in those four instances that your public-spirited corporations and your public-spirited landowners have been at work, and … you will find very much done without damage to anybody of what we hope to make universal by this Bill.²⁷

The press were unimpressed by the oratory. But eventually, on December 3, 1909, the Bill was passed. Its most important provision was to allow and encourage local authorities to make town-planning schemes for large areas liable to be developed for new housing. In them the idea was to recapture the kind of informal yet sensitive control exercised by private developers when they granted building leases, as in the great London estates, through the power to control development – a power added to the 1909 Act, almost accidentally, as an administrative expedient to ensure that necessary building was not impeded by the preparation of town planning schemes.²⁸ The earliest schemes approved by the Local Government Board were for three linked areas on the west side of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Harborne, and Quinton, a total of 2,320 acres; a scheme for East Birmingham soon followed, with the firm intention eventually to cover the entire periphery of the city. George Cadbury in 1915 commended them for their role in reducing “The great stirrings of social unrest, which are such a striking manifestation in these days,” since “Undoubtedly at the present time a large factor in the Labour Unrest is the desire of the masses of the working classes to obtain the means to live a proper life for both themselves and their families.”²⁹ But another prominent Birmingham industrialist and social reformer, J. S. Nettlefold, who had originally conceived of the schemes in imitation of best German planning practice, doubted that they would have any effect of the kind: “Neither of the two Birmingham schemes are in the least degree likely to help those people who so badly need assistance, if only for the sake of their children.”³⁰

For Nettlefold, the London scheme that was approved at about the same time, at Ruislip–Northwood, was much superior. It was very much larger, covering some 6,000 acres as against 4,000 in the two Birmingham schemes; it set out roads, building lines, open spaces, shopping, factory, and residential areas. With a maximum density of 12 houses to the acre, it included many areas with fewer. At its heart was a design – commended by Burns in the debate – by A. and J. Soutar, the designers of Old Oak, for the Ruislip Manor Company, the winner in a competition assessed by Raymond Unwin and Sir Aston Webb.³¹

Today, in a short tour of West London, the earnest student of planning history can take in three early classics: the LCC’s Old Oak estate of 1912–14, the Ealing Tenants’ nearby cooperative garden suburb of 1906–10, and Ruislip–Northwood. The comparison is not to Ruislip–Northwood’s advantage. Speculative builders, even enlightened ones, could hardly compete with the early LCC Architect’s Department at its best, or with Unwin and Parker’s small gem at Ealing. What additionally disappoints is the quality of the Ruislip layout. The core is the Ruislip Manor scheme, and in turn the core of that is a formal main axis which climbs gradually, through a series of traffic circles, to form the main shopping parade passing under the Metropolitan Railway line that provides the raison d’être of the whole development, thence to the summit of a pronounced hill, which looks down the far side to the northern boundary of the scheme, an extensive green belt reserved mainly for recreation.

By the standards of by-law planning, of course, it is a notable advance: there is a coherence of a rather formal kind, the open space is generous and flexibly disposed (a green wedge, for instance, runs alongside the railway, right in to the edge of the shopping center), some pieces of the road pattern are interesting, and the small bit actually designed by the Soutars – one of whom later succeeded Unwin at Hampstead Garden Suburb – is very good.³² But, surprisingly, there are also long unbroken lines of almost straight street, of unequalled by-law tedium; Burns, one feels, orated in vain. And, coupled with the uninspired neo-Georgian of the shopping parade – a style to be repeated countless times, all over suburban London, in the 1920s and 1930s – the effect is one of rather crushing formalism: a City Beautiful that isn’t very beautiful. It provides an inauspicious start for the golden age of the English suburb.

New York Discovers Zoning

The Americans had already done much better than that. Their classic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century suburbs, all planned around commuter railroad stations – Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, Lake Forest and Riverside outside Chicago, Forest Hills Gardens in New York – all had a conspicuously high standard of design; Riverside, as we shall see in Chapter 4, was almost certainly one of the models for Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. These suburbs maintained sophisticated systems of social and physical control, in order to maintain homogeneous communities of high quality, with harmonious houses.³³ And, as American cities rapidly extended their basic municipal services outwards, the citizens of these suburbs were the main beneficiaries: “They owned the flush toilets and bathtubs that flowed with ample supplies of municipal water; they were the bicyclists who benefited from the fresh asphalt pavements; and they also rode the lengthy streetcar lines to suburban neighbourhoods for a price equal to that paid by inner-city commuters for shorter journeys.”³⁴ The problem was that down to 1900 there were not many of them.

That was especially true in New York and Chicago, which were already too big for effective streetcar access; here, the future would depend on subway or commuter lines. New York opened its first subway segment in 1904,³⁵ and the system began to spread in the following years.

As its historian has remarked, it was a response to two critical problems, rapid urban growth and awkward geography: with 3,437,000 people in 1900, the world’s second city, it sprawled across several islands separated by arduous waterways; Manhattan was 13 miles long but only 2 miles wide at best.³⁶ So the system had to be good, and it was: it was the first subway in the world with express tracks at up to 40 miles per hour.³⁷ It opened up huge undeveloped tracts north of 59th Street, especially on the west side, and northwards into the Bronx, for middle- and upper-class occupation.³⁸ Between 1905 and 1920, the population of Manhattan, above 125th Street, increased by 265% and in the Bronx it increased by 156%; from 1910 to 1930 the population living outside Manhattan increased from 51 to 73% of the city total.³⁹

But, as the Tenement House Commission had reported in 1900, while “Undoubtedly better transit facilities will enable some of the more ambitious and better paid tenement dwellers to provide themselves with separate houses in the outlying districts … it is evident that the bulk of the laboring classes will continue to live in tenement houses”; they could not afford to move.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, one indirect effect of Veiller’s work was the Commission on Congestion of Population, established through the efforts of settlement-house leaders in 1907, which reported in 1911 in favor of decentralization through transit.

