Austerity Britain, 1945–51 by David Kynaston Read Free Book Online Page B

been implacably anti-suburb through the 1930s, but this particular broadside was published in Town Planning , an influential 1940 Pelican paperback. ‘However little can be done in wartime towards the achievement of the ideals I have tried to set out, it is essential that we should get our minds clear now as to what we are going to do when the war is over,’ he stressed. ‘The thing is there for us to do if we will. We can continue to live in stale and shameful slum-towns. Or in sterile and disorderly suburbs. Or we can build clean proud towns of living and light. The choice is entirely our own.’ Two years later, When We Build Again (a documentary focusing on Bournville Village in Birmingham) was even more idealistic. ‘There must be no uncontrolled building, no more ugly houses and straggling roads, no stinting of effort before we build again,’ declared the film’s narrator, Dylan Thomas, who also wrote the script. ‘Nothing is too good for the people.’ The Beveridge Report did not concern itself specifically with town planning, but in February 1943 – the same year that a bespoke Ministry of Town and Country Planning was set up – it was Beveridge who opened a notable exhibition, Rebuilding Britain, at the National Gallery. ‘How can the war on Squalor be won?’ asked the accompanying catalogue, referring to one of the five evil giants that Sir William’s report hoped to slay. The answer was sublime in its certainty: ‘The very first thing to win is the Battle of Planning. We shall need to have planning on a national scale, boldly overstepping the traditional boundaries of urban council, rural council, County Council. Boldly overstepping the interests described so often as vested.’
     
    The following year’s Town and Country Planning Act did indeed give far-reaching powers to local authorities for reconstruction and redevelopment, and by the time the war ended it was almost a truism that the future lay with the planners. Entirely characteristic was the plan published in March 1945 for the future of Glasgow, with the most stirring of mottoes on its front cover: ‘The Voice of Time Cries out to Man – ADVANCE!’ One old man, though, was unconvinced. ‘Ah, yes,’ said Churchill, as towards the end of the war he looked round the Cabinet and considered his minister’s favourable assessment of the latest town and country planning reports. ‘All this stuff about planning and compensation and betterment. Broad vistas and all that. But give to me the eighteenth-century alley, where foot-pads lurk, and the harlot plies her trade, and none of this new-fangled planning doctrine.’ 10
     
    Among those actively seeking a new and better post-war environment for the British people there were two main camps: baldly put, those who did not believe that the future lay in the big cities, and those who, broadly embracing modernism, did believe just that. They were, with on the whole unfortunate results, almost diametrically opposed to each other.
     
    To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform was the title of Ebenezer Howard’s influential 1898 treatise, a utopian vision (heavily influenced by William Morris) of dispersal of population from the huge industrial cities and the creation of new, self-supporting towns of some 30,000 residents of mixed social background, living in light, airy surroundings and surrounded by a ‘green belt’. The first ‘garden city’ was established five years later at Letchworth, in Herfordshire, and it was followed in 1920 by Welwyn Garden City. During the war, the Howardian agenda entered the political mainstream, as a series of reports and plans, culminating in the Greater London Plan published in 1945, recommended a less populous inner core, a suburbia contained by a substantial green-belt ring and, beyond that ring, the building of environmentally favoured new towns.
     
    Howard’s direct successor, and a formidable but in many ways attractive figure in the planning world, was