Sometimes a book sits in a charity shop just waiting for the right person to come along to love it and cherish it and eventually write a Substack post about it. Here’s the story of one such book, picked up in Oxfam in Olney, a small town in Buckinghamshire famous for its centures old pancake day race and for the composition of ‘Amazing Grace’, 301 years ago.
I spied it on the bottom shelf and knew what it was right away, a large format hardback with dull covered boards, of the size and shape of many of my collection: The County of London Plan, say, or Conurbation. But this was one I had never even heard of. The Buckinghamshire Regional Planning Report it said on the cover, with ‘circa 1933’ pencilled inside. This copy was stamped ‘Bucks Education Committee Bradwell Council School Boys’ dept.’ Somehow I doubt the girls got a copy. It had been written by William Robert Davidge for Buckinghamshire County Council in the era before the Town and Country Planning Act came into force in 1947. Given that, what would it even contain, I wondered?
The idea was this book contained guidance and information for all of the various planning committees across Buckinghamshire. ‘We hope to encourage them to cooperate in securing orderly development throughout our beautiful County,’ wrote Leonard H West, chairman to the advisory committee, ‘in preserving beauty and avoiding ugliness, while in no way obstructing reasonable commercial and industrial progress’. The plan itself follows this optimistic yet feeble tone: there’s a section looking at planning powers, which in 1933 appear to be minimal. The objects of town planning seem to focus not on creating housing or communities, but, according to the book, with sanitary conditions, amenity, convenience and preservation. Housing, meanwhile, was at the time the responsibiity of the Department for Health, completely unconnected to the town planners.
Davidge, its writer, had been an architect for the London County Council in the Edwardian era, one of those who watched the garden city experiment at Letchoworth and became a fully fledged convert to the cause. Years later he became a town planner, and completed similar documents to this one for Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, West Kent and – wait for it – Belfast. You can sense a kind of frustration all the way through the book, a kind of static sensation that he is hemmed in by the rules of the day and the lack of actual town planning powers – time and again it mentions how limited they are.
The book itself is a beautiful piece of work, especially the maps and the photographs. I particularly love the map of the area that now contains Milton Keynes, then just a scattering of villages (including he village of Milton Keynes itself) and the three towns, Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Wolverton. I scoured the book for any signs or foreshadowing of the new town, which would arrive over 30 years later, but nothing. In fact, the very opposite aseems to be the case, with only a bit of industrial expansion on the cards.
The main bulk of the book focuses on proposals for new roads, such as the Emberton bypass, Western Avenue, and the Maidenhead bypass. The arrival of the car has been the big threat to town and country, and the book is full of solutions. This really is the era of bypasses, scores of them listed as being approved, such as around Waddeston, Great Missebden, Chalfont St Peter and Little Brickhill. Meanwhile, improvements to that great ancient road Watling Street as it passes through Stony Stratford were kicked into the long grass.
Then there’s open spaces, including ‘reservations of national importance’ in Chess Valley and Chiltern Hills. More suburban uses, such as golf and race courses, allotments and playgrounds also fall into the remit of the plan. Most excitingly there is talk of new sites for aerodromes, and it looks like anyone with any industry wants one. Land is to be reserved around the railways towns of Wolverton and Bletchley, as well as Aylesbury, High Wycombe and Slough for new airports, and just like the car, aircraft is changing the way that planners are thinking about the way towns should be developed. But there’s little idea of scale here, and certainly no speculative notions of how the manufacture of aircraft would change beyond all recognition. Of course, those changes were propelled by a world war whose scope lay slightly beyond the remit of this book. It’s full of guidance about new networks for water supply, electricity and gas, the modernisation of Britain’s infrastructure lying at the heart of planning powers at the time. It’s all good worthy stuff.
But what about places that people might, you know, actually live in? There’s just a couple of pages at the end about development control, such as roadside ads, municipal tips and petrol stations, and the preservation of old buildings and what it awkwardly calls ‘street furnishings’. ‘It is valuable to ensure that these should be pleasing in effect and suitable to the position in which they are placed’ goes Davidge, pretty much saying nothing at all. For guidance this book is fairly hopeless, the timid mealy-mouthed language failing to convey any sense of importance or urgency. It’s the kind of polite double speak that endured in the civil service and establishment circles for decades. But the thing missing is, of course, housing. We have a few photos of coming developments and new housing, but because this all down to private enterprise beyond the remit of the planners all the most significant stuff appears to be completely beyond their control. Reading this you really appreciate what a revolution the Town and Country Planning Act would be. It’s also hard not to think that since a high water mark for planning in the 1960s and 70s the profession has been leaking away power and influence ever since, heading back to the state we see here.
Davidge died in 1960, and not long after Fred Pooley, of Buckinghamshire County Council, dreamt up his monorail town on the site of what would later become Milton Keynes. Pooleyville was a fantasty, but the subsequent plan for Milton Keynes was not, but that’s another story. I wonder what both Davidge would think of the new town that was actually built here, swallowing up so many of the settlements that in this book had such timid and tentative plans attached to them. I have a feeling that he would be excited and impressed, not just by the modernity of it all, but just by the fact that something actually got done. And I also expect he would have expressed it in the mildest of terms.
In conversation with Owen Hatherley
Here’s a video of an online event I recently did with the brilliant Owen Hatherley for MKLitFest. We talked about new towns round the world, duelled with our copies of the Hook book and marvelled at Britain’s first multiplex, The Point. Thanks to everyone who tuned in on the night, and for the festival for having us.
This was super interesting & delightfully obscure - speaking here as a planner who started out in the 00s so that period is interesting to look back to.
"It’s also hard not to think that since a high water mark for planning in the 1960s and 70s the profession has been leaking away power and influence ever since, heading back to the state we see here."
You've perfectly encapsulated what seems to be happening in development and planning – the developers have the power and the planners have little to fight them off with. I suppose it shouldn't be like that at all. Developers and planners should work together to create better places, not fight each other. And planners should use their powers to stop developers doing the wrong thing.
(I also love finding old books and magazines in shops that tell us something about the past and the future. Great find.)