But – as the Commission had recognized in its own exhibition on congestion three years earlier, and as civic leaders appreciated – better transit was a double-edged sword: it could also spell even worse congestion in the city’s core, by bringing more workers in and raising land values. This was the paradox, and it could be resolved only through a complementary measure: restrictions on the height and massing of buildings.⁴¹

The Commission’s executive secretary was Benjamin C. Marsh, a lawyer and social reformer, who visited Europe at the start of its work in 1907–8 and published an early tome on city planning in 1909, the year of the first National Conference on City Planning in Washington. Both Marsh and a fellow visitor, a New York lawyer called Edward M. Bassett, were most struck by the success of the Germans in zoning land uses and building heights in their cities. Marsh in particular singled out Frankfurt, under its Bürgermeister Franz Adickes, as the model for American cities to follow;⁴² Marsh was also impressed by the results of zoning in Düsseldorf and by Werner Hegemann’s work in Berlin.⁴³

So zoning came to New York from Germany. Perhaps that is an oversimplification: mundanely, American land-use zoning seems to have originated in an attempt to control the spread of Chinese laundries in California, first in the city of Modesto and then in San Francisco, in the 1880s; and from 1909 onwards Los Angeles developed comprehensive land-use zoning.⁴⁴ But it was the German model of combined land-use and height zoning that was imported to New York City in its 1916 zoning ordinance, which – so contemporaries believed – was the most significant development in the early history of American city planning.⁴⁵ And the Manhattan case was basically different from almost anywhere else in America: here zoning was not residential, it was not concerned with regulating land use, it was commercial and it was concerned with the bulk and massing of buildings. It was supported by powerful commercial interests who saw it as a way of protecting the value of existing real estate against undesirable invasions – principally garment shops and garment workers who would invade the prestige stores of Midtown. Indeed, according to investigators from the Fifth Avenue Association, it was directed against “Hebrews” swarming from nearby lofts at lunchtime.⁴⁶ It reflected the conditions of 1916: a real estate depression, in which it mattered more to protect existing values than to create new ones. What the 1916 ordinance failed to do, despite the hopes of one influential and enthusiastic group, was to serve as a prelude to a fuller comprehensive plan.⁴⁷

The main agents were Bassett, who regarded it as his great life achievement, and his fellow New York reform politician George McAneny. Their moment of opportunity came in 1911, when Fifth Avenue garment retailers, worried by the spread of the manufacturing workshops that served them, formed a quasi-official commission to pressure the city into action. It brought speedy result: in 1913, the city’s Board of Estimate voted to create a Committee on City Planning, empowered to appoint an advisory Commission on Heights of Buildings. The Commission’s report, in December the same year, predictably argued for a system of zoning based on the concept of police power: the notion, anciently developed in American out of English law, that the state had the right to regulate the private use of property so as to guarantee “the health, safety, morals, comfort, convenience, and welfare of the community.”⁴⁸ A charter amendment to permit zoning followed early in 1914, and a Zoning Commission set to work to prepare the actual ordinance. Skilfully marshalling popular support and disarming opposition, it reported in 1916 in favor of four types of land-use zone, two of which – residential and business – would be subject to height restrictions.⁴⁹

As more than one observer pointed out, both then and subsequently, New York embraced zoning so enthusiastically because it was good for business. The Fifth Avenue merchants were concerned that floods of immigrant garment workers on the noontime streets would destroy the exclusive character of their businesses and would thus threaten their property values; they appealed to “every financial interest” and to “every man who owns a home or rents an apartment”; the Commission on Heights of Buildings confirmed that zoning secured “greater safety and security in investment.”⁵⁰ The very year of the New York ordinance, John Nolen could agree with an English writer that American city planning essentially aimed at civic improvements that did not interfere with vested interests.⁵¹ And, as the zoning movement rapidly spread from New York across the nation, this was its image.

It was indeed an odd kind of planning. For the relationship between zoning and planning was an indirect and tortuous one. True, the movement spread rapidly in the 1920s: in 1921 Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce, created an Advisory Committee on Zoning that included Bassett and Veiller; it resulted in a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act of 1923, which was widely adopted; in 1927 it was followed by a Standard City Planning Enabling Act, which was adopted by many States to give legal authority to city master-plans⁵² by 1929 more than 650 municipalities had planning commissions and 754 communities had adopted zoning ordinances.⁵³ And a series of landmark legal judgments, culminating in the historic 1926 case before the United States Supreme Court, Village of Euclid et al v. Ambler Realty Co., established the validity of zoning as a legitimate expression of the general police power.⁵⁴ But city planning was commonly done on an advisory, non-mandatory basis; in 1937, out of 1,178 Commissions, no fewer than 904 had no financial appropriation at all.⁵⁵ And in practice, despite the assertions of Bassett and others, planning and zoning were largely divorced from each other. Cincinnati, where the pioneer work of Alfred Bettman had achieved some real powers for the Planning Commission and where zoning was an arm of planning, was unusual.⁵⁶ As Bassett explained to his readers in 1936, though zoning was logically part of the city plan, commonly, planning and zoning commissions had to be legally separate.⁵⁷

In any case, the real point was why American cities so enthusiastically embraced the concept of zoning. The sordid reason was self-interest. In practice, as in New York, “zoning became primarily a static process of attempting to set and preserve the character of certain neighborhoods, in order to preserve property values in these areas, while imposing only nominal restrictions on those areas holding a promise of speculative profit.”⁵⁸ In Euclid v. Ambler, the great planner-lawyer Alfred Bettman – whose brief, submitted late in the hearing, may well have proved crucial – argued that the “public welfare” served by zoning was the enhancement of the community’s property values.⁵⁹ The point, significantly, was whether land should be zoned as industrial or residential; the Court gave the respectable residents of Euclid, a middle-class dormitory village next door to Cleveland, a guarantee that their investments would not be threatened. Bassett, the father of the New York scheme, later wrote that one of zoning’s major purposes was to prevent the “premature depreciation of settled localities.”⁶⁰ Or, as a later commentator put it,

The basic purpose of zoning was to keep Them where They belonged – Out. If They had already gotten in, then its purpose was to confine Them to limited areas. The exact identity of Them varied a bit around the country. Blacks, Latinos, and poor people qualified. Catholics, Jews, and Orientals were targets in many places. The elderly also qualified, if they were candidates for public housing.⁶¹

Zoning, in fact, simply reproduced arrangements that had informally prevailed in exclusive residential suburbs long before it arrived, and that combined four interrelated elements: careful site selection, comprehensive planning, creation of a defensive framework of property restrictions, local ordinances, and boundary-marking strategies, and underlying communal consensus. The walled and gated exclusive suburban communities that have proliferated since 1980 are merely a latter-day manifestation of a long American tradition – impelled, perhaps, by an ageing cohort’s fear of crime.⁶²

A standard text of the late 1920s, indeed, could openly promote zoning on the basis that it stabilized property values: in every city with well-established zoning, the authors reported, “property values are reported stabilized and in many instances substantially increased,” a fact that had been quickly recognized by financial institutions everywhere.⁶³ “Zoning and plat control,” they emphasized, “divide honors in being reported the most profitable results of city planning.”⁶⁴ As they proudly proclaimed in a chapter heading, “IT PAYS TO PLAN.”⁶⁵ Far from realizing greater social justice for the poor locked in the tenements of New York and Chicago, the planning-and-zoning system of the 1920s was designed precisely to keep them out of the desirable new suburbs that were being built along the streetcar tracks and the subway lines.

