CITY SPRAWLS
By A. W. GOMME
WHEN on the jacket of the L.C.C.'s book on the plan for London a picture of London's sprawl was presented, the authors showed that they were aware of the principal mischief of the present city, and the hopes of wise men were raised. Only to be dashed again, however ; for not only is the L.C.C. pressing on with more housing estates near Aldenham and Loughton which will aggravate the evil further, but much in the new plans, especially that for Outer London, will produce but new sprawls.
Two things are often confused, the mere size of a place and its sprawl. But they are quite different. It is arguable that London is too big, that no city should have 7,000,000 inhabitants ; there can be no true unity in such an aggregate. It is also arguable that steps should be taken now to reduce the population, though the difficulties in the way are tremendous and obvious. But sprawl means that a city, whatevel its size, occupies too much space, that it has no shape ; that it is in consequence unmannerly and, ugly, barbarous. A city of 7,000,000 people need not sprawl, and would not if pro- perly built ; a city of 1,000,000, or of 500,000, or of 50,000 can, and most of them in this country do. Birmingham, Derby and Slough are worse than London, not better. The new plans, both for London and for other big cities, may produce better-designed houses than the old, but they will increase the chief evil ; it would be absurd to upbraid a man for his ill manners in sprawling on the sofa and add that, if he would only get a new pair of shoes, he might go on sprawling.
What is the specific feature of the sprawling town, big or small? Everybody knows : it is the predominance of the detached or semi- detached house, two storeys high, or even bungalow. Consider any town that is (or his been) admirable, by the admission of all— whether big, such as Paris or Vienna, or of medium size, such as Edinburgh or Munich, or ,small, as Bologna, Oxford or Bath, ranging down to, by comparison, diminutive places like Banbury or St. Andrews or Orvieto ; whether consciously planned, as Bath and Edinburgh and the good parts (so rare) of London such as Bloomsbury, or not, like Oxford ; they have two characteristics common to all of them—the buildings are at least three storeys in height, most of them more, and they are not detached one from another. The towns are closely built. This is not accidental ; it is essential to good architecture, to the proper proportions of streets, to the dignity and satisfactory appearance of a town ; only thus can you get a street and not just a row of houses, and a town with a shape, and so a character, of its own. Tacitus noticed of the Germans, who were barbarians in his day, that, unlike civilised people, they lived in detached cottages. No amount of better design for the individual villas and bungalows will ever make Surbiton anything but a wilderness. You can almost lay down a universal rule : that no house in a town should be of less than three storeys and that most should be of from four to six. It was notice- able that the posters which advertised the admirable exhibition of the L.C.C. plan displayed not pretty little villas but some imagina- tive designs for big blocks of flats.
The saddest thing about Sir Patrick Abercrombie's plan for Greater London was the suggested lay-out of the satellite towns, designed to be places of some 4o,00o-5o,000 inhabitants. The existing village to be preserved as a sort of old-world museum piece ;
one or two ten-storey blocks of flats as a concession, and the rest two-storey villas, as though we can have nothing between two storeys and ten (though the L.C.C. have built good six-storeyed flats in many parts of London); an ugly juxtaposition, and the whole taking up far too much space, not a town at all, but a somewhat improved Surbiton. Incidentally, why are these towns called satellites? We are told that they are...planned to be independent of London, each with its own industries. There is danger here : they may turn out to be satellites after all, which will mean in effect that London will sprawl even further and more shapelessly. London is bad enough now, in all conscience, but it is not so bad as the indus- trial part of Lancashire, which, with a smaller population, occupies a yet bigger area, because of the multitude of towns.
Men say that, to avoid overcrowding, there should be not more than 4-6 houses to the acre, or whatever the number is. But over- crowding and slum conditions result not from the number of inhabitants per acre (within limits), but from the number of inhabi- tants per room. Provided that streets are wide enough and courts or garden-squares spacious enough to admit of light and air to the lowest floors, people can live in high and closely-knit buildings without being overcrowded. If you were to pull down all the two- storey dwellings in Fulham (surely the most depressing of all districts within the county of London) and replace them with six-storey blocks, all the inhabitants could be got into less than half the ground-space they now occupy ; the space thus saved could be used partly for a park and good school playgrounds, partly for more houses, as well as for a wide, straight road of a kind unknown there ; and the inhabitants, more crowded to the acre, would yet be living in healthier conditions than they now are. A town, when it grows beyond a certain size, must have open spaces within its borders, parks, squares (the latter so admirable a feature of London when it was planned, before we talked so much of planning); never- theless, the right principle is that a town should occupy as little space as possible—for architectural reasons, that it may please and not depress, in order to avoid long travel from dwelling-place to work, in order not to destroy good agricultural land and the country- side generally, and lastly so that the inhabitants of the town, at holiday times, may be able to get out of it ; the town must end, not go on for ever, straggling into suburbs.
What, it will be said, of the desire of the majority of town-dwellers, so often expressed, to live in detached villas, each with its own garden, and not in flats? (For certainly, if you have houses of 4-6 storeys, it is better to divide them horizontally than Vertically, and thus flats are unavoidable.) For myself, I doubt whether as many people really want this as is generally supposed ; but, granted they do, the answer is two-fold: in part a plain negative, "We are sorry, but we have not the space ; we cannot go on destroying the country- side, and we cannot spoil the towns, in order that you may sprawl out of one into the other. If you choose, or if your work compels you, to live in a town, you must accept the consequences ; do not deceive yourself into thinking you can live in town and country at the same time." It is also the fact that light, heat and water services can be more efficiently and more economically supplied to flats than to villas.
In truth the question, "Would you rather live in a small house with a garden than a flat?" is not a fair one. For, in answering " Yes " a man is thinking only of himself and his family, and means that he would like to live on the outskirts of the town, with the pleasant country at his door, and a good service of trains and buses. But only a small proportion of the people can live on the outskirts of a town ; and he should be warned that thousands of others are going to the same spot, and that the pleasant country will soon be spoiled by all those people with the same unattainable desire as himself, and that he will only get good transport provided it is overcrowded. It would not be much use to ask, "Financial condi- tions apart, which would you rather do : walk a mile to the station, travel for an hour in a crowded train, and then take a bus to the office, or go from door to door by car?" (to which most would answer, the latter), unless it is explained that 50,00o others will do the same, travel along the same roads, and all will look for a garage at the other end ; which may ultimately be found two or
three miles away from their offices. The people who went to live in Brondesbury so years ago, and to Edgware 25 years ago, all hoped they would be on the outskirts of the town, practically in the country. I am arguing for the closely-built town ; but if you ask mc whether I personally should like a house and garden of my own I should say, Yes, near the Temple, with the garden sloping down to the river, my place of work and the theatres and libraries all close at hand, with buses and trains nearby but just far enough away not to be noisy. But what is the value of the question and the answer to the town-planner or to me, unless I am being offered a privilege almost unique to myself?
To secure dignity and imagination in architecture, to reduce waste of time and the discomfort involved in daily travel (so wisely emphasised in the L.C.C. book), to allow wide streets for easy traffic and open spaces for health, to preserve the country from spoliation (for the sake of the town-dweller as much as for agri- culture), towns must be smaller ; but smaller because they occupy less space, not because they should have fewer inhabitants. Towns must have a shape, and should end where the country begins.
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