Pedestrians' Delight
Gibberd was the first planner to give pre- eminence to pedestrians in the shopping centre of a town. This has been copied in other new towns and in Vallingby, the model suburb of Stockholm, so that one is no longer struck by its originality, but it was at Harlow the idea was first painfully assimilated by the Corporation and the local shopkeepers. In the town centre of Harlow no cars are allowed. There are plenty of car parks and cycle parks around the perimeter, and shoppers have to walk the rest of the way to the shops. Almost everyone who has tried this kind of shopping likes it; it is wonderfully easy to get from one shop to another and for people with young children it is much less nerve-racking than the usual shopping street. It is interesting that shopkeepers who at first were sure that bankruptcy would be the result if cars could not park or even set down customers at their doors are now among its keenest en- thusiasts.
For the most part the housing has avoided extremes and kept to the main stream of post- war modern, though there arc some thrilling exceptions. As one expected, they have eschewed the gables, stucco, rough-cast, bay-windows, half- timbering and token strips of wood which adorned the cheapest houses before the war. It has meant, in the case of medium-priced houses, starting with a design as simple as a child's drawing—a door, four windows at the front, a roof and a chimney and modifying this simple and sound idea as the interior of the house re- quired. This has given many of the houses a pleasant cottage quality, as unpretentious and good as bread-and-butter. A street of them, plan- ned as a whole in an exciting landscape, makes a decent and beautiful place to live.
But the Corporation's Housing Department de- plore the architects' enthusiasm for building one large sitting-room in small houses, instead of two smaller ones. These chaps can't know much about family life,' says the Housing Manager. 'What about the kids doing their homework when the television's on? What about later on when they want to do their courting? They'll need a room to themselves, won't they?'
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