London: The Tube Brings Suburban Sprawl

Something like that was happening around London and other great British cities – but with an important difference. There, too, the age of mass suburbanization began after World War One. The key, in London and Birmingham as in New York or Chicago, was of course transport; these developments, at any rate in London and the big provincial cities, were well outside walk-to-work range. Booth and others had railed against the lack of cheap trains: despite Gladstone’s Penny Trains Act of 1844, the railway companies did little, and sometimes even seemed to share the Duke of Wellington’s view that railways might “act as a premium to the lower orders to go uselessly wandering around the country.”⁶⁶ Parliament in 1864 had allowed the GER extension to Liverpool Street on condition that the railway provided cheap trains, and alone in northeast London did large-scale working-class suburbs develop.⁶⁷

The key then was municipal trams and then buses in places like Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, underground railways and commuter railways as well in London. Above all, the growth of speculative housing around London – which roughly trebled the capital’s area in 20 years – depended on rail transit. Unlike provincial England, this system was provided by private enterprise: specifically, the Underground group, which had absorbed the London General Omnibus Company in 1912, and the main-line railway companies, of which two – the Southern, and the London and North Eastern – developed major commuter networks.

A significant part of this system was created by American capital and enterprise. But that was not surprising. Americans had been quick to see the commercial potential of land development following new rail or streetcar lines, and some of the earliest textbook examples of the planned railway suburb – Llewellyn Park at West Orange, New Jersey (1853), Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia (1854), Lake Forest, Illinois (1856), and Riverside, Illinois (1869) – all anticipate the first classic British essay in the genre, Bedford Park in West London (1876).⁶⁸ From here it was a short step to the notion that an entrepreneur would deliberately lay out rail or streetcar lines in order to develop suburbs around them, as illustrated by the careers of F. M. “Borax” Smith in the San Francisco Bay area or Henry E. Huntingdon in Los Angeles.⁶⁹ But the most colorful, if perhaps the least savory, example was provided – first in Chicago, then in London – by the career of Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905).

Yerkes was disarmingly open about his operations: “The secret of my success is to buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it on other fellows.”⁷⁰ Contemporaries called him “a buccaneer from a Pennsylvania penitentiary” (he had been jailed for early fraud) and “not a safe man.”⁷¹ He developed the street railway system of Chicago and connected it into a network via the downtown Loop, controlling over 400 miles of street railway.⁷² When the time came in 1897 to extend his franchises, he paid one million dollars to buy the State legislature and then the City Council; successful in the first, he was unsuccessful in the second and nearly provoked a riot, after which he felt it provident to leave the city.⁷³

London was a natural port of call. For there – as Theodore Dreiser recounts in his last novel, a thinly disguised fiction – he immediately realized that the Circle underground line was a ready-made downtown loop which could be exploited thorough new lines, then projected to start.⁷⁴ When Chicago heard of all this, Dreiser wrote, there were “snarls of rage” that “such a ruthless trickster, so recently ejected from that city” should now descend on London.⁷⁵ But descend he did; by 1901 Yerkes had acquired a large part of the London network, existing and new, and had welded it into a new company, the Underground Electric Railways of London Limited (UERL), and was engaged in a titanic struggle with another American tycoon, J. Pierrepoint Morgan, for the right to build new tubes in London.⁷⁶ The key to the operation is revealed by the fictional Yerkes:

maybe you can find out something about the land values that are likely to be made by what we do, and whether it might be worth while to buy in advance in any direction, as we have done here in Lakeview and other places.⁷⁷

The gains would not come directly from the new lines, however: expensive to construct, these barely reached the built-up edge of London. They would come from tramway feeder lines, developed by separate companies, with syndicates to buy and sell land on the American pattern; UERL already controlled one tramway net, in West London.⁷⁸ Unfortunately for him, in 1905, while the new tube lines were actually under construction, Yerkes died.

But at least some of his legacy was to live after him – though stripped of the colorful financial aspects. The year after Yerkes’s death his successor as chairman of UERL, George Gibb, brought in a young statistical assistant called Frank Pick. The year after that, the company in deep financial trouble, UERL’s directors bowed to the wishes of their American controlling interests and appointed to the post of general manager a 32-year-old British émigré to the United States, then manager of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, Albert Stanley. Stanley (later Lord Ashfield) and Pick, men of very different but complementary personalities, were to form arguably the greatest management team ever known in the history of urban public transport; from 1933, on formation of London Transport, Ashfield would become Chairman, Pick Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.⁷⁹ In 1912, when UERL took over the London General Omnibus Company, Pick – now the company’s commercial manager – began to develop feeder buses from the tube termini, on the model of Yerkes’s original tramways plan; within six months, with a new slogan “Where the Railway Ends the Motor Bus Begins,” he more than doubled the number of routes, and extended the service area five times.⁸⁰

But that was just the provisional start. After World War One, Pick began systematically to analyze the gaps in existing rail services and the possibilities of providing new ones. Successive governments, apparently impressed by the notion that public works would relieve unemployment, provided public money at zero or minimal rates of interest.⁸¹ The results were presented in a number of papers that Pick – that most academic-minded of managers – gave to learned and professional societies from 1927 onwards: a tube line, running at average speed of 25 miles per hour, would give an urban area of 12-mile radius; by wide spacing of outer stations and by closing inner ones (as Pick did on the Piccadilly Line in 1932–4) this could be edged out to perhaps 15 miles, but hardly anyone would pay the equivalent of more than a 6d. fare, so by the late 1930s – when the last tube extensions were being built – the whole system had reached a limit.⁸²

South of the River Thames, directed by its equally dynamic general manager Herbert Walker, the Southern Railway (SR) did a similar job, rapidly electrifying its network to trigger a building boom. Over a third of the new stations opened in the London area after 1919 were on the SR and “Almost all the new stations opened in the London suburban area after 1920 had some form of subsidy from interested developers, seventeen of them on the Southern Railway alone.”⁸³

The development, thus triggered, took two forms, both presaged by the pioneering prewar schemes: first, an explosion of speculative building, above all around London, partly within the framework of town-planning schemes, partly running ahead of them; secondly, a great extension of local authority housing estates, especially around the great cities, generally in the form of dependent satellite towns linked to the parent city by tram, bus, or rail. Both came to be condemned for failures in planning; but while in the first place the condemnation was muted and partial, in the second it was well-nigh universal, providing in the process the fuel that powered the movement for a more effective town and country planning system.

