to a partial control only, especially in the markets for housing and agricultural land. Proposals for the outright nationalization of land, which had some followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, received very little support from any government, even the Labour one of 1945. Furthermore, the climate for interventions in the market for land changed a good deal in the 1970s and I come back to these developments at the end of this chapter.
Ideology and Moral Climate
So far, I have discussed the regulation of the use of land which constitutes a restriction on the full exercise of property rights. I now turn to an examination of why and how that regulation and its practical application arose and how a set of moral convictions, an ideology, is formed which can have that effect.
Earlier in this chapter I stressed the way in which town planning in Britain was formed in a reaction to the horrors of the Victorian city. But another reaction – and a different horror – was also involved. Those whose interests lay in commentary on the state of the country, especially its towns and cities, were not only impressed by the conditions in which their fellow citizens lived, they were also moved by a sense of the disorder apparently created by urban life. The two themes – social justice and order – ran through public debate about cities in the Long Century from 1850 to 1970. Sometimes one of these themes predominated, sometimes the other. For example, for the intellectuals writing, talking and lobbying about the state of towns, the social justice strand was probably more important towards the beginning of the period, while a concern with order was prominent in the later part. My argument in this case study is that what I shall call a disposition, a set of beliefs and professional practices, is created by a group of intellectuals, some involved in the actual practice of planning and some not, in interaction with an audience drawn from a wider social group but one with the same social affiliations. That disposition resulted in a set of regulations and practices, collectively called town planning, introduced by the state and which constrain the market in land by controlling the uses to which it can be put. In sum, the key feature of the ideological formation of town planning is the combination of two apparently very different elements in an alliance. Order-planning sees town planning as oriented to the restoration of social order, while for justice-planning the activity is geared to solving problems of the distribution of resources between different sections of society.
Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the Garden Cities movement, wrote in the late nineteenth century of the disordered life of cities of the time, especially London. He quotes Lord Rosebery in 1891, then Chairman of the London County Council: ‘I am always haunted by the awfulness of London: by the great appalling fact of these millions cast down … without regard or knowledge of each other, without heeding each other, without having the slightest idea how the other lives’ (Howard, 1965 (originally 1902): 42). Howard himself was preoccupied with the overcrowding of London, its expansion and the disordering of the countryside that it produced. Raymond Unwin, one of the most influential of early town planners, begins his major work on the subject by noting ‘the rapid and disorderly increase in the size of towns and their populations’. The countryside is being covered in rows and rows of houses put up ‘without any consideration for the common interests of the people’ (Unwin, 1909: 1, emphasis added). Thirty years later, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis lamented ‘the discomfort of living in a land where disorder, ugliness, and inefficiency are generally accepted and tolerated’ (Williams-Ellis, 1937a: xv). At the end of the 1930s, Anthony Bertram, a writer on architectural and design matters, is more forceful still: ‘But what the town-planner wants, and what indeed everybody wants who has any feeling for urbanity, for the design of cities and towns, is order. That is not at all the same thing as uniformity. No, we want variety, but ordered variety, not everybody following their own sweet will, which seems nowadays to be not at all sweet’ (Bertram, 1939: 23, author’s emphasis). What is required is a plan.
What is the root of disorder? Town planning is the deliberate shaping and organizing of the physical environment. According to Patrick Abercrombie, a town planner of the twentieth century, if there were no such organization and human habitation were allowed to grow ‘naturally’, the result would be ‘complete muddle’ as in the nineteenth-century towns of the UK. And one form of this muddle is ‘laissez-faire’. Ideologies require the identification of enemies. For Abercrombie, the enemy is clear enough here; it is the Smithian ‘muddler who will talk about the Law of Supply and Demand and the Liberty of the Individual’ (Abercrombie, 1943: 26, 27). G. D. H. Cole, who also had quite a lot to say about the virtues of planning, suggested in 1945 that ‘reliance on the free play of economic forces … has been largely responsible for many of our worst and most intractable social and economic problems’ (Cole, 1945: 21). A similar proposition is advanced by J. M. Keynes, who argues that a utilitarian, economic and financial ideal has become the guiding light of the community as a whole. This, the ‘most dreadful heresy … which has ever gained the ear of civilized people’, has meant that the state does not intervene to ensure the ‘preservation of the countryside from exploitation’ (Keynes, 1937: 2).
Order-planning’s contribution to the ideology of town planning had a number of elements. Howard’s was the idea of the Garden City conceived as a third alternative to town life and country life. That would ‘restore the people to the land’ which is the ‘very embodiment of Divine love for man’ and would cure ‘the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty’ (Howard, 1965: 44). Garden cities combined the virtues of both town and country and would therefore act as magnets for the population. They would provide employment and amusement and, at the same time, good housing and green space, all in an attractive layout. Howard did succeed in constructing two garden cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, as we have seen, although all did not entirely go to plan, but his major legacy lies in the foundation by others of New Towns after the Second World War and, secondarily, in the layout of suburban areas in the interwar period. New Towns have been constructed all over the country although mostly within striking distance of London. The terms of reference of the New Towns Committee, which reported just after the end of the Second World War, argued that New Towns should be ‘self-contained and balanced communities for working and living’, an ambition which comes straight from Howard (New Towns Committee, 1946: Howard, 1965: 119, 121). These are revealing phrases. The towns were to be self-contained in that they provided everything – employment, amusement, transport, health and social care – and inhabitants hardly had any compelling reason to cross their boundaries. And they were to be balanced communities representing all social classes, giving a cooperative order to the settlement. F. J. Osborn, who worked with Howard and became a major force in the development of town planning in the UK, argued for the extensive development of New Towns because their size could be contained and their inhabitants could therefore enjoy ‘the inalienable advantages of comfort in their houses, beauty and grace in their surroundings, sunlight, fresh air, health and a share of civic powers’ (quoted in Whittick, 1987: 25).
Garden Cities and New Towns were one order-planning response to the disorderly city. Others were the doctrine of green belts, the often visceral antipathy to suburban development, together with associated moves to preserve the countryside and coastline. These were all symptoms of the same condition. As much as anything else, green belts, constraints on ribbon development, prohibitions on rural building and New Towns were effectively designed to contain cities and towns, to stop the spread of contagion. If uncontrolled, buildings would appear in every pretty country village, despoil beauty spots and corrupt the coastline. The County of London Plan (Forshaw and Abercrombie, 1943) sought to develop the already existing green belt around London which, in addition to forming ‘the main place of week-end walking, bicycling, picnics, etc.’, served to restrict the outward growth of the city and prevent the agglomeration of urban units. Similar ideas of extending existing green belts generally introduced in the interwar period informed other city plans. A 1941 plan for Birmingham, for example, proposed green belts to prevent separate towns from growing together to create ‘huge urban areas’ (Birmingham Bournville Village Trust, 1941).
The invasion of the countryside by the suburbs of towns was of particular concern in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the interwar period when there were