COUNTRY LIFE
Planning England
Those who are most effectively busy both with the preser- vation of rural England and the ordered development of urban England have made the regional and the town plan the first article of their credo ; and most of us are in accord. The faith has been and will be justified at least in some measure ; but a rather disturbing heresy is appearing. The very councils which have been among the first to express approval and to act have weakly (and greedily) themselves tampered with their own plans very soon after they were published and advertised. The plan has induced people to build or take houses under shelter of the schedules ; and no sooner was the step taken than the protection was withdrawn. Houseowner3, for example, who trusted to the clause that not more than four houses and no factories were to be built are informed that the Council itself, on temptation, has decided to qualify its plan and build a noisy garage or what not on the reserved area. Protests from the sufferers are unavailing. This sort of thing has happened in one of the towns about which Mr. Clough Williams-Ellis wrote one of his facetious and 'wisely satiric " Cautionary Guides."
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