The Legacy of Tudor Walters

Down to World War One, local authorities had provided a negligible share of new housing in Britain: a total of 18,000 houses under the 1890 Act, the great majority of them in London; between 1910 and 1914, indeed, demolitions had outrun completions.⁸⁴ And, though there was a deepening crisis in the supply of working-class housing, there was no agreement as to the solution; some, like Nettlefold in Birmingham, thought that the framework of the 1909 Act would serve to release the energies of the private builders; others that co-partnership schemes provided the answer.⁸⁵ During the war, the problem actually worsened; rent strikes in Glasgow and in the new munitions factory areas led to the hasty imposition of rent control.⁸⁶ At its end, the government faced a dilemma; it wanted to lift rent control, but it did not dare to unless the supply of new housing increased, and that could come only through local authority intervention.⁸⁷ In his highly influential 1918 book The Home I Want, the housing reformer Captain Reiss could assert that it was “generally agreed, even by those who believe in private enterprise, that no other policy can be adopted immediately after the war” than local authority building; “It has been a bitter reproach to us that thousands of the men who have gone out to fight for ‘Home and Country’ have had no home worthy of that name and but little for which to thank their country.”⁸⁸

All this was to change. Almost overnight, the housing of the working classes – the term was still openly used, then and for long after – came to be a public responsibility. The result, between the two world wars, was more than a million local authority dwellings, most of them single-family cottage houses, with their own gardens, in the form of satellites at the peripheries of the cities. Sometimes, as with the developments by Manchester at Wythenshawe, Liverpool at Speke, or London at Becontree, these amounted almost to new towns – albeit lacking sufficient industry to make them anything like self-contained. But they were the largest planned developments in England at that time, dwarfing the then garden cities: Becontree reached the 116,000 mark in 1939; Wythenshawe at the end of the 1930s was one-third of the way to the same target.

They represent the supreme achievement, though some would say the supreme failure, of Raymond Unwin. Here, not for the last time, we go out of historical sequence. Unwin’s considerable early reputation came from his designs for the first Garden City at Letchworth and for Hampstead Garden Suburb, to be chronicled in Chapter 4. In 1915, at considerable financial sacrifice, he had joined the Local Government Board as Town Planning Inspector in order to influence housing reform. Two years later, his opportunity came: he was appointed a member of the Committee on Housing chaired by Sir John Tudor Walters, which reported a month before the war’s end, in October 1918.

That report proved one of the most potent influences on the development of the twentieth-century British city. It essentially argued four propositions. First, that though public utility societies, formed by groups of large employers, “should be made an important auxiliary to the work of the local authorities,” the latter alone – subsidized, of course, by government – could complete the task of building some 500,000 houses in a short time, 100,000 a year; speculative builders, the report dismissively declared, “present a rather more difficult problem, but they most certainly have their place.” Secondly, that the local authorities must chiefly build on cheap undeveloped land on the outskirts of cities, carefully phasing their plans in with tramway development so that they did not have to pay enhanced value:

With respect to the large towns, it is most desirable that, in order to avoid further overcrowding in the built-up areas, the new schemes should be provided in the outskirts, and the first step in this direction is to speed up the town-planning schemes coupled with foresight in tramway extension and other means of transit.⁸⁹

Thirdly, it argued that on such sites it was both possible and desirable to build at maximum densities of 12 single-family houses to the acre, each with its own garden, securing economies in land use by skilful design – of which they gave numerous examples. Fourthly, that to ensure good quality of design the plans should be produced by architects and must be approved by local commissioners of the Local Government Board and its Scottish equivalent.⁹⁰

The report represented Unwin’s personal triumph. All his basic ideas, carried through from his 1912 pamphlet Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!, were here: the minimum distance of 70 feet between houses to guarantee winter sunshine, the use of short terraces, the garden for every family, the use of spare backland as recreational space, the emphasis on culs-de-sac for safe children’s play. Partly these recommendations stemmed from the remarkable experiment of employing a separate Women’s Housing Sub-Committee, of whose recommendations Unwin seems to have taken just so much as he wished – rejecting, for instance, their recommendation that every house must have a separate parlor.⁹¹

The report was radical enough; what was remarkable was its immediate endorsement. But the fact was that the government was running scared. The day after the Armistice, Lloyd George announced what came to be known as the Khaki Election, promising, in one of those celebrated statements that are always misquoted, “habitations fit for the heroes who have won the war.”⁹² The next February, back in office at a conference with ministers, the Prime Minister recounted an anecdote:

A well-to-do man went to remonstrate with the miners. One of them, a fairly educated man and a Scotsman, said “Do you know the place I live in?” He lives in one of those houses that are back-to-back, with all the sewage brought right through the living-room, and he has all his children living in that place. He said “Supposing your children lived in those conditions, what would happen to you?” The well-to-do man said frankly “I should be a Bolshevik.”⁹³

Neville Chamberlain responded “I agree that our housing problem has got into such a condition that it is a threat to the stability of the State.”⁹⁴ The next month, in Cabinet, Lloyd George returned to what was evidently an obsession:

In a short time we might have three-quarters of Europe converted to Bolshevism … Great Britain would hold out, but only if people were given a sense of confidence … We had promised them reform time and time again, but little had been done … Even if it cost a hundred million pounds, what was that compared with the stability of the State?⁹⁵

A month after, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board repeated that “the money we are going to spend on housing is an insurance against Bolshevism and Revolution.”⁹⁶ And this was to be embodied not merely in the fact that a house was built, but also in its design: “The new houses built by the state – each with its own garden, surrounded by trees and hedges, and equipped internally with the amenities of a middle-class home – was to provide visible proof of the irrelevance of revolution.”⁹⁷

The insurance policy was duly taken out, in the form of the Addison Act, named for Christopher Addison, Minister of Reconstruction and then of Health: officially, the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1919. It imposed a duty on each local authority to survey housing needs – not just for slum clearance, but generally – and to make and carry out plans. It also guaranteed a state subsidy, independent of costs, to take account of the tenant’s ability to pay; the costs were not to be passed on.⁹⁸ It also made plan preparation mandatory for all urban areas with 20,000 and more people.

The same year, the Ministry of Health – a brand-new ministry, formed out of the old Local Government Board, and responsible for the new housing program – issued an immensely influential Housing Manual which bore Unwin’s stamp all over it; its central argument, that urban densities of 12 houses per acre could be justified on cost grounds, derived directly from Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! It also carried over from the Tudor Walters report other key arguments, such as the minimum distance of 70 feet between houses; it “became an unwritten, unexplained, but universally accepted code of practice.”⁹⁹ But it also repeated another argument, which Unwin had used in a lecture at the University of Manchester in 1912 and which had recurred in the Tudor Walters report: that the resulting developments should take the form of semi-autonomous “satellites” rather than full-fledged garden cities. Unwin, in other words, here made his definitive and immensely influential break with the pure garden-city gospel.

