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Towards a greater urban geography: regional planning and associational networks in London during the early twentieth century

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02665433.2011.601608

1466-4518

Lucy E. Hewitt,

Scottish History and National Identity

Abstract This article examines commitment to the regional development of London as it emerged among individuals and groups interested in urban planning in the early twentieth century. Following a brief account of growth and reform in the capital during the nineteenth century, this article focuses on the development of debates about planning the metropolis in the first two decades of the century, exploring practical initiatives such as the Town Planning Conference held in 1910 and the production of The London Society's Development Plan for Greater London during the years of the First World War. London's associational culture was central in generating and hosting discussions about the future of the city during this period and the article provides an indication of the extent of overlapping memberships between groups such as the Royal Institute of British Architects, The London Society and the Town Planning Institute. In conclusion, this article suggests that the regional imagination, central to the later development of planning, was clearly visible in the programme of work undertaken during the First World War and that associational networks were an important part of early professionalization in planning in Britain. Keywords: regional planningLondonvoluntary associationsnetworksprofessionalization of planning Acknowledgements My thanks to The London Society, particularly to Frank Kelsall, for permission to reproduce images of The Development Plan for Greater London from their archives. My thanks also to Helen Meller and the anonymous readers who commented on an earlier version of this paper. Notes Ford Maddox Hueffer, The Soul of London. A Survey of a Modern City (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 16. K. Hoggart, ‘London as an Object of Study’, in London: A New Metropolitan Geography, ed. K. Hoggart and D.R. Green (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), 1. This question is posed by both Young and Garside, and by Hoggart and Green in the opening pages of their studies of London, though the authors take different approaches to answering the question. K. Young and P. Garside, Metropolitan London. Politics and Urban Change, 1837-1981 (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 1; Hoggart and Green, ‘Preface’, London: A New Metropolitan Geography, vii. Hueffer, Soul of London, see chapter one, ‘From a Distance’, esp. 8, 16–8. Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 1. For a discussion of the varied rates at which municipal corporations acquired and developed their powers, see J. Moore and R. Rodger, ‘Who Really Ran the Cities? Municipal Knowledge and Policy Networks in British Local Government, 1832–1914’, in Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940, ed. R. Roth and R. Beachy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 37–70. H. Emil Davies, The Story of the London County Council (London: Labour Pub. Co., 1925), 17. A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Penguin, 1990), 320; Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 22–3. D. Owen, ‘The City Parochial Charities: The ‘Dead Hand’ in Late Victorian London', The Journal of British Studies 1, no. 2 (1962), 117. Owen observes that, in part, this situation was created from the local movement of population concentrations away from certain central parishes over the course of the century. Briggs, Victorian Cities, 321; Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 21. Edwin Chadwick's phase quoted by Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 25. Other Acts passed in the same period applied to the whole urban area, for example, in the same year a Metropolitan Building Act, which attempted the regulation of new buildings in the capital, and the Nuisance Removal Act, which sought to put in place a sanitary code for the city, were passed, see Emil Davies, The Story of the London County Council, 18. See particularly, Briggs, Victorian Cities, 311–61; D. Owen, The Government of Victorian London, 1855-1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries and the City Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Young and Garside, Metropolitan London. Briggs' term, Victorian Cities, 333. Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 27–8. Ibid., 35–6. Ibid., 20. Lord Hobhouse, ‘The London County Council and its Assailants’, The Contemporary Review, vol. LXI (1892), 332. H.G. Wells, ‘A Paper on Administrative Areas Read Before the Fabian Society’, published as Appendix 1 in Mankind in the Making (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903), 415–6. Ibid., 410. Ibid., 406. Ibid., 416. Soul of London, 33. Ibid., 35. For the text and discussion of the papers given in 1904 and 1905, see H.E. Meller, ed., The Ideal City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979). Patrick Geddes, ‘A Suggested Plan for a Civic Museum (or Civic Exhibition) and its Associated Studies’, Sociological Papers III (1907): 200–1. Ibid. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 206. Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, London City Suburbs As They Are Today (London, 1893), 15–6. Other groups formed for similar reasons included the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London (1875) and the London Topographical Society (1890). See H. Hobhouse, London Survey'd. The Work of the Survey of London 1894-1994 (Swindon: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1994). Members of the Survey Committee given in Walter H. Godfrey, ‘The London Survey Committee’, Architectural Review, vol. XXIV, no. 141, August 1908, 60; vol. XXVII, no. 158, January 1910. Architectural Review, vol. XXIV, no. 142, September 1908, 112. Ibid., no. 145, December 1908, 267. The Architectural Review referred to the failure of the initial approach to make ‘any very profound impression’ and to the ‘devious course’ of the Bill since. vol. XXIV, no. 145, December 1908, 267. The Supplement was overseen by an advisory committee that included a number of notable figures in Britain's first generation of planning professionals, such as Thomas Adams, the planning inspector at the LGB; Stanley Adshead, first professor of Civic Design at Liverpool and at London; Brook Kitchin, an associate of the RIBA who worked at the LGB; H.V. Lanchester, an architect-planner; J.S. Nettlefold, credited with having coined the term ‘town planning’ and instrumental in developing the policy of suburban extension in Birmingham; and Raymond Unwin, the architect-planner of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb. David Barclay Niven, ‘A Zone Scheme for London’, Town Planning and Housing Supplement to The Architectural Review XXVII, no. 1, January 1910, 55. Ibid. H.E. Meller has written about the exchange of ideas and experience across national boundaries through the advent of town planning exhibitions and conferences, ‘Philanthropy and Public Enterprise: International Exhibitions and the Modern Town Planning Movement, 1889-1913’, Planning Perspectives 10, no. 3 (1995): 295–310. John Burns, ‘Inaugural Address’, in Town Planning Conference, 10-15 October, 1910, Transactions (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1911), 63. William Edward Riley, ‘City Development’, in Town Planning Conference, 291. Ibid., 298. Professor Arthur Beresford Pite, ‘The Architect and Town Planning’, Town Planning Conference, 415. George L. Pepler, ‘Greater London’, Town Planning Conference, 612. Ibid., 611. Ibid., 619. Ibid., 620. Architectural Review, vol. XXX, no. 181, December 1911, 357. Architectural Review, vol. XXXI, no. 184, March 1912: ‘one of the suggestions of the promoters is to start a special fund for the collection of all data relating to the various proposals for the improvement of London, including maps, plans, etc. Questions relating to roads, traffic, housing, town planning, architecture, and sculpture will probably be considered by special committees. The Society appears likely to command influential support, and to have a large following of leading architects', 186. For an account of the London Society's work on the planning of London from its foundation and throughout the interwar period, see Lucy E. Hewitt, ‘The London Society and the Development Plan for Greater London’, London Topographical Record 30, no. 169 (2010): 115–32. Minutes of the meeting was held on 17 January 1912. The London Society, First Annual Report, 1912-1913, 20. Among planners and architects were Thomas Adams, who held the post of chief technical planning officer at the Local Government Board until 1914, and George Pepler, who replaced Adams and held the position until the 1940s; Stanley Adshead, held the first Chair of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool and, from 1914, the newly created Chair of Civic Design at University College London; Raymond Unwin, the architect-planner of Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb; Henry Vaughan Lanchester was responsible for, among other projects, planning the complex of civic buildings at Cathays Park, Cardiff, and was a colleague of Patrick Geddes, touring India with him in 1915 and maintaining strong links to the country over the following decades; Patrick Geddes also joined, though he left London for India in 1914; Aston Webb, who was responsible for works such as the completion of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the design of the Admiralty Arch; Leonard Stokes had served as a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in England and, between 1910 and 1912, was president of the RIBA; David Barclay Niven, author of the original proposal for a Greater London plan published in the Architectural Review in 1909; William Edward Riley, chief architect at the LCC from 1899; Arthur Beresford Pite, architect and first professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art; William Robert Davidge, an architect at the London County Council, district surveyor, and president of the RIBA in the mid-1920s. The practising artists who joined in 1913 included Sir Edward Poynter, a painter who had served as the director of the National Gallery in the 1890s and president of the Royal Academy from 1896 until 1918; Frank Brangwyn, an early member of the London Society's council, was known as a highly versatile and accomplished artist who had worked under William Morris; Sir Thomas Brock, best known as the sculptor of the Queen Victoria Memorial, joined the Society in its first year and later served on the executive committee as a representative of the Royal Society of Sculptors; Sir George James Frampton, also a sculptor, known for his collaboration with Aston Webb on the Victoria and Albert Museum, served on the Society's council from 1913. By 1919, the sculptor Feodora Gleichen, posthumously made the first female member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in the mid-1920s, had also joined. The first membership list published in 1913 indicated that 23 Society members were MPs, 14 were Peers, and 9 were elected to the LCC. By 1920, the number of MPs and Peers had increased to 33 and 32, respectively, and the Society's Parliamentary Committee had grown to include 40. Viscount Hambleden, inherited the family firm, W.H. Smith, in 1891 and was among the founding members of the London Society; Gordon Selfridge, the owner of Selfridges, was a life member and a vice-president of the Society; and Sir Richard Burbidge was the managing director of Harrods from 1893 and a life member of the Society from 1913. Sir Richard Burbidge died in 1917 and was succeeded, both as managing director of Harrods and as life member of the London Society, by his son Richard Woodman Burbidge. Bruce Ingram was the managing director of the Illustrated London News and The Sketch; Lord Northcliffe, a vice-president of the London Society by 1919, owned the Evening News, The Times, and the Daily Mail; Sir George