PLANNING NEW TOWNS
By GILBERT McALLISTER, M.P.
WHEN Lord Reith, the Chairman of the New Towns Com- mittee, whose interim report has just been published, became Minister of Works and Planning he asked for men " with wings
to their minds." It was a phrase received with little understanding and more than faint ridicule. Few people know their Aristophanes today ; but Lord Reith was right both in period and in mood. The struggle between democratic Athens and totalitarian Sparta was not unlike the struggle between the United Nations and the Axis powers except that, fortunately, this ended differently, with victory on the side of the angels. The more Athens was ravaged, the more her people dreamed of a new society in which the desolate and oppressed would come by their own again. The more Britain was bombed by the Luftwaffe, the more splendid became our dreams of the re- construction which would follow close on victory : " Then Sinne and Death combin'd in a firm band To rase the building to the very floore ; Which they accomplish'd, none could them withstand ; But Love took Grace and Beauty by the hand And built a nobler Palace then before."
The public interest in planning, to which the blitz gave a dynamic impulse, brought forth many great schemes of city reconstruction, today enshrined in many handsome folio volumes. One dream re-
curred persistently. It was the idea of building new towns which would not only serve to relieve the pressure at the centres of our overcrowded towns and avoid suburban sprawl—the conurbations, to use Sir Patrick Geddes's ugly word—but would also be in them- selves the living expression of a new humanist approach to re-hous- ing, industrial location and the socially integrated community. It is true that there were many who shied from the very idea. Towns are not things you build, they argued ; towns grow. There was something in their point of view. It is difficult merely by planning to secure the loveliness of a town such as Salisbury. On the other hand, they were apt to forget that some of the finest examples of town-building in Britain arose from planning. Bath did not happen ; it was planned. So, too, with the New Town of Edinburgh. So, also, .with the lovely Regent's Park suburb, now one of the chief adorn-
ments of London and saved, it seems, from our own peculiar brand of vandalism at the eleventh hour.
Before we make up our minds about " this new town business" we have to think of the alternatives. The alternatives are all around us. They are to be seen in the sprawling suburbs, the dormitory estates, in ribbon development and in the scattering of houses in- disCriminately over the countryside. London and Edinburgh alike doubled their area between the two wars. In London, to quote Sir Patrick Abercrombie, " the best elements, particularly the young married people," moved out to the sprawling estates. Market-garden land was destroyed for ever. The countryside was pushed farther and further from the centre of our cities. It is not an alternative to hem people in and confine them within the towering tenements of vertical city development. In fact, we cannot, unless we resort to the most rigid compulsion, induce people on a rising standard of living to " make do " with cramped domestic space. Vertical de- velopment in the past has given rise to suburban sprawl, and sub- urban sprawl has resulted in vertical development in a never-ending circle of frustration. The one is the cause and not the cure for the other. Four out of five of the population of these islands live in towns. If we are to provide the people with the things they want and the things they need, biologically and spiritually—a house with a garden within walking distance of factory or office, within walking distance of the shops, the schools, the churches, the theatres and the recreation fields, and all within walking distance of an unspoilt countryside—then_ a policy of building new towns is irresistibly forced upon us. It is not something from which we should shrink ; it is perhaps one of the most challenging and exciting adventures to which any generation has been called. It is in this spirit that the Reith Committee conceived its task as nothing less than " to conduct an essay in civilisation, by seizing an opportunity to design, evolve and carry into execution for the benefit of coming genera- tions the means for a happy and gracious way of life."
An essay in civilisation! Not for them the soulless tenement or the dormitory suburb ; not for them the hurriedly built and ill- defined trading estate with its residential annexe.
" Come, friendly bombs, and rain on Slough ; It isn't fit for humans now."