Here, it came to be challenged by another Ministry initiative of 1919: a committee, comprising Chamberlain as chair, George Pepler (Unwin’s chief of planning at the Ministry), and Captain Reiss, to report on the problem of unhealthy areas. Its interim report on London, published in March 1920, argued that the capital still suffered from an intolerable housing problem: 184,000 people in the LCC area lived in unhealthy areas, 549,000 in all under unsatisfactory conditions. There were two main remedies: to build up, or to move out. The first was “quite unsuitable for a working-class population who are dependent on their own services for domestic services and the care of their children,” as well as putting occupants “at the mercy of any undesirable tenant”; the testimony of Medical Officers of Heath and of social workers made it clear that “the self-contained house is what appeals to working people.”¹⁰⁰ So the long-term solution must be garden cities, some based on existing country towns, of 30,000–50,000 people, surrounded by green belts. But, to achieve them, the problem was how to coordinate housing and industrial movement: “the only way to escape from the vicious circle is by the investment of the State … of a considerable amount of capital … the return upon which must be delayed for a considerable period.”¹⁰¹ And for this, a first essential was an integrated plan for the development of the whole built-up area of London.¹⁰² Two years later, in its final report, the Committee repeated and underlined this last recommendation; it also asked for government loans to get the garden cities started.¹⁰³

The fact was that the Committee found itself on the horns of a dilemma. Without dispersal, it was difficult to house more than 70% of slum dwellers in five-story tenements, and impossible to approach such a figure if development was to be restricted to the three-story blocks favored by the Ministry of Health, let alone the cottages demanded by local authorities like Bethnal Green Borough Council. The dilemma continued throughout the interwar years – to be resolved only by the dramatic reduction in population throughout London – but particularly in the East End – during World War Two bombing.¹⁰⁴

It was crying for the moon. By 1921, following a sustained campaign by the Beaverbrook and Northcliffe presses against government waste, Christopher Addison – architect of the whole program, first as Minister of Reconstruction, then of Health – had been sacrificed by Lloyd George in order to salvage his precarious coalition government.¹⁰⁵ His successor at Health, Sir Alfred Mond, slashed the program. The era of reconstruction, of Homes Fit for Heroes, was over. To be fair, housing subsidies came back, and with them large-scale local authority house-building: through the 1923 Act, significantly passed when Chamberlain had replaced Mond at Health, and the Labour government’s 1924 Wheatley Act, which represented a partial return to the 1919 program. Between 1919 and 1933–4, local authorities in Britain built 763,000 houses, some 31% of the total completions.¹⁰⁶

They built them, however, according to the latter-day Unwin prescription, in the form of peripheral satellites rather than full-fledged garden cities. The LCC housed 19,000 at Watling in northwest London, 30,000 at Downham in southeast London, 40,000 at St Helier around the new Morden tube station, and no less than 116,000 in the huge satellite at Becontree, the largest planned residential suburb in the world, and bigger than many English provincial towns.¹⁰⁷ They provided an immense improvement in housing standards, though ironically for the artisan, the small tradesman, and the clerk rather than for the really poor, who could not afford the combined burden of rent and fares.¹⁰⁸ Architecturally, they were debased sub-Unwin, following the Housing Manual with little imagination and no inspiration. They are plain dull: a sudden and sad decline from the standards set a few years earlier at Old Oak.

In terms of detailed planning, they aped the worst faults of the speculative builder. The White Hart Lane extension, the Wormholt estate in Hammersmith, and St Helier are all cut in half by huge arterial roads, which were actually built at the same time as an integral part of the plan (though, to tell truth, Unwin and Parker got in the same tangle at the northern edge of Hampstead Garden Suburb); no one, apparently, then anticipated what traffic would do to the local environment. Local jobs were few, and public transport links to jobs poor; by the late 1930s overcrowding on the Morden tube (which served both Watling and St Helier) was the subject of parliamentary questions, and the comedian Max Miller was making questionable jokes about it¹⁰⁹ until the District Line was extended there in 1932, commuters from Becontree faced a 75-minute journey to Charing Cross.¹¹⁰ None of the estates, even the biggest, had any kind of planned green belt around it, though Becontree had a partial and very narrow park girdle. Becontree was well planted with trees, though, as the sociologist Terence Young reported in his pioneer survey of 1934, “the children have made their existence insecure”; the world was not innocent of vandalism, even then.¹¹¹

Thus the new estates were not always popular with their occupants; at Becontree, the most distant, more than 30,000 left over a 10-year period; more than 10,000 in one year, 1928–9, alone;¹¹² at Watling in northwest London, surveyed by the young Ruth Glass at the end of the 1930s, some had returned to the slums because they could not afford rent and fares.¹¹³ And some, doubtless, yearned for the bustle of the city:

One afternoon in the autumn of 1937, early in the history of the Watling Estate, a woman banged loudly at the door of her neighbour. When it was opened she cried out: “What has happened?” “Why,” said her neighbour, “what should have happened; what is the matter?” “Everything is so terribly quiet,” said the first woman, still frightened to death.¹¹⁴

But later research has undermined this view that a move to Watling or Roehampton meant a life of loneliness and desolation. In Roehampton, people became good friends and helped each other. But they kept themselves to themselves and their neighbors at a distance. In Watling the residents went further, building a strong community characterized by friendships, gregariousness, acts of public sociability, and mutual aid. Here, outside hostility played a role.¹¹⁵ For the prospect of an LCC estate was not popular with locals: at Becontree there were the usual press stories about people who pulled off their front doors for firewood¹¹⁶ at an inquiry in the 1930s, an impassioned exchange took place:

In fact, the new estates were almost universally regarded as repositories for the working class, which “in many contexts seen as urban, unionized, ‘communist,’ uncultured, and destructive – was suspect.” Sharp predicted barricades and “the bitterest kind of political upheaval.” Even Unwin thought the people in one-class estates had become “little more than disorganised crowds.” And this explains the concern, at the end of World War II, that the new towns should be of “diverse and balanced social composition.”¹¹⁸

The Building of Suburbia

This reaction came, of course, from someone on the other side of the great housing divide which by then had sprung up across England, though nowhere more starkly than in the Home Counties around London. On that other side, a new industry had effectively been created, catering for a new market. Before World War One, the overwhelming majority of the entire population had rented their homes. After it, a number of factors conspired to persuade millions of the new middle class to buy. Huge changes in the structure of the economy were creating a new white-collar class, whose numbers rose from 20 to 30% of the workforce between 1911 and 1951.¹¹⁹ Real incomes for a large section of the population – especially this new white-collar group and the skilled blue-collar workers, whose jobs were disproportionately in and around London – were rising sharply. The Building Societies attracted huge funds, especially in the depression of the 1930s when industrial shares became unattractive. By various devices – insurance guarantees, the development of a “builder’s pool” whereby the developer took the risk – the proportion loaned could be raised as high as 95%; at Bexley in the 1930s, keys to the cheapest houses could be had for a £5 deposit, and if this were lacking the estate agent or builder would lend it. Interest payments reached a low point of 4.5% in the mid-1930s.¹²⁰

In Britain, new lending by building societies totaled £7 million in 1918, £32 million in 1923, £75 million in 1929, and £103 million in 1933. Alan Jackson stated that 75% of all new homes in interwar suburban London were bought on a mortgage.¹²¹

