THE TOWN OF TOMORROW
Tim appearance of this book is opportune. We have become conscious at last that the spread and sprawl of our great towns has reached unbearable limits. A Royal Commission is to investigate the possibilities of controlling the location of industry. Even were it bold enough to recommend definite bans on new industries in certain areas (the London, Midland and Manchester conurbations, for instance), no Government dare rouse the industrialists' wrath by enforcing them—and rightly so in our present state of ignorance regarding the wider technical issues of industrial planning. Probably we may look for no more than an extension of the present policy of tempting industry into the Special Areas (and other desirable localities) by offering particular inducements. Certainly our thriving industrial centres will continue to expand so long as industry wills it. There is good reason to believe, too, that town- life is preferred by a growing majority of our people today to the simpler pleasures offered by life in the country. If then urban populations must continue to increase, how are we to- curb the spread of urban areas—with all the drawbacks this entails : the loss of country and fresh air, traffic congestion, increased distances between work and home and much else ?
It is significant that the last two or three years have seen the acceptance of flats as the solution in districts, such as Birming- ham and the Midlands, which have so far stoutly resisted them. But resistance is now -useless, since no alternative can be put forward. The success of independent garden cities has not been such as to hold out any hopes for a problem of this magnitude. Moreover, the founding of new towns (assuming that industry could be forced or tempted into them in sufficient quantity) shirks the whole urgent question of what is to be done with the old ones. That flats, properly employed, can solve the problem, is easily seen when one considers that the average density of Birmingham, for instance, is only 20 persons per acre and that, leaving ample space for industry, traffic and amusement, over ten times this number could be housed in buildings unshadowed from dawn till dusk and with only 12 per Cent. of the ground built on at all.
If flats must come, let them be good flats. And here this book should be of service. It gives clearly and concisely ina matter of 40 pages the whole theory, technique and practice of flat-design, and follows on with 16o pages of beautifully reproduced photographs and rniniature. _plans pi' examples from all over the world. For each of these last, sufficient details are given concerning class of tenant, rent, building costs, construction: and services. It will be a revelatiOn to the untech- nical reader of the first section (and it is so written- as to be Its intelligible to him as to the architect or engineer) how exact a science the design of flat-dwellings has become. Given the conditions, the best type of lay-out is known already and can be produced. But one almost tragic sentence appears at the foot of page i6—and this sentence accounts for the distaste in which flats are held by most people in this country. "No such ideal big-scale schemes of development for wholei areas have yet been realised . . . Many of the blocks here illustrated might be units in a large scale development, were it not that the private ownership of land, and the absurdly high price of it when it is wanted for building, and the fact that leases for adjoin- ing sites fall in at different times, make .anything of greater extent than a single block of flats on a restricted site in an already built-up area, impossible of realisation by private enterprise."
Here we have the whole crux -of the matter. We can only have the most important advantages which flats- offer (both to the individual and to the community) if we can employ them in large-scale planning. But large-scale planning is impossible in our towns for the reasons given above: Where proper flat-planning is feasible, in open country, flats would probably not be needed. Our only hope of seeing an adequate demonstration of their possibilities lies either in some such public body as the L.C.C. developing, say, the south bank of the Thames on these lines or else in similar action by some large industrial enterprise in open country. Perhaps, as our irritation with our present unwieldy towns increases, we may finally reach a stage where some such arrangement as the German Lex Addickes for the pooling of land may become practical politics. Till one of these things happens we shall have to content ourselves with dreams, stimulated by glances at the illustrations on pp. 184, 189 and 191 of this volume— projects!
GEOFFREY BOUNIPHREY.
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