Riddell, managing director of the News of the World also joined the London Society and served as a member of the Society's Council. The related organizations represented on the council of the London Society included the Royal Academy, the RIBA, the Mansion House Council on Health and Housing, the Surveyors Institutions, the National Town Planning and Housing Association, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association. It also formed a working alliance with the Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London, with whom it began to share offices. Earl of Plymouth, ‘The London Society and its Scheme for a Development Plan of Greater London of the Future’, Journal of the London Society, no. 5 (October 1915): 2. Section heads were Professor Adshead, Arthur Crow, W.R. Davidge, David Barclay Niven, and H.V. Lanchester, Journal of the London Society, January 1915. H. Meller, Patrick Geddes. Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London: Routledge, 1990). For an account of the interest in regionalism among geographers during the period, see particularly David Matless's excellent research on the area, ‘Regional Surveys and Local Knowledges: The Geographical Imagination in Britain, 1918-39’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17, no. 4 (1992): 464–80. Among the best sources for discussion of regional planning are Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow. An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002) and Stephen V. Ward, Planning and Urban Change (London: Sage, 2004). Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 180–2. Patrick Abercrombie, ‘A Civic Society. An Outline of its Scope, Formation and Functions’, Town Planning Review VIII, no. 2 (1920): 79–92. The second plan was to focus on the central wards of the city and suggest a system of zoning to guide central redevelopment and growth. A good deal of work was conducted on this second plan, including detailed surveys of land use in the central parts of London, the commissioning of aerial photography, and some sustained work funded by the RIBA during the early 1930s. Raymond Unwin, ‘Some Thoughts on the Development of London’ (lecture given before the London Society, January 9, 1920). Text reprinted in The Journal of the London Society, no. 26, April 1920, 8–10. Journal of the London Society, no. 38, April 1921, 10. Patrick Abercrombie to Lord Esher, 4 April 1941, archives of the London Society. Patrick Abercrombie, Greater London Plan 1944, a report prepared on behalf of the Standing Committee on London Regional Planning at the request of the Minister of Town and Country Planning, London, 1945, p. 1. D. Gilbert, ‘London of the Future: The Metropolis Reimagined after the Great War’, Journal of British Studies 43, no. 1 (2004): 91–119 Of the figures mentioned in earlier sections of this paper for their commentary on the notion of a Greater London, Ford Maddox Hueffer, Patrick Geddes, David Barclay Niven, W.E. Riley, Beresford Pite, and George Pepler all joined The London Society. H.G. Wells sent a note of support to the group expressing his ‘complete sympathy’ with their aims, though quite possibly, despite the range of political perspectives represented by its members (see Note 65) felt the group lacked sufficient favour for the political left. Aston Webb was president of the RIBA 1902–1904; Ernest George, 1908–1910; Leonard Stokes, 1910–1912; John Williams Simpson, 1919–1921; Paul Waterhouse, 1921–1923; Raymond Unwin, 1931–1932; and G. Gilbert Scott, c.1930. Ian MacAlister served as the secretary to the Institute between 1906 and 1943, and Henry Vaugh Lanchester served as a vice-president. The 11 London Society members who served on the Provisional Committee of the TPI in 1913 were S.D. Adshead, J.W. Cockrill, W.R. Davidge, Patrick Geddes, Brook Kitchin, H.V. Lanchester, E.L. Lutyens, T.H. Mawson, G.L. Peper, Raymond Unwin, and Aston Webb. The London Society members who served as president of the Institute were Raymond Unwin, 1915–1916; J.W. Cockrill, 1916–1917; S.D. Adshead, 1918–1919; G.L. Pepler, 1919–1920 (again in 1949–1950 and served as the Institute's honorary secretary and treasurer from its foundation until his death in 1959); H.V. Lanchester, 1922–1923; Thomas Mawson, 1924–1925. See G.E. Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning. A History of Town Planning in the United Kingdom During the 20th Century and of the Royal Town Planning Institute, 1914–74 (Leighton Buzzard: L. Hill, 1974), 57–9. Presidents were W.D. Caröe, Leonard Stokes, A.B. Thomas, and Aston Webb. The secretary, between 1911 and 1937, was Francis R. Yerbury. S.D. Adshead, Brook Kitchin, H.V. Lanchester, and Raymond Unwin. See Sociological Society Reports, 1905–11 (London: Sociological Society nd). R.A. Buchanan, ‘Science and Engineering: A Case Study in British Experience in the Mid-nineteenth Century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 32, no. 2 (1978), 216–7; R.A. Buchanan, ‘Institutional Proliferation in the British Engineering Profession, 1847–1914’, The Economic History Review 28, no. 1 (1985), 42–60; P. Levine, The Amateur and the Professional. Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). M. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, The American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80. Ibid., 1373. J. Moody, ‘The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963-1999’, American Sociological Review 69, no. 2 (2004): 213–38. One excellent exception to this is Mark Wigley's account of the networks existing among architects, planners, and intellectuals of Ekistics, M. Wigley, ‘Network Fever’, Grey Room, no. 4 (2001): 82–122. This activity was quite limited in practice. By January 1913, only three planning schemes had been approved under the Act, two in Birmingham totalling 3700 acres and one in Rochdale covering an area of just 43 acres. There were other schemes being considered or in preparation; across the whole country, these covered just over 52,000 acres. See ‘Chronicle of Passing Events’, Town Planning Review 3, no. 4 (1913), 281–3.