On the supply side, larger established builders like Costain, Crouch, Laing, Taylor Woodrow, Wates, and Wimpey competed with a host of small firms existing on precarious profit margins and cash flows, which often went under but kept prices keen.¹²² And, in the depths of an agricultural depression, land was cheap; a plot could be had for as little as £20.¹²³ So families with modest incomes – skilled manual workers earning as little as £3.50 a week – could now afford to buy.¹²⁴ In the 1930s, £1 a week would buy the standard three-bedroomed semi-detached, while those earning £300–500 a year – teachers, bank officials, executive class civil servants – could afford bigger houses, perhaps detached.¹²⁵

But these different agents were merely acting in the service of a deep collective national dream. The worship of the suburban ideal went back a long way, as Dennis Hardy has suggested. Less dramatic than grand metropolitan visions, less innovative than garden cities, it was the vision of suburban life that took pride of place as a populist utopia. People migrated to the new suburbs not only because new houses were available, but also because a house with a garden in a tree-lined avenue was another manifestation of a basic anti-urban feeling. “Owning a small patch of England and turning one’s own soil was another demonstration of what Jan Marsh has called ‘our collective pastoralism.’ ”¹²⁶

Paradoxically, the garden-city movement – to be considered in Chapter 4 – fanned the flames of suburban idealism. For, although garden-city purists could not accept anything less than self-standing settlements, others could settle for such terms as “garden suburb” and “garden village” and even, in cases, “garden city,” for their own ends. As Gillian Darley has noted, “soon the misused term Garden Suburb, Village or City began to be synonymous with suburbia.”¹²⁷

The result was a suburban explosion, on a scale unmatched before or ever after. In the 20 years between 1900 and 1920 the urban acreage of England and Wales increased by 10% (from 2.0 to 2.2 million acres), but in the 20 years from 1920 to 1939 it increased by nearly half (from 2.2 to 3.2 million acres). On these acres went nearly 4.2 million new homes: just under one-third of them (1.2 million) built by local authorities; over two-thirds (3.0 million) by private enterprise, mostly for owner-occupiers. At the peak of the building frenzy, 1934–5, private enterprise built just under 288,000 dwellings, more than double the previous record (1905–6) and never equaled since. Most of them, by far, were built around London. In 1921, the four counties surrounding the County of London – Essex, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey – accounted for 12.2% of the housing stock; but they accounted for almost double that, 23.6%, of the houses built between 1918 and 1940. Astonishingly, more houses – 983,048 of them – were built here between the wars than had existed at the start.¹²⁸

These circumstances powerfully conditioned the resulting product. “To be saleable, a speculative house had to be emphatically middle-class, but if it had to be middle-class it also had to be cheap”: that meant romantic-looking, conservative in style, cheap to build, yet a status symbol.¹²⁹ Novean Homes advertised for “Families of good breeding who wish to acquire a house to be proud of at a cost of less than £1 a week”¹³⁰ “Every house different” and “No pair of houses alike” were favorite slogans.¹³¹ Because the Royal Institute of British Architects banned speculative architectural practice in 1920, the vast majority of these houses – nearly three million of them, between the two world wars – were designed by unqualified assistants or from pattern books or magazines. Only in the 1930s did the bigger firms begin to use architects.¹³²

In the 1920s, at any rate, they were also designed without benefit of much planning. Though local authorities everywhere scrambled to follow the lead of Birmingham and Ruislip–Northwood by schemes under the 1909 and then the 1919 and 1932 Acts, the builders were often as not ahead of them; and in any case, there was a lack of positive direction from the Ministry of Health and a lack of qualified local planners.¹³³ Councils, frightened of claims for compensation if they refused permission under the then legislation, would gratefully accept gifts of open space from developers in return for an agreement to build denser and cheaper.¹³⁴ Many areas must have resembled Edgware, where, in 1927, the Chairman of the Ratepayers’ Association said that the Town Planning scheme appeared to be framed by land-development exploiters: “Aesthetic purposes can nowhere be seen in the plans.”¹³⁵ Thus, the amount of planning depended on what you could pay.

A carefully-designed development would be marked by a variety of house-styles, winding roads, closes and crescents, generous gardens, tree-plantings and grassed verges. But often the speculative suburb lacked any overall plan, being developed road by road by numerous builders until the land ran out … The result of such activity was sometimes a long sprawl of monotonously similar semi-detached houses along a busy arterial road, backed by a waste of derelict agricultural land, remote from amenities such as shops, schools and stations.¹³⁶

Since the frontage was the dearest aspect and also the basis of cost, long narrow plots between 25 and 35 feet wide were the rule, producing parallel rows on identical plots. At the bottom end of the market, speed of building was of the essence; a rural landscape could be transformed into a new estate within a month. So trees were uprooted and natural features ignored; roads were laid out in aimless serpentine fashion or simply followed old field paths, giving an impression that managed to be simultaneously restless and monotonous.¹³⁷ The result was a segregated landscape of suburbia, in which the kind and density of the housing immediately suggested the social status of those within it. And the 1932 Act actually encouraged this, by giving councils the opportunity to lay down variations in density, all the way down to one house per 5, 10, or 25 acres, invariably without liability to pay compensation.¹³⁸

Usually, the starting point was either a concentration of shops and flats in Mock Tudor or Debased Classical, around the railway or tube station; a giant cinema might be another prominent feature. Thence, building proceeded in ribbons, following feeder bus services along the new arterial by-pass roads – designed, ironically, to reduce traffic congestion, and financed under unemployment relief programs in two bursts, in the early 1920s and the mid-1930s – without benefit, until an Act of 1935, of any limitation on frontage development. The resulting pattern was immortalized by the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, as By-Pass Variegated:

here are some quaint gables culled from Art Nouveau surmounting a facade that is plainly modernistic in inspiration; there the twisted beams and leaded panes of Stockbrokers’ Tudor are happily contrasted with bright green tiles of obviously Pseudish origin; next door some terra-cotta plaques, Pont Street Dutch in character, enliven a white wood Wimbledon Transitional porch, making it a splendid foil to a red-brick garage that is vaguely Romanesque in feeling.¹³⁹

Rustic names like Meadowside, Woodsview, and Fieldsend all too soon became misnomers; the Southern Railway, with three successive stations called Park – Raynes, Motspur, and Worcester – narrowly avoided the appellation being awarded to yet a fourth, Stoneleigh.¹⁴⁰

The result was universally derided and condemned. The fact was that the prosecutors were all upper-middle-class and the offenders were mostly lower-middle-class: in a typical such suburb, Bexley, which gained 18,000 houses and 52,000 people in the 1930s, the 1951 Census showed that the overwhelming majority came from Social Class III, the skilled manual and junior non-manual grades.¹⁴¹ Moving as they did from by-law terraces without bathrooms or inside lavatories, they were enjoying a quantum leap in their quality of life, and “whatever their place in the hierarchy of snobbery, all suburbs showed the same characteristic of one-family houses in gardens and in an environment more or less removed from the dirt, noise and congestion of the city.”¹⁴²

