Shoring up planning disaster
Christopher Booker
Despite a somewhat arcane correspondence in The Times, no one has yet drawn attention to what was by far the most remarkable feature of the long and thoughtful speech made in Manchester Town Hall on 17 September by Mr Peter Shore, on the subject of the catastrophic decline of industry in Great Britain's major cities. On the face of it, a call for moves to bring back industry to London, Manchester and Liverpool may scarcely seem the stuff of which high drama is made. But seen in the perspective of the past seventy years, Mr Shore's speech in fact marks an extraordinary watershed in the entire history of twentieth-century planning.
If modern town planning owes its genesis to one thing more than any other, it is to the violent reaction which took place around the turn of the last century to the appalling squalor of the Victorian industrial city, forcing millions of people to live cheek-byJowl with belching factory chimneys and sooty railway lines. No longer satisfied with the odd slum clearance scheme, a number of visionaries began to dream of much more radical solutions to the problem. First among them was Ebenezer Howard, whose solution put forward in 1898 was simply to abandon the squalid, smoky, overcrowded cities altogether, and to set up 'Garden Cities' in the countryside. A few !Tars later, in 1904, the French engineer Gamier began to dream of an entirely new kind of city, based on the complete physical separation of what he saw as the city's 'four functions'. People would live in large, ferro-concrete blocks of flats, surrounded by open spaces for 'leisure', which in turn would be rigorously separated from the main transport arteries—while squalid industry would be removed altogether, to a special 'zone' beyond a green belt. In the 1920s, it was the ideas of Garnier which inspired Le Corbusier to his megalomaniac plans for the complete rebuilding of Paris as a city of 'towers in the Park', once again based on the complete separation of residential housing estates from 'industrial zones'.
Although in the 1930s Corbusier's totalitarian ideas became increasingly influential among the younger generation of architects and would-be 'planners', to the world at large the idea of systematic town-planning Was still little more than a distant curiosity. But in 1937, alarmed by the growing industrial imbalance in the Depression between the relatively thriving south-east of England and the decaying North, the government set uP a Royal Commission under Sir Montague Radow to consider ways in which industrial growth could be directed into depressed areas. The minority report of that Commission, largely drafted by the Professor of
Town Planning at London, Patrick Abercrombie, is rightly looked back on as the foundation of our entire post-war planning system. For it went much further than the Commission's brief, in recommending not only the setting up of a national Planning Ministry with wide powers, but also the creation of a series of satellite 'new towns', and the wholesale decentralisation of industry from Britain's cities. Within seven years from the publication of the report in 1940, via wartime destruction, Abercrombie's own plan for the County of London, and the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, Britain had the most sophisticated planning system in the world. And at its heart were all the ideas which had been bubbling around among the visionaries for forty years or more—above all the separation of 'uses', by way of the 'Development Plans' which by 1951 covered the entire country, with every inch apportioned to its own distinct 'zone'.
By and large these are the principles which have now governed the 'positive planning' of Britain foi thirty years. Under the New Towns Act of 1946, more than thirty new satellite cities have been set up. Industry has been directed to 'depressed areas', through the system of 'industrial development certificates' (like the one recently refused to Toyota for a depot in Bristol). While above all Britain's older cities have seen the greatest concentration of 'planned redevelopment' in history, most of it following the strict doctrine of the 'separation of uses', so that as vast areas of the inner cities have been razed and rebuilt, the old muddle of homes, corner shops, factories, workshops and warehouses has been replaced by the planners' shining new housing estates, with the horrid, messy old workshops and factories bundled out of the way.
Of course the results have been catastrophic. Particularly during the heyday of the great 'inner city' clearance schemes of the 'sixties and early 'seventies, literally tens of thousands of small businesses, factories and workshops in London, Liverpool, Man chester and Britain's other major cities were compulsorily purchased, to make way either for housing schemes or even just for tracts of now derelict land. And far from happily moving to new towns, or new premises (which of course became increasingly hard to find), the majority of these dispossessed businesses simply closed down. As far as the planners were concerned, they had achieved their ideological purpose—which was to rid the inner cities of nasty polluting industry.
The fact that hundreds of thousands of people were losing their livelihoods in the process was quite immaterial. Only four years ago, when more than 300 people pro tested to Camden Council in north London that a big new housing scheme would lose them their jobs ('What planners' paradise is to be built at what cost in human misery ?'). the Council simply replied. 'We have no legal obligation to compensate or relocate these businesses'—and the same sort of story could be infinitely repeated in Southwark, Islington, Lambeth, Wandsworth and almost every big city in Britain.
Now, at long last, when almost all the possible damage has been done, the politic ians are waking up to the fact that a major social disaster has occurred. In less than a decade London has lost more than a third of all its industrial jobs. Liverpool lost nearly a fifth in just five years and Manchester the same—and, as Peter Shore confessed two weeks ago, 'we have to acknowledge that ...
comprehensive redevelopment schemes, uncertainty created by planning blight, and well-intentioned but perhaps over-rigorous
efforts to remove "non-conformingindustrial users from areas zoned for residential
use have all led to the permanent closure of many firms, and particularly small and medium ones'.
The local politicians are now running round in small circles, begging the govern ment to do something to 'bring industry back' to them. The Department of the Environment is desperately racking its brains for what to do, and the unofficial ending of the New Towns policy is only one of its responses. But in the end, as Peter Shore him self admitted, 'we have only limited power directly to create the industries, large or small, privately or publicly owned, on which the wealth of these areas will be based'. In fact, as we have seen so often before, the power of the 'positive planners' to destroy is infinitely greater than their capacity to create. And it seems as if for a fitting monument to the great twentieth-century adven ture in town planning, from Gamier to John Silkin, they will have to rest on the grim and derelict deserts to which they have reduced our inner cities for a long time to come.
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