Come, garden city! The report avoids this old-fashioned phrase. It has seldom been popular with the intelligentsia ; but it is a phrase that still stirs the popular imagination. The Committee prefers the simple phrase " new towns," and I would not quarrel with that, except to say that the new town as defined, with its green belt (three-quarters of a mile all round), its houses, its industry, its shopping centre, its social facilities, its population range of twenty thousand to sixty thousand, fits exactly the definition of garden city as given by Howard when he attempted, at the close of the nineteenth century, to urge a revolutionary idea upon a reluctant world. This revolutionary idea, Mr. F. J. Osborn has pointed out in his recently-published Green-Belt Cities, was as old as Moses. The report encourages us, even if it does not exhort us, to obey the first rule of the town-planning decalogue, " Thou shalt not permit cities to expand indefinitely," and to see to it that, just as every Jerusalem has its Samaria, so London, Man- chester and Glasgow shall have •their daughter towns.
What sort of life will people lead in these new towns? Will they be healthier? Will they be happier? It is easy to answer that they will be healthier. That we know as a matter of certainty. The infantile mortality rate in Welwyn Garden City and in Letchworth is much lower than the average for Britain as a whole ; is equal to the New Zealand rate, and is only a quarter of the child slaughter imposed by great industrial cities such as Glasgow. When people were moved from the Hulme district of Manchester to the more spacious environment of Withenshawe every disease-rate fell by half within three years. They would be healthier, certainly Happiness is not a thing one can plan for, except that happiness is partly con- ditioned by health, or its absence, and partly by the fulfilment of our profounder biological needs. We know, said Lewis Mumford recently, that there are certain urban patterns which make for a continuation of the race, and that there are certain patterns that make for its final extinction. The new town will help us to stay the decline—now inevitable—in our population. But happiness in the deeper sense, what of that? It is not to be expected that the new towns will provide all the diversity of cultural interest at
present available—in theory, at any rate—in our metropolitan civili- sation. At the same time, if dispersal of population and industry into new towns is now the Government's policy—and it is—then a plan for the dispersal of the arts, taking the best to the most, is equally essential.
The new small towns will develop a cultural life of their own, and if in every aspect of art we are to be a nation of performers as well as spectators, then the new towns will help this process. I myself was brought up in a small industrial town in the West of Scotland. It had grown from an old handloom weaving village before it was caught up in the tidal wave of industrialism. It had a vigorous local life, a sense of community which nothing has been able to kill. Even when industrialism was doing its worst, and the people were housed in slums so bad that their like is hardly to be found today, its citizens were always conscious of the fact that just beyond the outskirts lay the orchard country of Clydeside, with the river winding and twisting through a landscape so serene that Neil Munro could only compare it with the Seine between Rouen and Les Andelys. There is no doubt that for them that back- ground of unspectacular but beautiful countryside was a permanent factor making for happiness in their lives. Since then I have lived in Paris, in Geneva, in Moscow and, for ten years, in London. I know most of the capitals of Europe, and I know the delights that they offer to their citizens. But beneath the glitter and attrac- tion of our great-city life today there is a vast harvest of frustrated lives. There are hidden costs in the swollen city which tend to be disregarded, so much disregarded that people have not yet recovered from the shock of Robert Sinclair's statement just before the war —a statement backed by cold statistics—that one out of three of the population of the County of London dies in the workhouse.
Have we enough space in our crowded island for new towns? What of our agricultural land? What of the falling birthrate, and will there be enough people to fill these new towns? These are inevitable questions. The answer to the first two is that even if we decide to provide in new towns, and extensions of existing small towns, for as many as six million people to be dispersed from our huddled cities, the total area required for all the houses, indus- tries and the necessary services amounts to one per cent. of all the unbuilt-on land in Britain. The answer to the second, I suggest, is that if we attempt to rehouse our city populations at our present high densities (assuming that we all agree that suburban sprawl must be avoided) then a very rapid decline in our population is inevitable. There is, moreover, the consideration that, although the population begins to decline, the number of individual families will increase for many years.
The new town as the basis of city development will give a dynamic to our programme for building four million new homes. It will afford the ordinary citizen, his wife and his family a better and more harmonious existence than any that is open to them now.
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