A CIVIC SENSE IN ENGLAND? [To the Editor of the
SPECTATOR.] Sta,—Mrs. Williams-Ellis is admirably provocative in her article; "A- Civic Sense in England?" Even the Civic Societies of Birmingham, Leeds and other towns, to whose work she does scant justice, have good reason for gratitude to anyone who pillories in public the conditions which, in face of widespread apathy, they are trying to alleviate.
But Civic, Societies represent only the protest of a few against the environment of the many.. The squalor which our generation- found existing around, and, dully regarded as '
inseparable from, industry is surely not satisfactorily explained by saying that the men who built our towns never faced the fact that they were going to live in them. Our towns as such were, generally speaking, made by men who were not going to live in them, and who avoided facing any civic or political facts. Indeed, if in an inquiry into who made our towns it were permissible to use "the argument from design," it would be easy to prove that our towns were made by nobody. It is certainly true that no one consciously thought of town- making when mean streets and grim factories were built any- how and anywhere. The tumultuous rush of industrial expansion which trampled down rural life and overwhelmed historic town units is over. Civilization is recovering its breath, and as it contemplates Wigan, Glasgow or Bermondsey it is very properly horrified to see what unthinkingly it has allowed to grow up.
To cure squalor by arousing civic pride—that is a great aim. But there seem to be two particular difficulties in applying the remedy. First is the obvious one that civic pride is a sentiment largely conditioned by local facts, and is therefore most feeble where it is most required to be strong. The second point is what an American writer recently has called "the political disintegration of large cities." Civic boundaries do not now for the most part contain social or industrial units. The Manchester business man, whose Rolls-Royce enables him to live in Derbyshire or Staffordshire, escapes the offence of mean streets, as well as the burden of the rates. Wimbledon, Weybridge and Woking owe to London popula- tions which think that they owe nothing to London beyond what they pay in rates on office or factory premises, and at the same time contribute little or nothing to the life of the localities in which they sleep. Classes are segregated and divided by physical barriers, and it is no wonder that civic pride is hard to arouse and responsibility for squalor hard to fix. London is almost, if not quite, past praying for ; it would certainly be past working for were it not that the threat of a population of 15 or 20 millions is so imminent and so appalling. Other cities may nerve themselves for the task of keeping or regaining civic unity by a determination to avoid at all costs becoming what London now is.
Civic sense by all means, so that from it may arise a general intolerance of squalor in all parts of the body civic. But first must come a reintegration of civic life, and the remedying of the morbid conditions of our cities, which create in their centres great patches of disregarded poverty and repression, and around them zones of comfort, charitably-minded, per- haps, but carefully withdrawn from sordid realities. Among the motives for such a reintegration will certainly be know- ledge of the danger of giving class-consciousness a physical basis. The whole process by which our towns have spread and outgrown historic and administrative boundaries creates areas of class-consciousness and embitters feeling in many such areas. The old civic units cannot be restored. We have nowadays to think of larger units, it may be of nothing less than whole regions. Only by regional planning, which preserves local administrative areas for local purposes, can the burdens, which at present fall on those parts of the community least able to bear them, be equitably distributed, and new civic centres where both industry and human life can develop fully and freely be established.—! am, Sir, &c.,
3 Gray's Inn Place, Gray's Inn, London, W.C.
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