But suburbia did more for them. Uniform and monotonous as they might seem from the outside, for their new occupants each house embodied tiny variations, built-in or bought-in, which gave it individuality: a stained-glass window, a porch, a kitchen fitting, even a garden gnome. The house itself was designed to express individuality, hence the bay window and the corner door, the great variation in very minor detail, the general lack of collective space around the house, all consciously designed to be as unlike “council housing” as possible.¹⁴³

But architects did not like it. Repeatedly, in their journals, at their congresses, during the 1930s they railed about the suburbs. The suburbs’ chief fault seems to have been that they conspicuously diverged from either of the then main standards of good taste: the Neo-Georgian as still taught in leading schools like Liverpool, or the uncompromisingly modern embraced by the young members of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne.¹⁴⁴ Instead, their cozy imitation-vernacular derived from a much older architectural tradition pioneered by John Nash at Blaise Hamlet and Park Village West, and subsequently developed to a high art by such late Victorians as Philip Webb, Norman Shaw, and Raymond Unwin. Perhaps significantly, the first two had opposed the whole idea of a closed architectural profession, and Parker was trained as an interior decorator.¹⁴⁵ But of course, the result was a pastiche; and often an unsuccessful one. Osbert Lancaster put it all better, that is to say more savagely, than any of the professionals:

If an architect of enormous energy, painstaking ingenuity and great structural knowledge, had devoted years of his life to the study of how best to achieve the maximum of inconvenience, in the shape and arrangement under one roof of a stated number of rooms, and had the assistance of a corps of research workers ransacking architectural history for the least attractive materials and building devices known in the past, it is just possible, though highly unlikely, that he might have evolved a style as crazy as that with which the speculative builder, with no expenditure of mental energy at all, has enriched the landscape on either side of our great arterial roads … Notice the skill with which the houses are disposed, that insures that the largest possible area of countryside is ruined with the minimum of expense; see how carefully each householder is provided with a clear view into the most private offices of his next-door neighbour and with what studied disregard of the sun’s aspect the principal rooms are planned.¹⁴⁶

The Architects’ Revenge

Whether it was sour grapes or not, the architects were angry; they wanted revenge. They were not the only ones, though they led the attack. Their metaphors were sometimes military, sometimes clinical. Clough Williams-Ellis, in England and the Octopus (1928), wrote of ribbon development as “The disfiguring little buildings [that] grow up and multiply like nettles along a drain, like lice upon a tape-worm”; bungalows “constitute England’s most disfiguring disease, having, from sporadic beginnings, now become our premier disease.”¹⁴⁷ By 1933 he was declaring that

I would certainly sooner go back for another year in wartime Ypres than spend a twelvemonth in post-war Slough. Should that sound like an over-statement I should explain that it is merely the prudent desire of one who desires to remain happily alive, and who would therefore assuredly choose an eighty per cent risk of being shot, gassed or blown up in heroic company to the certainty of cutting his own throat in surroundings of humiliating squalor.¹⁴⁸

Slough, as also for Betjeman, became the symbol of all that was wrong. Yet Betjeman loved some suburbia, as witness his television labor of love on Metro-land: “A verge in front of your house and grass and a tree for the dog. Variety created in each facade of the houses – in the colouring of the trees. In fact, the country had come to the suburbs. Roses are blooming in Metro-land just as they do in the brochures.”¹⁴⁹ These, like Surrey, were the good suburbs, inhabited by loveable Betjemanesque characters like Pam the great big mountainous sports girl, or Miss J. Hunter Dunn sitting the evening long in the car park in the full Surrey twilight; but Slough, like Ruislip Gardens, from which Metro station,

were quite other places, occupied exclusively by lower-middle-class despoilers of the countryside.

Abercrombie, who had taken the lead in founding the Council for the Preservation (later Protection) of Rural England in 1926, took a more sanguine view of the bungalow disease: “Seriously, is not the damage largely skin deep? … will many of what you rightly call Blasphemous Bungalows, blaspheme for long? And is not much of England virgin country, intacta?”¹⁵¹ He was more concerned about ribbon growth: “These strips of the countryside are … being colonised with no more rationale of social grouping, or economies of estate development or aesthetics of rural design than existed during the industrial revolution of last century.”¹⁵² But he too was convinced that “This rural England of ours is at this moment menaced with a more sudden and more thorough change than ever before,” too rapid to permit automatic adjustment.¹⁵³ He wrote wistfully of the Chinese practitioner of Feng Shui,

whose job it is to study and expound the shapes which the spiritual forces of nature have produced and to prescribe the ways in which all buildings, roads, bridges, canals and railways must conform to them, is placed in a position of extreme power; and we ourselves can hardly hope to be able similarly to explode some flaring upstart bungalow or “Satanic Mill” or conflagrate the perpetuation of certain countryside-blasting advertisements in their own spirit.¹⁵⁴

But, he thought, they certainly showed the right way.

In 1938, Williams-Ellis was back on the attack with Britain and the Beast, an edited volume of essays by such leading figures of the day as J. M. Keynes, E. M. Foster, C. E. M. Joad, G. M. Trevelyan, and many others. In it, Joad presented “The People’s Claim” to the countryside. “To thousands, nature, newly-discovered, has been a will-o’-the-wisp” as those lured into the countryside find that it has disappeared: “In fifty years’ time there will, in southern England, be neither town nor country, but only a single dispersed suburb, sprawling unendingly from Watford to the coast.” To guard against this, “the extension of the towns must be stopped, building must be restricted to sharply defined areas, and such re-housing of the population as may be necessary must be carried on within these areas.”¹⁵⁵

Thomas Sharp, perhaps the most prolific writer on planning problems in the early 1930s, took – here as elsewhere – a harder line. For him, the evil started with Ebenezer Howard’s vision of Town-Country, which in practice had produced a degenerate mixture:

From dreary towns the broad, mechanical, noisy main roads run out between ribbons of tawdry houses, disorderly refreshment shacks and vile, untidy garages. The old trees and hedgerows that bordered them a few years ago have given place to concrete posts and avenues of telegraph poles, to hoardings and enamel advertisement signs. Over great areas there is no longer any country bordering the main roads; there is only a negative semi-suburbia.¹⁵⁶

And, if the present ideals continued to hold sway, under the influence of new technologies – radio, television, the car – things could only get worse.

