Planning with Tears-
Reconstruction and Town and Country Planning. By Sir Gwilym Gibbon. (Architect and Building News. x5s.)
No one knows more of the obstructions to town planning than Sir Gwilym Gibbon, who formerly held high office in the planning division of the Ministry of Health. By pursuing the subject after his retirement, he shows that, in his own way, he is a believer in planning. It must be frankly said that it is a way peculiarly his own. He takes the reader on an extensive tour of the urban tangle, chatting copiously and learnedly, and pursuing a zigzag course that makes the tangle as bewildering as possible. His realism and unwillingness to short-circuit complications must be counted as merits. But he is so expert a student of the tangle that he has come to love it. Intellectually he is driven towards planning ; temperamentally he is a curator of chaos.
For a tough-minded constructive statesman, -wishing to face all the snags in formulating policy, a study of this book would he a good exercise. The problems are competently.. raised, and sug- gested policies are destructively criticised. A minor defect is the unplanned punctuation ; commas are too often used between independent sentences. A more serious defect is that at no point does the author summarise his reasons for wanting planning. Gathered from dispersed passages, his objectives appear to be these: reduction of density and increase of opal space in con- gested towns ; sitings of dwellings and workplaces nearer each other ; green belts around towns ; creation of local communities ; regroup. ing of centres ; better communications ; rapid scrapping of obsolete buildings ; and the easing of the troubles of distressed areas. These are sound aims, and put together they make an intelligible policy. Unfortunately, in many passages Sir Gwilym casts doubt on several of them, and dismisses the means essential to others.
Thus, for example, he really evades the problem of excessive density by suggesting that height limits should be relaxed—which is just changing the form of density. He queries the wisdom of rehabilitating derelict towns ; they may be economically obsolete. Though he favours the collection of increments of land value, he attacks the Uthwatt Levy ; but he makes no alternative proposal. Dealing with compensation, he preaches fair play to owners while hankering after saving the public purse ; yet he criticises the Uthwatt Report from both angles. Though he approves green belts, he is not sure that the growth of large cities ought to be checked. He even develops a twinge of conscience (page tog) about giving Londoners better conditions of living, fearing that their humour and fighting spirit may be depreciated thereby. And though he applauds the new towns of Letchworth and Welwyn, he seems, at the suggestion that such exploits should be repeated, to seek instinctively for a fortified hedgehog of Whitehall files.
His own most positive proposal is the pooling of ownerships, an expedient not Without value for local• replanning, but utterly in- adequate as a means of dealing with the over-concentration of large cities. Sir Gwilym, with all his knowledge, fails to appreciate the 'great national issue tackled by the Barlow Report. Hence his criticism of the Uthwatt proposals seems petulant. Planning, like bridge-building, is difficult. But difficulties are more deterrent if you do not know whether you wish to cross the river.
Notwithstanding these weaknesses, the book has weight and vigour, and contains suggestions of real value. Some will be irritated, others amused, by Sir Gwilym's controversial technique. He tours with a retinue of imaginary planning idealists and extremists, whose feeble full tosses he hits for six on every other page with infallible virtuosity. Perhaps in his formative days he listened to the Church bell of Old Welwyn, on which is engraved the motto: "Success to the Established Church, and No Encouragement to Enthusiasm. Read with historical understanding, that is a revealing and even a
salutary statement. So also is this book. F. J. OSBORN.
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