‘And one fine morning -’: reflections on a double centenary

Abstract

... the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning -So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.(The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)In 2014, we have celebrated two momentous centenaries: that of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), and that of the University College London (UCL) Bartlett School of Planning - the UK's second planning department, coming hard on the heels of Liverpool in 1909 and the historic 1909 Housing, Town Planning, c the department a kind of glorified trade school. Michael Collins records that, as late as the mid-1920s, election to the TPI was based on 'merit'. Membership increased slowly from ninety-seven in 1914 to 438 in 1927; very few local authorities had the resources to secure the services of a professional town planner, had they desired to do so (Collins, 2014). The system was designed to 'be operated by local authorities with limited resources and little, if any, knowledge of town planning. This task was made difficult by the fact that regional and town planning were in their infancy, both as academic disciplines and fields of professional activity' (Collins, 2014). Planning did not play an important role in the government's approach to post-war reconstruction, which gave priority to the preparation of local authority housing schemes to meet a predicted national need for some 400,000 additional houses. Collins concludes that: 'the plan making system was tightly constrained, cumbersome and time-consuming. The issues that local authorities were expected to address were local, narrowly defined and subject to criticism' (Collins, 2014).At Liverpool and UCL, Adshead and Abercrombie both combined major profes- sional practices with part-time involvement in teaching and administration, as did their post-World War II successor, William Holford. Only in 1960, when Richard Llewelyn Davies was appointed first to the Bartlett Chair of Architecture and then in 1970 to the Chair of Planning, did research became at all significant. In his 1960 inaugural lecture, Llewelyn Davies argued that the architectural curriculum needed to be reshaped to incorporate a much wider range of essential knowledge, including 'the sciences which deal with the human being - both as an individual and as a member of a group' (Llewelyn Davies, 1960, 9; Hall, 2014b, 215). He concluded: 'The idea that these sciences are related to architecture is fairly new and we have still to work out how best to teach them. In doing so we shall be greatly helped by the development of research' (Llewelyn Davies, 1960, 10; Hall, 2014b, 217).The descent from the summitSoon after Llewelyn Davies took charge at UCL, the year after the Institute received its Royal Charter, planning in the UK reached some kind of apogee. By the late 1960s there was a national plan, regional strategic plans and a second generation of new towns, including Milton Keynes, Northampton and Peterborough. Every region had a Regional Economic Planning Council; the South East strategy proposed to link London to these new towns, and to other major developments at the edge of the region, by discontinuous growth corridors along main railway lines and the motorway network, then in mid-construction. …

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