Mothers and Children
Each housing group would have its own shor ping centre, community centre, branch library and health centre. But since no one could have much sense of belonging to a community °f 20,000, the housing groups were sub-divided into neighbourhoods of from three to five thousand people. These neighbourhoods were each centred on a primary school, thus putting the safety and convenience of mothers and children before every other consideration in the town. Each neighbourhood had its own few shops, a Pub' and in some cases, a church. In Gibberd's original plans for Harlow s internal road system several neighbourhood units were joined by a roughly circular road system intended for buses. It was here that Harlow had to face for the first time the fact that few, if anY' authorities were prepared to see the town as it was going to be, rather than as it so obviously was in its fumbling beginnings. The transport authorities did not consider the town big enough to justify the useful circular service; they were only prepared to offer a radial service; and tins largely dictated the final pattern. In a predominantly working-class town this, was a development no one had foreseen; an neither Gibberd nor anyone else foresaw that s° many factory workers were going to want t° own their own cars and, despite the short clic' tances involved, want to use them to go to work. This falls in very largely with the patter6 of the rest of the country, in which owning a C1 is no longer an upper- and middle-class prer08 tive; but it has been aggravated in Harlow b the strange blindness of the transport auto ties. Because there were not many inhabitants 0,, the town to start with, it was not profitable t". provide a decent bus service. Because the bd,c1 service was so inadequate—particularly, people people bred in London—more and more a the inhabitants acquired their own cars. Because relatively few people now attempt to use the bus service it is still, with a population of 50,000, disgracefully bad, and it is not now economically feasible to improve it.
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