Tradition has broken down. Taste is utterly debased. There is no enlightened guidance or correction from authority … Rural influences neutralize the town. Urban influences neutralize the country. In a few years all will be neutrality. The strong, masculine virility of the town; the softer beauty, the richness, the fruitfulness of that mother of men, the countryside, will be debased into one sterile, hermaphrodite beastliness.¹⁵⁷

The root of this sterilization process, it emerged, was fantasy about the countryside:

For a hundred years we have behaved like film-struck servant girls blinded to the filth around us by romantic dreams of worlds as yet and ever likely to be unrealised. More than anything it is this pitiful attitude of escape which has brought the English town from its beauty and hopefulness of a hundred and fifty years ago to its shapeless and shameful meanness of today.¹⁵⁸

The remedy will be through “great new blocks of flats which will house a considerable part of the population of the future town” – and indeed of the countryside, where old country houses could be demolished to make way for them.¹⁵⁹ Thus Sharp joined the Corbusian camp, distancing himself decisively from the garden-city tradition.

What he shared with them, and with commentators generally at this time, was a terror of what Anthony King has called the democratization of the countryside: the lower-middle-class and working-class invasion of an area that had hitherto been the preserve of an aristocratic and upper-middle-class elite.¹⁶⁰ Joad, in his 1938 essay, expresses it revealingly:

And then there are the hordes of hikers cackling insanely in the woods, or singing raucous songs as they walk arm in arm at midnight down the quiet village street. There are people, wherever there is water, upon sea shores or upon river banks, lying in every attitude of undressed and inelegant squalor, grilling themselves, for all the world as if they were steaks, in the sun. There are tents in meadows and girls in pyjamas dancing beside them to the strains of the gramophone, while stinking disorderly dumps of tins, bags, and cartons bear witness to the tide of invasion for weeks after it has ebbed; there are fat girls in shorts, youths in gaudy ties and plus-fours, and a roadhouse round every corner and a café on top of every hill for their accommodation.¹⁶¹

This clash of attitudes was neatly expressed when Brighton proposed that, in order to preserve the South Downs from building, it would lease land as a motor racing track. There was immediate expression of outrage from the Society of Sussex Downsmen, The Times, the West and East Sussex Councils, and a House of Lords Committee. Lord Buxton, in the Second Reading debate, said, “I say frankly it is not so much the actual track to which I object. It is more the fact of there being that track, which will bring immense numbers of people to the Downs, to the destruction of the amenities.” To which the Committee chairman, Lord Redesdale, was forced to point out, “by all means exclude the public from the Downs, but then you must not say you are preserving the Downs for the public. At least be honest and say you are preserving the Downs for the Society of Sussex Downsmen and the actual inhabitants of the Downs.¹⁶²

In all the furore over the English countryside at this time, therefore, there were a few dissenting voices. One significant one was that of the young Evelyn Sharp, secretary of the Town and Country Planning Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Health, who was writing of the need to

remember that the countryside is not the preserve of the wealthy and leisured classes. The country rightly prides itself on the fact that since the War there has been unparalleled building development, a development which every Government has done its utmost to stimulate, and whose effect has been to create new and better social conditions for a very large number of persons … persons of very limited means.”¹⁶³

Any serious attempt to reverse the policy, she argued, would “undoubtedly run counter to the wishes of a large section of the community.”¹⁶⁴ There, indeed, spoke the future Permanent Secretary.

By that time, indeed, Interim Development Orders covered some 19.5 million acres or 50% of the entire country – the half, moreover, where large-scale development was occurring. In Surrey, one of the counties most affected by London’s growth, almost all landowners were voluntarily accepting restrictions on development, thus avoiding death and estate duties.¹⁶⁵ The then Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health commented that

nobody who goes about the country today can fail to observe that the tide of sporadic, unregulated development that threatened to engulf the south after the war, is being stemmed, and that planning is beginning to leave a visible mark on the English countryside.¹⁶⁶

The 1932 Act was an advance: it allowed local authorities to make schemes for almost any land, including rural areas. By 1942, 73% of all land in England was subject to “interim development control,” which, in conjunction with a draft scheme, had become the favored mechanism of control.¹⁶⁷ But not everyone would agree that it was effective – certainly not Professor Joad.

By 1938, the Williams-Ellises and the Joads had a new and a powerful supporter. On every one of his public appearances in the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Pick bemoaned the opportunity that was being lost by the failure to plan. In 1927, “there was much planning, but no plan … The needs of the moment are met sometimes exceedingly well but without reference to the whole … Unfortunately for London it has so far never had a directing head … It is at that low stage of animal development in which the brain is rudimentary and ganglia scattered throughout the organism stimulate such activity as serves to keep the creature alive.” In 1936, “Such developments … are almost analogous to a cancerous growth”; in 1938, the risk was of “an amorphous mass of building” in which “London’s country would suffer from a confluent pox.”¹⁶⁸

His voice, joined to the chorus, proved irresistible. Neville Chamberlain, on becoming Prime Minister at the end of 1937, almost immediately set up a Royal Commission on the Geographical Distribution of the Industrial Population, chaired by Sir Anderson Montague-Barlow. The following year, in his evidence to the Barlow Commission, Pick had arrived at the argument that if London grew beyond the magic 12–15-mile limit set by the economics of the tube, it “must cease to be intrinsically London … a unitary conception.”¹⁶⁹ So, he argued, London’s growth should be contained: “It would be possible to go on layering first industry and then residences, and then industry and then residences, and building indefinitely, but that would not be London. It would be putting rings of industrial towns around London, and that would not be London.”¹⁷⁰ For this reason, he favored both a green belt at least a mile wide around London, and controls on new industry at the edge of London.¹⁷¹

Perhaps Pick’s enthusiasm for planning was not entirely disinterested; he wanted controls on London’s physical growth but not on further expansion of jobs, which suited London Transport’s book; his prophetic fear, that the growth of car ownership would lead to low-density sprawl, was also the view of a public transport advocate.¹⁷² But, in all he wrote, there emerges a consistent, almost cartoon-like, vision of a giant organically planned conurbation, in which a single integrated public transport system would provide the nerve structure for the body, and land-use planning would guide the healthy growth of the organism. Pick was in no doubt, in the 1930s, that the latter was lacking: “What goes by the name is idle and useless so far.”¹⁷³

To that extent, Pick was joining his weighty voice to the chorus demanding controls on London’s further growth. But there was a subtle difference between them: Frederic Osborn, asked whether he would agree with Pick that a city that was not growing was a city in decay, replied, “I would even go to the other extreme and say that the ideal town, from the rating point of view, is the static town.” When the Commission reported in 1940, it recorded Pick’s view that London could grow further to a population of 10–12 million, but found against it: it argued on the contrary for the planned dispersal of population to self-contained new towns and an overall reduction in London’s population.¹⁷⁴

So the Barlow Commissioners accepted a limit on London’s growth, Osborn-style rather than Pick-style, thus setting in train a course of events that culminated in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Britain at last would have a land-use planning system that could effectively shape the growth of London – and indeed of every city, town, and village in the land.