Country Planning
MR. TILLEY, architect and a farmer's son, has written a book very apt to this present moment when a renewed drive to step up our home food production to yet higher levels has just been officially announced. It is the book of a young man with a message, very much in earnest, who has clearly studied his subject where it should be studied, that is, on the farms and in the villages of England. Had he been content with plainer writing and fewer polemics, his presentation would have been the more effective, but none the less he states his case persuasively. Those who have read Mr. Thomas Sharp's admirable The Anatomy of the Village will find his com- mendations as to compactness, density, the sense of physical en- closure, intimacy and so w' echoed here, and, indeed, I do not think that any of Mr. Tilley's theories or proposals anywhere run counter to current enlightened planning opinion.
His denigration of the everlasting standard semi-detached as the product of laziness, his advocacy of modern terrace housing, his plea for adequate living space as against excessive gadgetry, his awareness that size is a factor in determining whether a community is viable as a social entity or not, his sympathetic understanding of country needs (and prejudices) slaw him to have been thoroughly alert in his thinking but nowhere revolutionary. His plans and pictures do the same. One would have expected some reference to Dr. C. S. Orsiln's little classic Country Planning (now effectively screened in a documentary as 24 Square Miles) wherein an arbitrarily chosen map-square of Oxfordshire was brilliantly anatomised. It is just up Mr. Tilley's street. Nor does there seem to be any reference to the repeal of The Housing (Rural Workers) Act of 1926 that so many of us so deplore, though he has plenty of sensible things to say about the repair of the old country cottages. For example:— " In the matter of administration it is of vital importance that the local authorities concerned with large-scale cottage reconstruction should avail themselves of the services of a fully qualified architect. Whether he is a full-time member of their technical staff, or a private practising architect employed in a consultative capacity will depend largely upon local conditions, and the amount of work to be done. But the present-day_ system which allows medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors to condemn cottages to demolition is entirely unsuitable. As well might one expect a doctor to call in an architect to prescribe remedies for one of his (the doctor's) patients. The medical authorities, armed no doubt with one of the many excellent Ministry of Health circulars on the subject, are certainly in a position to pass judgement on the present fitness or otherwise of a dwelling for habitation ; but, not being possessed of sufficient knowledge of building techniques, they are not the people to decide whether or not a building can be readily reconditioned and made habitable. To be able to do this the person in charge must have a trained instinct for planning, coupled with a good knowledge of building construction, both modern and traditional. This means that he must be a qualified and experienced architect ; nothing less will do."
As one who has fought many battles, mostly lost, on behalf of ancient loveliness arbitrarily condemned by rule-of-thumb decisions,
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